Description
Book SynopsisThis book explores the post-insular imprint in Puerto Rican letters through a sample of authors from the island and the diaspora. From a canonical figure like Alejandro Tapia to the post-Nuyorican poet Víctor Hernández Cruz, and from the working-class feminism of Luisa Capetillo and Franca de Armiño to Virginia Sánchez Korrol's narrative homage to the legacy of Emilia Casanova, trends such as dissidence and migration are core to the understanding of the Puerto Rican and its diasporic experiences. In Tapia's case, his Póstumo saga offers a transmigrated subject who questions the gender binary. Regarding Capetillo and Armiño, a sample of their plays shows not only a global awareness, but also the intersection between class and gender issues to challenge patriarchal constraints. A related intersection, the one between gender and racial matters, is key in Casanova's understanding of freedom and the pan-Antillean consciousness that Boricua historian Sánchez Korrol underscores in h
Trade Review
“With thoughtful, nuanced, and fresh readings of texts by writers whose work and existential-literary cartographies defy confining articulations of Puerto Rican identity, Nancy I. Bird-Soto intervenes in fundamental critical conversations about migration and coloniality in Puerto Rican experience and identity debates, to build a strong case that the ‘post-insular’ has always constituted a defining characteristic of that experience.” —Vicky Unruh, Professor Emerita, University of Kansas
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments – Introduction: Dissident Spirts and the Case for the Post-Insular – Spirits of Dissidence: Alejandro Tapia y Rivera’s Póstumo el transmigrado and Póstumo envirginiado – Whimsical Women: Gender and Labor in the Plays of Luisa Capetillo and Franca de Armino – “All in the Name of Liberation:” Feminist and Abolitionist: The Story of Emilia Casanova – A Poetic Manifesto for the Caribbean: Victor Hernandez Cruz’s In the Shadow of Al-Andalus – Index.
