Colonial figures in motion: globalization and translocality in contemporary Puerto Rican Literature in the United States
Title:
Colonial figures in motion: globalization and translocality in contemporary Puerto Rican Literature in the United States
Author:
Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé
Appeared in:
Centro journal
Paging:
Volume 14 (2002) nr. 2 pages 5-25
Year:
2002
Contents:
This essay situates contemporary Puerto Rican literature in the United States in the space between two discursive implosions: the implosion of the 1970s attempt to found U.S. Puerto Rican literature by returning to a privileged Island origin, and the implosion of the utopian goal of establishing an independently controlled community (in the U.S.) or a sovereign nation (in Puerto Rico). Like other recent proposals on Puerto Rican cultural politics, most notably Grosfoguel, Negrón-Muntaner, and Georas's "Beyond Nationalist and Colonialist Discourses: The Jaiba Politics of the Puerto Rican Ethno-Nation" in Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking Colonialism and Nationalism, the essay argues for this border condition as a space of possibilities. But unlike other recent proposals, the essay underscores Puerto Ricans¿ border condition as a space already occupied and intervened by global capitalism and identifies strategies, or what it calls colonial figures of motion, through which Puerto Rican cultural practices redirect and expand that condition. By focusing on the strategies of movement that Puerto Rican cultural practices have deployed, rather than deploying Puerto Rican cultural practices in the interest of a critique of nationalism, as others have done, the essay hopes to contribute to theories about Puerto Rican cultural agency within the present conditions of colonial migration and globalization.
Publisher:
The City University of New York (provided by DOAJ)
Journal description