Description
Book SynopsisPresents an anthology of Chicano literary criticism, with essays on a range of texts - both old and new - that draws on diverse perspectives in contemporary literary and cultural studies: from ethnographic to postmodernist, from Marxist to feminist, from cultural materialist to new historicist.
Trade Review'Criticism in the Borderlands maps the significant contribution of Chicano and Chicana literary and cultural studies toward defining a culture of resistance in the United States...' --Suzanne Oboler, Novel: A Forum on Fiction
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Foreword: Redefining American Literature / Roland Hinojosa xi
Editors' Introduction: Criticism in the Borderlands 1
Part I. Institutional Studies and the Literary Canon
Narrative, Ideology, and the Reconstruction of American Literary History / Ramón Saldívar 11
The Rewriting of American Literary History / Luis Leal 21
The Theoretical Subject(s) of
This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism / Norma Alarcón 28
Part II. Representations of the Chicana/o Subject: Race, Class, and Gender
Imprisoned Narrative? Or Lies, Secrets, and Silence in New Mexico Women's Autobiography / Genaro Padilla 43
Body, Spirit, and the Text: Alma Villanueva's
Life Span / Elizabeth J. Ordóñez 61
Ana Castillo's
The Mixquiahuala Letters: The Novelist as Ethnographer / Alvina E. Quintana 72
Fables of the Fallen Guy / Renato Rosaldo 84
Part III. Genre, Ideology, and History
The Novel and the Community of Readers: Rereading Tomás Rivera's
Y no se le tragó la tierra / Héctor Calderón 97
Ideological Discourses in Arturo Islas's
The Rain God / Rosaura Sánchez 114
Conceptualizing Chicano Critical Discourse / Angie Chabram 127
Sites of Struggle: Immigration, Deportation, Prison, and Exile / Barbara Harlow 149
Part IV. Aesthetics of the Border
Chicano Border Narratives as Cultural Critique / José David Saldívar 167
On Chicano Poetry and the Political Age:
Corridos as Social Drama / Teresa McKenna 188
Feminism on the Border / From Gender Politics to Geopolitics / Sonia Saldívar-Hull 203
Dancing with the Devil: Society, Gender, and the Political Unconcious in Mexican-American South Texas / José E. Limón 221
Works Cited 237
Selected and Annotated Bibliography of Contemporary Chicano Literary Criticism 260
Index 275
Contributors 287
