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The Future of US Latino/A Literary Theory

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The Future of US Latino/A Literary Theory Centro Journal ISSN: 1538-6279 [email protected] The City University of New York Estados Unidos Perez, Richard Emerging Canons, Unfolding Ethnicities: The Future of U.S. Latino/a Literary Theory Centro Journal, vol. XXII, núm. 1, 2010, pp. 298-307 The City University of New York New York, Estados Unidos Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=37721077013 How to cite Complete issue Scientific Information System More information about this article Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal Journal's homepage in redalyc.org Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative CENTRO Journal imagining a U.s. Latino/a Future review essay Volume7 xx11 Number 1 s p r i n g 2010 U.S. Latino/a Literary Theory, I have argued elsewhere (Perez and Di Iorio Sandín 2007), is stretching the social boundaries of what it means not only to be Latino/a, but American. One of the most rooted expressions of a cultural presence or signifier of belonging is the creation of a literary tradition. The three texts examined in this review essay review—The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature by Raphael Dalleo and Elena Machado Sáez; On Latinidad: U.S. Latino Literature and the Construction of Ethnicity by Marta Caminero-Santangelo; and A Companion to U.S. Latino Literatures edited by Carlota Caulfield and Darien J. Davis1—testify to a U.S. Latino/a accumulation of texts that have chronicled an undeniable presence, growing Emerging Canons, Unfolding in force and significance with each decade of the 20th and 21st centuries. As the word tradition suggests, U.S. Latino/a literature has carved out and transmitted, from one Ethnicities: The Future of U.S. generation to another, from one ethnicity to another, from one region to another, from one language to another, a remarkable body of work reshaping from within the Latino/a Literary Theory contours of American identity. It is important to understand this phenomenon from within, rather than from the outside, since mainstream narratives often attempt to depict the social location of U.S. Latino/as, for as the literary production documents, U.S. Latino/as have invented new modes of imagining the American experience. Ri c h a R d Pe R e z A literary tradition or the canon, as Dalleo and Machado Sáez put it, is established from alternative forms of insider knowledge. Herein lies the paradox of U.S. Latino/a identity: on the one hand, it is constituted as always already alien, while conversely, A Companion to US Latino Literatures its massive social and literary presence firmly place it as an eth(n)ical reminder of the limits and possibilities of American democracy. It is important to even take this a Edited by Carlota Caufield and Darién J. Davis step further and argue that the very potential of an American democracy is, in many Rochester, NY: Tameis, 2007 ways, dependent on its Latino/a future. 248 pages; $95.00 [cloth] The three books examined in this review understand the significance U.S. Latino/a literature plays in rendering a narrative of this future. The Latino/a Canon, for instance, The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence recognizes that “Latino/a literature stands at a crossroads, a moment of consolidation and institutionalization for a field that has historically thought of itself as marginal of Post-Sixties Literature and oppositional” (p. 1). This tension between imminent “institutionalization” By Raphael Dalleo and Elena Machado Sáez and continual “opposition” is the creative energy, a U.S. Latino/a aesthetics, New York: Palgrave Mcmillan, 2007 which threatens to reform the nation’s traditions. At the crossroads stands a “Latino/a 216 pages; $74.95 [cloth] literature,” amassed over the last hundred years, narrating the experiences, insights, and projections of an integral portion of America’s population. For Dalleo and Machado Sáez, while a post-Sixties Latino/a literature has been given entry into the On Latinidad: U.S. Latino Literature marketplace, it has entered without falling prey to the apolitical and assimilative and the Construction of Ethnicity pressures that often come with such an invitation. The dynamic tension that emerges in U.S. Latino literature between the promise of a market acceptance and an eth(n)ical By Marta Caminero-Santangelo resistance to social assimilation marks the opening and possibility of democratic life. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007 336 pages; $59.95 [cloth] If Dalleo and Machado Sáez approach U.S. Latino literature in a comprehensive sense, Marta Caminero-Santangelo examines the varying ethnicities that constitute U.S. Latino/a identity. Interestingly, as Caminero-Santangelo points out, U.S. Latino/a identity often obfuscates the extent to which each group closely identifies with their culture of origin. She explains, “If a sense of peoplehood is deployed largely through symbols, it is striking that the most prominent symbols in the arsenal of U.S. Latino history have so often been nationally specific, rather than panethnic, in nature” (p. 6). Yet she concedes that “the most significant predictor of whether someone was likely to choose a panethnic label was whether she or he was a first-, second-, or third- generation immigrant” (p. 29). Her examination of U.S. Latino literature negotiates [ 298 ] [ 299 ] these two ethnic locations moving from the “nationally specific” to a “panethnic” label. This range causes a certain indentificatory confusion or contradiction, fodder for a U.S. Latino fiction equipped to explore the political implications of this socially inborn antinomy. Caminero-Santangelo’s text warns of the dangers in our facile use of the term Latino, while keeping it intact and understanding the changing nature of how we name and identify. The question here is, What is the future of this appellation? Is it tied to the future of U.S. Latino/as as a new and still developing ethnic formation? Interestingly, the final book of this review, A Companion to U.S. Latino Literatures, embraces the “diversity” reflected in the term and its literary output (p. 1). For Carlota Caulfield and Darien Davis, the editors of this anthology, U.S. Latino/a artists have established a new aesthetic, while serving as social commentators on “ethical issues.” “Latina and Latino poets, dramatists, novelists, short story writers, essayists, and filmmakers have been instrumental in the articulation of Latino aesthetic and ethical issues in the U.S. They have played roles as cultural interlocutors, interpreters, and recorders of their own cultural past as well as the real or imagined past of the countries that many have left behind” (p. 2). However, Caulfield and Davis also understand that the imagined community built by U.S. Latino/a writers remains “fragmented regionally, economically, racially, and socially” (p. 4). In such a complex reordering of identity, it is the literature that maps our communities and explicates our futures. U.S. Latino/a literature has a dual responsibility: on the one hand, it details the specificity of identity; on the other, it imagines a future identity that is still under negotiation. That future, as these three theoretical texts outline, is ineluctably dependent on a literary tradition. Canons, Markets, and Negative Capacities In The Latino/a Canon, co-written by Raphael Dalleo and Elena Machado Sáez, an important temporal break is established that distinguishes between a pre- and post-Sixties U.S. Latino/a literature. Post-Sixties here means a body of writing that emerges after the Civil Rights generation and whose literary emphasis changes from an openly contestatory stance, challenging and rejecting mainstream market mores, to a more upwardly mobile sensibility, which forges a “new relationship to politics” (p. 2). The mistake or misreading committed by too many critics, according to The Latino/a Canon, is to analyze contemporary Latino/a literature in apolitical terms, making them amenable to the mainstream and thus marketable, or viewing them as facile translations of a U.S. Latino/a experience, offering stories desirous for social assimilation. Dalleo and Machado Sáez counter this critical tendency, arguing that while these texts do find, in unprecedented ways, access to the market place and thus accrue a mainstream readership, they nonetheless imagine new modes of addressing political and social questions. As the authors explain: “The goal of this book is to distinguish our position from each of these groups by arguing that rather than retreating from politics, or substituting what Nancy Fraser calls a ‘politics of recognition’ for a ‘politics of redistribution,’ recent Latino/a literature imagines creative ways to rethink the relationship between a politics of social justice and market popularity—a combination that the critical reception denies by either rejecting one of these elements or articulating them as binary oppositions” (p. 3). It is not, Dalleo and Machado Sáez argue, that these post-Sixties writers “turn away” from the political responsibilities established by civil rights authors, but instead “renew that political tradition” by imaginatively [ 300 ] addressing their place in a changing “American” landscape. This reformulation, review essay significantly, turns a creative eye to “future horizons” taking into eth(n)ical account the “market’s centrality” (p. 7). The book is composed of five wide-ranging chapters examining the works of Pedro Pietri, Nicholasa Mohr, Piri Thomas, Junot Diaz, Angie Cruz, Cristina Garcia, and Julia Alvarez. Each chapter builds on the thematic issue of post-Sixties writers and their contemporary engagement with politics, specifically the imaginative relationship to nostalgia, upward mobility, consumer citizenship, and postcolonial historical narratives. The power of the text comes in what Edouard Glissant, in another context, has called the piling up effect. The Latino/a Canon constructs its argument through increments, effectively building a theoretical case and political vocabulary that illustrates the stages of narrative change in U.S.
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