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25 - Latina/o Life Narratives

Crafting Self-Referential Forms in the Colonial Milieu of the Americas

from Part IV - Literary Migrations across the Americas, 1980–2017

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 February 2018

John Morán González
Affiliation:
University of Texas, Austin
Laura Lomas
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Jersey
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Summary

In this essay, I analyze the specific genre innovations employed by Latin@ authors to render visible both individuals in the United States and communities with transnational ties to Latin America and the Caribbean as they employ various autobiographical strategies to establish a self-narrated tradition that ultimately leads to the making and remaking of an entire corpus of particularized identity discourses. I compile a case study on formal evolutions in Chican@ autobiographical discourses as informed by the field's theoretical frameworks to show how reimagined self-referential genres negotiate entry into global modernity via modern capitalism, the nation-state, and the diasporas that resulted from these conjunctions. The persistency of these genre innovator-activists, those who were willing to look across racial, cultural, sexual, and class boundaries to examine the relationality of their intersectional identities while arguing for their rightful insertion into our (trans-)national American master narratives, has carved open the spaces for those currently writing and finding publishers in the twenty-first century
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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References

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