Friday, April 14, 2017 Session 1
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Friday, April 14, 2017 Session 1: 9:00 – 10:15 a.m. 1. Race, Masculinity, and the Coloniality of History in Puerto Rican Literature “And always Puerto Ricans”: Urban Archipelagoes and the Coloniality of Middle-class, White, Gay Male Desire in 1970s New York” Enmanuel Martínez, Rutgers University A popular gay novel set and published in the social and political aftermath of the monumental Stonewall Riots of 1969, Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance (1978) marks a major turning point in the larger history of post-World War II queer literature and liberation in the United States. Set across the urban archipelago of 1970s NYC, Dancer from the Dance tells the story of Anthony Malone, a middle-class, white, gay man, and his lifelong desire for island spaces (i.e. Manhattan, Long Island, and Fire Island) and bodies—above all, the body of the working-class, gay, Puerto Rican men: “Each year you love someone new: Orientals in 1967, Italians in 1968, blacks in 1969, and bearded blonds in 1970; and always Puerto Ricans… You remember the eyes, as beautiful as bare trees against the sky: naked, away. Years pass loving such eyes” (Holleran 131). I argue that the figure of the silent, working-class, gay, Puerto Rican man in Holleran’s novel is one that inadvertently flattens and, thus, trivializes the historical presence and contributions of queer Latinxs in NYC in the 1970s in general and queer Puerto Rican men in particular. Drawing upon the work of Latin American and U.S. Latinx scholars of decolonial thought and criticism such as Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Maria Lugones and Walter Mignolo, my paper performs a close reading of Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance with the aim of decolonizing such literary representations of the hegemony of middle-class, white, gay male desire. Tracing the structures of queer coloniality in Holleran’s novel, my paper examines the degree to which the mute presence of a racialized other (in this case, the silent body of the working-class gay Puerto Rican man) functions as “underside” of middle-class, white, gay “modernity”—the latter fundamentally depending of the presence of the former for its own erotic self-realization. My analysis of Holleran’s novel thus elucidates the degree to which a colonial logic of representation continues to structure popular literary representations of queer Latinxs. In critiquing the coloniality of middle-class, white, gay male desire as reproduced by Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, I work to better acknowledge and validate the central role that queer Latinxs have and continue to play in the larger history of contemporary, U.S. America LGBTQ politics and art. “Identity Starts at Home: Developing Counterhegemonic Afro-Latino Masculinity in Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets” Regina Marie Mills, University of Texas at Austin The family home is the first place that Piri Thomas realizes that his ambiguous identity leaves his racial loyalty and his national and ethnic pride in question. Through a reading of Piri Thomas’s Down These Streets, I argue that Piri invokes a ‘counterhegemonic Afro-Latinidad’ in the spirit of William Luis’s claim that, “Afro-Latino identity in particular sets the groundwork for questioning the hegemonic positionality to which Afro-Latinos and non-Afro-Latinos subscribe.” Piri’s Afro-Latino masculinity becomes a means of interrogating the racial and ethnic assumptions of Black, Puerto Rican, and white communities, though it fails to interrogate, and often incorporates, troubling gender and sexual politics. Within Thomas’s memoirs, the home is the starting place in Piri’s construction of a counterhegemonic Afro-Latino masculinity that serves both as an identity and a lens of interrogation. By thinking deeply about the subtle and overt acts of racism that he experiences in his family, Piri develops a counterhegemonic Afro- Latino masculinity that challenges the assumptions and actions of his family and the Puerto Ricans and Black Americans that he meets in the streets. In this presentation, I identify the tense relationship between Piri and his father as the catalyst for the centering of his Afro-Latino identity “‘The island was abandoned by history’: Geographies of Race in Victor Hernández Cruz’s Red Beans” Gabriela Ramirez-Chavez, University of California, Santa Cruz I draw on Frances R. Aparicio’s concept of tropicalization, which views the politics of representation as a multidirectional process “by examining the shifting semantics of cultural signifiers,” to link the geographies of race to the idea of spatial and racial time.1 Departing from past studies on tropicalization and, specifically, Hernández Cruz’s “hispanization” of English, I argue that he “tropicalizes” both the United States and the island of Puerto Rico by deconstructing and recombining the signs associated with each space. Cruz’s collection Red Beans (1997) destabilizes Western dichotomies of time and space, North and South, and Self and Other. By linking industrial materials and modern technologies with the West/“future” and romantic images of the tropics with the Caribbean/“past,” his speaker appears to reify developmentalist approaches that situate Latin America in an earlier stage of development vis-à- vis the United States and, by extension, what Johannes Fabian calls “the denial of coevalness,” or the ethnographer’s assumption that subaltern subjects do not exist in the same historical time. Yet through various poetic techniques, Hernández Cruz converges both spaces and conveys their interdependency, inseparability, and synchronicity. 2. Re/imagining Race: Borders, Gender, and Eugenics “La Leyenda Negra: Racial Imaginaries of Haiti and the US/Mexico Border” Katherine Steelman, University of California, San Diego In this paper I examine blackness in Tijuana, BC, MX, specifically focusing on how the US media, Mexican media, and social media users have been representing the migration of Haitian refugees to the city. In 2004, Eduardo Galeano wrote an article titled, “Haiti: la maldición blanca,” in which he argues that since its independence from France, Haiti has been cursed by white imperial powers for being the site of the first successful slave rebellion. Much scholarship has been produced, including that of Manoucheka Celeste, and Robert Lawless, about the ways in which the media has been complicit in this “curse” against Haiti. New York Times articles dating back to 1915 have laid the foundation for the vilification of Haiti in the US imaginary. Similarly, Tijuana itself is a place that has seen material ramifications as a result of representations in US media. An article published in the New York Times in 1920 sets the groundwork for the ways Tijuana is represented in US cultural production, which is both racialized and sexualized. Fast forward to the present day, and there is increasing news coverage of Haitian migration to Tijuana, which is building upon these histories of representations of both Haiti and Tijuana. With these histories in mind I examine representations of Tijuana and Haiti in newspaper archives, comic books, film and literature, in juxtaposition with contemporary representations of Haitians in Tijuana. I analyze these representations not only to examine their negative effects, but also to take up the ways in which they have been resisted and reimagined by alternative representations in culture and social media. “Writing While Brown: Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, and Lucha Corpi” Leigh Johnson, Marymount College Life writing (memoir and autobiography) puts the writer in the position of the character. While Ana Castillo’s recent memoir, Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me, chronicles her son’s arrest and incarceration, it also positions her as a daughter, lover, and mother. The fraught politics of race comes to bear upon the relationships presented in the book from her relationship with her darker- skinned mother, to her “brown” son, to her light-skinned lover. This essay takes up the conference theme of Latnix Lives, Matters, and Imaginaries: Theorizing Race in the 21st Century by examining how recent life writing by Chicana authors (Lucha Corpi, Sandra Cisneros, and Ana Castillo) positions the writer as lone intellectual in struggle with the ramifications of the US history of racial prejudice and violence. The writers use their essays as a way of theorizing the ways in which race affects their ability to parent, write, move, and live. “Remapping Eugenics and Mestizaje in River of Angels (2014)” Christine Fernández, U.S. Military Academy, West Point The canon of Chicanx literature has often situated itself within the borderlands as a historical site of political, linguistic, and cultural contestation and renegotiation, which discloses the region’s complex settlement following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848. Earlier canonical texts, such as Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s novel, The Squatter and the Don (1885) observe the early formative cultural and racial/ethnic cartography of Californio/ Mexican-American settlers throughout the late 19th century. Other key Chicano authors, such as Alejandro Morales, have incorporated the concept of mestizaje, within the locus of Southern California. He returns to early California settlement with his most recent novel, River of Angels (2014), which unearths the hidden history of eugenics and its central role in the urban development of Southern California’s Los Angeles River basin. I argue that Morales’s novel demonstrates the aesthetics of mestizaje through his fiction as an ongoing process that is not only counterpuntal to the historical framework of eugenics, but it allows us to reassess the cultural cartography and intersections of Californios, mestizo Hispanics, and the contributions of other ethnic/ racial identities throughout Southern California. 3. Documenting Crisis: Myths, Immigrants and the Intervention of Literature “‘Refugees of a World on Fire’: The Turn to the Undocumented in Women of Color Feminisms” Esmeralda Arrizón-Palomera, Cornell University This project identifies the post-Civil Rights Era as a moment in which the undocumented immigrant emerges as an analytical framework in U.S.