Troubling Nationhood in U.S. Latina Literature : : Explorations of Place and Belonging / / Maya Socolovsky.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Rutgers University Press Backlist eBook-Package 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Socolovsky, Maya,
• Place / Publishing House: New Brunswick, NJ : : Rutgers University Press, , [2013]; ©2013
• Year of Publication: 2013
• Language: English
• Series: Latinidad: Transnational Cultures in the
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (256 p.)

This book examines the ways in which recent U.S. Latina literature challenges popular definitions of nationhood and national identity. It explores a group of feminist texts that are representative of the U.S. Latina literary boom of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, when an emerging group of writers gained prominence in mainstream and academic circles. Through close readings of select contemporary Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American works, Maya Socolovsky argues that these narratives are "remapping" the United States so that it is fully integrated within a larger, hemispheric Americas. Looking at such concerns as nation, place, trauma, and storytelling, writers Denise Chavez, Sandra Cisneros, Esmeralda Santiago, Ana Castillo, Himilce Novas, and Judith Ortiz Cofer challenge popular views of Latino cultural "unbelonging" and make strong cases for the legitimate presence of Latinas/os within the United States. In this way, they also counter much of today's anti-immigration rhetoric. Imagining the U.S. as part of a broader "Americas," these writings trouble imperialist notions of nationhood, in which political borders and a long history of intervention and colonization beyond those borders have come to shape and determine the dominant culture's writing and the defining of all Latinos as "other" to the nation.