Overview

This book examines the ways in which recent U.S. Latina literature challenges popular definitions of nationhood and national identity. It explores a group of feminist texts that are representative of the U.S. Latina literary boom of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, when an emerging group of writers gained prominence in mainstream and academic circles. Through close readings of select contemporary Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American works, Maya Socolovsky argues that these narratives are ""remapping"" the United States so that it is fully integrated within a larger, hemispheric Americas. Looking at such concerns as nation, place, trauma, and storytelling, writers Denise Chavez, Sandra Cisneros, Esmeralda Santiago, Ana Castillo, Himilce Novas, and Judith Ortiz Cofer challenge popular views of Latino cultural ""unbelonging"" and make strong cases for the legitimate presence of Latinas/os within the United States. In this way, they also counter much of today's anti-immigration rhetoric. Imagining the U.S. as part of a broader ""Americas,"" these writings trouble imperialist notions of nationhood, in which political borders and a long history of intervention and colonization beyond those borders have come to shape and determine the dominant culture's writing and the defining of all Latinos as ""other"" to the nation.

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9780813561189

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Reviews

This timely and insightful book offers analyses of narratives both familiar and new depicting fruitfully disruptive Latina lives. Socolovsky's readings demonstrate that U.S. Latina literature is crucial to understanding how colonial legacies increasingly trouble the contemporary nation-state. --Rafael Perez-Torres author of Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture A wonderful extended meditation on the ways Latina writers have imagined and narrated alternative notions of 'community' in which the United States and Latin America are interdependent extensions of each other rather than strictly bounded and mutually exclusive. --Marta Caminero-Santangelo author of On Latinidad

This timely and insightful book offers analyses of narratives both f--Rafael P rez-Torres author of Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture (01/22/2013)

Author Information

MAYA SOCOLOVSKY is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

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