A traves del caleidoscopio: Identidad y localizacion cultural en textos autobiograficos hispanos en los Estados Unidos.
Item
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Title
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A traves del caleidoscopio: Identidad y localizacion cultural en textos autobiograficos hispanos en los Estados Unidos.
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Identifier
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AAI9917674
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identifier
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9917674
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Creator
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Lopez, Iraida H.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Oscar Montero
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Date
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1999
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Language
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Spanish
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Modern | Literature, Latin American | Literature, Caribbean | Women's Studies | Biography
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Abstract
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Latino/a literature and autobiographical narratives have generated a great deal of interest in recent times. This thesis represents an effort to link both areas, at the same time that it helps fill a void in the study of Latino/a autobiography from a comparative perspective. A close reading is made of seven Cuban-American, Puerto Rican, and Chicano/a contemporary autobiographies, published between 1967 and 1995, by writers Gustavo Perez Firmat, Piri Thomas, Luis J. RodrIguez, Nicholasa Mohr, Gloria Anzaldua, Norma Elia Cantu, and Judith Ortiz Cofer.;The thesis focuses on two topics that the texts themselves foreground: identity and cultural location. In this study, ethnic and national identity do not constitute "authentic", unidimensional, and stable entities. While identities are framed in a historical context, they become plural, fluid, evolutionary, and kaleidoscopic. In very diverse contexts, many of these writers assume a multiple identity that goes beyond ethnicity or the hyphen to include other aspects of subjectivity, such as gender, race, class, and sexuality. Simultaneously, all of them embody a bicultural and hybrid identity that makes them both observers and participants of Hispanic and Anglo-American traditions. Through their writings, they articulate new ways of being American.;The vantage position developed by these writers entails the forging of a "third space" from which to define cultural identity. This "third space," inherently hybrid, is critical of cultural purity, cultural totalization, and cultural territorialization within rigid boundaries. It is best understood through the notions of transnationalism, the border, and cultural citizenship. At times overlapping, the three concepts refer to the cultural location of the writers, who negotiate space against the grain of the classic American myth of the melting pot.;At the same time that the thesis concentrates on the cultural themes of identity and location, it expands the methodological framework used to analyze ethnic literatures---which generally emphasize their homogeneous cultural capital---by focusing on the intersections of gender, race, class, and sexuality which complicate each writer's position, inscribing it into the metaphoric and shifting space of the kaleidoscope.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
