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Narratives of Migration and Displacement in Dominican Literature

Author: Danny Méndez

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-03-12

Total Pages: 243

ISBN-13: 1136467890

Establishing an interdisciplinary connection between Migration Studies, Post-Colonial Studies and Affect Theory, Méndez analyzes the symbolic interplay between emotions, cognitions, and displacement in the narratives written by and about Dominican and Dominican-Americans in the United States and Puerto Rico. He argues that given the historic place of creolization as a marker of national, cultural, and social development in the Caribbean and particularly the Dominican Republic, this cultural process is not magically annulled in Caribbean immigrations to the U.S. Instead, this book illustrates the numerous ways in which Dominicans’ subjective interpretation of their experiences of migration and incorporation into U.S. society, seen through the filter of multiple creolizations of the past, are woven into their written works as a series of variations on Americanness and Dominicanness. Through close readings of selected writings by Pedro Henríquez Ureña, José Luis González, Junot Díaz, Josefina Báez, Loida Maritza Pérez among others, Méndez argues that emotional creolizations operate as a psychological parameter on immigrant populations as they negotiate their transcultural status against the ideological norms of assimilation in their new host country. Consequently, he proposes that this emotional creolization is dialectical — that is, it not only affects diasporic populations, but also changes the norms and terms of assimilation as well.

In Zones of Contact (combat)

Author: Danny Méndez

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13:

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The assassination of the Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo in 1961 marked the beginning of many rebirths for the Dominican Republic. Confronted with the growing pains of an emerging democratic national consciousness, the island was also faced with an unprecedented circumstance: a massive exodus that displaced thousands of Dominicans to the United States and Puerto Rico. My dissertation focuses on contemporary narrative representations of Dominican migrations to the United States and Puerto Rico. In chapter 1, "A Product of Exiles, Travels and Displacements: The Constructions of an Ethnic and Racial Consciousness in the United States in Pedro Henríquez Ureña's Memoir," I propose my own working definition of a Dominican transnational subjectivity at the beginning of the 20th century as I see it surfacing in Henríquez Ureña's memoir. In chapter two, "With Floating (Intranational) Borders: Displaced Dominicans in Puerto Rican Narratives," I explore the narrative representation of Dominican migrations to Puerto Rico and the challenges they bring about to the Puerto Rican national discourse constituted in the late 1930s. This chapter analyzes José Luis González's La luna no era de queso: memorias de infancia (1988), Ana Lydia Vega's "El día de los hechos" from her short story collection Encancaranublado y otros cuentos de naufragio (1982) and Magali García Ramis's "Cuatro retratos urbanos" from the short story collection Las noches del riel de oro (1995). In chapter three, "Of Absent (nomadic) Fathers and Boys in Construction: Dominican Diasporic Subjectivities in Junot Díaz's Drown," I analyze the short story collection titled Drown (1993) by Junot Díaz. My reading of Diaz's work interprets his characters as gravitating towards communities in which they become active components of multi-racial and multi-ethnic communities fostered by global migrations. In the last chapter, "Crooked City Women: A Reading of Race, Ethnicity and Migration in Narratives of Late 20th and 21st Century Dominican Women writers," I focus on Loida Martiza Pérez's novel Geographies of Home (1999) and Josefina Báez's performance piece Dominicanish (2000) to illustrate how their work challenges patriarchal forms of expression that are rooted in the homeland and then disseminated in U.S. diasporic Dominican communities.

Stanley Cavell, Literature, and Film

Author: Andrew Taylor

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 0415509645

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This book offers a thorough examination of the relationship that Stanley Cavell's celebrated philosophical work has to the ways in which the United States has been imagined and articulated in its literature, highlighting how literature and philosophy are conjoined in the ethical and political project of national self-definition.

Cognition, Literature, and History

Author: Mark J. Bruhn

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-11-26

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 1317936868

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Cognition, Literature, and History models the ways in which cognitive and literary studies may collaborate and thereby mutually advance. It shows how understanding of underlying structures of mind can productively inform literary analysis and historical inquiry, and how formal and historical analysis of distinctive literary works can reciprocally enrich our understanding of those underlying structures. Applying the cognitive neuroscience of categorization, emotion, figurative thinking, narrativity, self-awareness, theory of mind, and wayfinding to the study of literary works and genres from diverse historical periods and cultures, the authors argue that literary experience proceeds from, qualitatively heightens, and selectively informs and even reforms our evolved and embodied capacities for thought and feeling. This volume investigates and locates the complex intersections of cognition, literature, and history in order to advance interdisciplinary discussion and research in poetics, literary history, and cognitive science.

Rethinking Empathy through Literature

Author: Meghan Marie Hammond

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-07-11

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1317817362

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In recent years, a growing field of empathy studies has started to emerge from several academic disciplines, including neuroscience, social psychology, and philosophy. Because literature plays a central role in discussions of empathy across disciplines, reconsidering how literature relates to "feeling with" others is key to rethinking empathy conceptually. This collection challenges common understandings of empathy, asking readers to question what it is, how it works, and who is capable of performing it. The authors reveal the exciting research on empathy that is currently emerging from literary studies while also making productive connections to other areas of study such as psychology and neurobiology. While literature has been central to discussions of empathy in divergent disciplines, the ways in which literature is often thought to relate to empathy can be simplistic and/or problematic. The basic yet popular postulation that reading literature necessarily produces empathy and pro-social moral behavior greatly underestimates the complexity of reading, literature, empathy, morality, and society. Even if empathy were a simple neurological process, we would still have to differentiate the many possible kinds of empathy in relation to different forms of art. All the complexities of literary and cultural studies have still to be brought to bear to truly understand the dynamics of literature and empathy.

Class and the Making of American Literature

Author: Andrew Lawson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-03-14

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1136774246

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This book refocuses current understandings of American Literature from the revolutionary period to the present-day through an analytical accounting of class, reestablishing a foundation for discussions of class in American culture. American Studies scholars have explored the ways in which American society operates through inequality and modes of social control, focusing primarily on issues of status group identities involving race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability. The essays in this volume focus on both the historically changing experience of class and its continuing hold on American life. The collection visits popular as well as canonical literature, recognizing that class is constructed in and mediated by the affective and the sensational. It analyzes class division, class difference, and class identity in American culture, enabling readers to grasp why class matters, as well as the economic, social, and political matter of class. Redefining the field of American literary cultural studies and asking it to rethink its preoccupation with race and gender as primary determinants of identity, contributors explore the disciplining of the laboring body and of the emotions, the political role of the novel in contesting the limits of class power and authority, and the role of the modern consumer culture in both blurring and sharpening class divisions.

Literature and the Glocal City

Author: Ana María Fraile-Marcos

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-07-17

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1317682165

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The modern city is a space that can simultaneously represent the principles of its homeland alongside its own unique blend of the cultures that intermingle within its city limits. This book makes an intervention in Canadian literary criticism by foregrounding both ‘globalism,’ which is increasingly perceived as the state-of-the-art literary paradigm, and the city. These are two significant axes of contemporary culture and identity that were previously disregarded by a critical tradition built around the importance of space and place in Canadian writing. Yet, as relevant as the turn to the city and to globalism may be, this collection’s most notable contribution lies in linking the notion of ‘glocality’, that is, the intermeshing of local and global forces to representations of subjectivity in the material and figurative space of the Canadian city. Dealing with oppositional discourses as multiculturalism, postcolonialism, feminism, diaspora, and environmentalism this book is an essential reference for any scholar with an interest in these areas.

Shipwreck in Art and Literature

Author: Carl Thompson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-05-09

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 1136161538

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Tales of shipwreck have always fascinated audiences, and as a result there is a rich literature of suffering at sea, and an equally rich tradition of visual art depicting this theme. Exploring the shifting semiotics and symbolism of shipwreck, the interdisciplinary essays in this volume provide a history of a major literary and artistic motif as they consider how depictions have varied over time, and across genres and cultures. Simultaneously, they explore the imaginative potential of shipwreck as they consider the many meanings that have historically attached to maritime disaster and suffering at sea. Spanning both popular and high culture, and addressing a range of political, spiritual, aesthetic and environmental concerns, this cross-cultural, comparative study sheds new light on changing attitudes to the sea, especially in the West. In particular, it foregrounds the role played by the maritime in the emergence of Western modernity, and so will appeal not only to those interested in literature and art, but also to scholars in history, geography, international relations, and postcolonial studies.

Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Terror in Literature and Culture

Author: Basuli Deb

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-11-13

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1317632117

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This book offers a transnational feminist response to the gender politics of torture and terror from the viewpoint of populations of color who have come to be associated with acts of terror. Using the War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, this book revisits other such racialized wars in Palestine, Guatemala, India, Algeria, and South Africa. It draws widely on postcolonial literature, photography, films, music, interdisciplinary arts, media/new media, and activism, joining the larger conversation about human rights by addressing the problem of a pervasive public misunderstanding of terrorism conditioned by a foreign and domestic policy perspective. Deb provides an alternative understanding of terrorism as revolutionary dissent against injustice through a postcolonial/transnational lens. The volume brings counter-terror narratives into dialogue with ideologies of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, class, and religion, addressing the situation of women as both perpetrators and targets of torture, and the possibilities of a dialogue between feminist and queer politics to confront securitized regimes of torture. This book explores the relationship in which social and cultural texts stand with respect to legacies of colonialism and neo-imperialism in a world of transnational feminist solidarities against postcolonial wars on terror.