Description
Book SynopsisFinalist for The Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History, given by the American Society for Theatre Research.
Silver Medal Winner of The Victor Villaseñor Best Latino Focused Non-Fiction Book Award, given by the International Latino Book Awards.
Honorable Mention for the Best LGBTQ+ Themed Book, given by the International Latino Book Awards.
A queer genealogy of the famous performance space and the nuyorican aesthetic
One could easily overlook the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, a small, unassuming performance venue on New York City's Lower East Side. Yet the space once hosted the likes of Victor Hernández Cruz, Allen Ginsberg, and Amiri Baraka and is widely credited as the homespace for the emergent nuyorican literary and aesthetic movement of the 1990s. Founded by a group of counterculturalist Puerto Rican immigrants and artists in the 1970s, the space slowly transformed the Puerto Ric
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A thrilling meditation on the seldom-acknowledged wild and wily ways artists of color in the 1990s and 2000s queered Nuyorican poetic performance by astutely reconnecting with its corporeally fluid founding aesthetics. Karen Jaime’s The Queer Nuyorican is a timely and seductive invitation to explore nuyorican aesthetics as an inclusive, mobile, inspiringly contentious Open Room. * Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, author of Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails *
Karen Jaime’s assessment of the aesthetics cultivated and mobilized at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe takes a groundbreaking turn to render queer contributions as central to the artistic, cultural, and political legacy and future of this beloved institution. Bringing to light previously unexamined archival materials and offering a proximity of analysis only possible from the vantage point of a creative participant in the scene, Karen Jaime allows us to discover the Nuyorican anew. This intimate and rigorous volume will shape all future scholarship on the Cafe and the nuyorican aesthetic. * Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, Dean of the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin *
The Queer Nuyorican has the potential to make readers hopeful for a queer future through its particular connection to the queer past. The book’s chapters, organized by artistic subjects, make for a gratifying read for specialists, as well as more general audiences, allowing for a more queer, and racially diverse, view of the field. * The Journal of American Drama and Theatre *
"The Queer Nuyorican is an extremely compelling book. By positioning herself so centrally and working with such a rich and heretofore underutilized archive, Karen Jaime transforms our perception of this leading Puerto Rican, Latinx, African American, and queer of color institution in New York City." * Latino Studies Journal *
