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This essay employs a literary analysis of Julia de Burgos's poetry to establish how she has been, borrowing from Dixa Ramírez's Colonial Phantoms (2018), misrepresented and "ghosted" in Western discourse and national archives as solely a Puerto Rican nationalist poet when she was an exile, too. Distinct from this misrepresentation, Burgos perceived herself as an exile. Part of the work of this essay is undoing the colonial ghosting of Julia de Burgos's legacy by remembering her as she was—an exile. Utilizing Edward Said's notion of an intellectual exile, I provide an examination of the nautical metaphors and avian imagery in Burgos's poetry collections as personal renderings of exilic status, and thus of an exilic writer. Denying Burgos's exilic status is to deny her the political significance of her poetry and her life. Everything she wrote and the way she lived was defined by the fact she could not reside or simply "be" in her homeland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes short stories "La vida real" (1893) by Carmela Eulate, "Sara la obrera" (1895) by Ana Roqué and "El cajero" (1916) by Luisa Capetillo. Based on the study of the context of production --basically the diagnosis of social crisis and the proposed solutions offered by different sectors-- we can see how these stories thematize the poverty of the popular sectors, the opportunities that education can offer and their relations with members of other social classes. While the stories by Eulate and Roqué express a commitment with the perpetuation of the social order, Capetillo's story celebrates its transgression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Plurentes is the property of Universidad Nacional de La Plata and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Working as principal investigator and head of the translation team for El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña / the Puerto Rican Literature Project (PRLP)—a free, bilingual, user-friendly, and open access digital portal that anyone can use to learn about and teach Puerto Rican poetry—has provided the author with insight about the colonial conditions that structure translation as word-making practice, survival strategy, and decolonial methodology. In collaborating with Puerto Rican writers, translators, investigators, and scholars and sustaining a dialogue with a long history of personal and collective archival work, the author has at times found, in collaboration with literary peers, that Puerto Ricans often act as self-translators, archivists, and historians, while navigating the conditional visibility and general invisibilization of their modes of speech, their literatures, and their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the lesbian characters in Puerto Rican narrative and examines the strategies of visibility of sexual minorities. In the texts studied, lesbians are monstrous figures that reactivate topics of the gothic or science fiction tradition: vampires, zombies, serial killers or cyborgs. In so doing, they are at the crossroads of genres and gender, creating epistemic spaces with diffuse contours. These contributions to Puerto Rican lesbian literature thus participate in the revision of the national literary canon and the redefinition of its borders, through strategies of fragmentation, hybridization and literary zombification.

Copyright of Liminalities is the property of Liminalities and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article outlines a reading of the novel Sexto sueño (2007), by the Puerto Rican writer Marta Aponte Alsina. This paper's objective is to analyze the way in which a unique space of enunciation is articulated through two performativities: one legal and another literary. It involves a journey that takes us through places like the U.S. and Puerto Rico, in which bodies in transit are crossed, not only by legal and biopolitical practices, but also by various instances of experimentalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An Interview with author Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa is presented. Topics include talks about several stories and persons he think are missing in Puerto Rican literature and think that the Puerto Rican literary canon has made enough progress, or what type of work is still needed to be done; and focuses on work in the Puerto Rican literary canon.

Newspapers were the primary literary institutions of Latinx modernism, and attending more centrally to newspaper and other periodical literature changes the way we understand Latinx literary history. It demonstrates not only the generic and formal dynamism of Latinx writing but also how thoroughly embedded that writing has always been in hemispheric currents of thought and textual circulation. In this essay, I give an account of how Latinx modernism contributes to and transforms the fields of Latinx literature, modernist studies, and Latin American studies. I describe the print-cultural archive of Latinx modernism and justify my use of the term Latinx based on the transnational identifications of newspaper literature pages during this period. I then outline the problems and potentiality presented by the Latinity of Latinx writing, building on the work of Latin American decolonial theorists. Relying on examples from the archive, I show how Latinx modernism engages what I am calling the spirit of Latinoamericanismo and in the process transforms our conception of American modernity, showing it to be inextricable from coloniality. The spirit of Latinoamericanismo figures the oppositional potential of Latinx modernist literature, including its contradictions and limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In keeping with a transinsular approach, this paper proposes that the narrative of the "Great Puerto Rican Family" informs Down These Mean Streets (1967) and Piri's conception of race and gender. Piri's interactions with his mother and her representation throughout the novel are of central interest since she is Piri's most immediate connection to the Island. Through their conversations, Piri hears his mother's recollections of the Island, which, in turn, are appropriated and transformed by Piri in the creation of his own memories and thoughts. Down These Mean Streets thus rewrites the gran familia puertorriqueña within the U.S. context, making it, as one might propose, the "gran familia neorriqueña." This new rendering of a traditional literary trope offers a paradigm of the diaspora that exposes earlier misconceptions. And while not devoid of contradictions, the gran familia neorriqueña offers insight in approaching representations of race and gender in the novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Los pies de San Juan by Eduardo Lalo is a hybrid work: it has been variously described as a photographic essay, an artist book, a chronicle-book, a performance album and a book-object. In this work emerges an obsession for detail and fragmentation, which makes it impossible to construct a global image of a San Juan of Puerto Rico that is explored on foot, camera at hand, in search of marks in the ground, waste and traces of decadence, rather than through panoramic views. This essay will analyze this sense of fragmentation and waste, taking into account the photographic repertoire but mainly focusing on the written reflections that accompany it. The cityscape is constructed as an "antipostcard", in which the parts selected never allow us to see a whole, and in which Lalo's cosmovision of the subject "being" the city establishes a fusion between body and city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Este ensayo examina el poemario Huracanada (2018), de la escritora puertorriqueña Mayra Santos-Febres, desde una perspectiva ecocrítica. Específicamente, estudia cómo estos poemas resaltan en qué medida la devastación que provocó el huracán María en Puerto Rico en 2017 no debe atribuirse simple y simplistamente al poder de las fuerzas naturales, sino también a un desquilibrio profundo y sistémico en la relación entre seres humanos y la naturaleza, tanto en la isla como globalmente. Este desequilibrio ha contribuido a la intensificación de fenómenos como los huracanes—algo que la literatura científica sobre los efectos del calentamiento global antropogénico señala enfáticamente—y a los catastróficos efectos de estos eventos sobre las poblaciones más vulnerables del planeta. Más aún: el poemario muestra cómo, tras este tipo de desastres, los justificados intentos de asegurar la sobrevivencia y la prosperidad de diversas poblaciones—incluyendo las más vulnerables—frecuentemente implican la colaboración con un sistema económico, industrial y tecnológico que es cómplice del problema que se intenta resolver. En mi lectura, Huracanada es una invitación a transformar el paradigma del desarrollismo tecnológico-industrial que domina globalmente, y a sustituirlo por modelos sostenibles de subsistencia y comunidad.

Copyright of Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Through an analysis of Manuel Abreu Adorno's Llegaron los hippies (1978) and Rafael Franco Steeves's Alaska (2007)--two authors that have been mostly overlooked by critics of Puerto Rican literature--the essay argues that there is a literary tradition interested on a representation of vulnerable heterosexual male bodies that embrace a performance of a mongo masculinity, that is, male bodies that use failure as a survival tactic. Therefore, these bodies exhibit the emptiness at the center of a letrado and popular discourse anxious about a colonial shame that has been associated with racialized and sexualized subjectivities, including what has been defined as a docile masculinity. Instead, the mongos choose life over the patriarchal imperative to dominate others. This literary analysis contributes to the discussion of masculinity studies in Puerto Rico by establishing a dialogue with previous scholarship on gender and sexuality phenomena in the island. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to analyze the short story "Oso Blanco", by Puerto Rican writer Mayra Santos-Febres, in order to perceive uncanny elements, which work as discursive strategy that reveals the communion of bodies unable to perform tangible approximations. The uncanny seems to constitute an epistemological metaphor in the image of the woman imprisoned in a bureaucratic cycle, or in the arm that gains autonomy from its body, or even in the transformation of the penitentiary building into the narrator and protagonist of the plot. The senses of the unusual gain historical and political dimensions, pointing out, as epistemological metaphors, to the fragmented subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Contexto Revista Anual de Estudios Literarios is the property of Facultad de Medicina, Universidad de los Andes, Venezuela and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

After thirty years under US colonial rule, Puerto Rican intellectuals of the 1930s generation used literature to proclaim a Hispanic heritage and position themselves against US imperialism in their nation-building efforts. One of these thinkers was Nilita Vientós Gastón, lawyer and gestora cultural, who served as editor-in-chief of the Puerto Rican journal Asomante (1945-70). I argue that Asomante is crucial to understanding not only the role of literary journals in canon formation, but also to identifying cultural aspects of an anti-colonial nation-building project in Puerto Rico. In doing so, I draw from canon formation and cultural nationalism debates to highlight how Vientós Gastón launched Asomante as an alternative "Ministry of Culture." I discuss how her editorial strategies--tracing genealogies, creating foreign connections with writers and other journals, instituting a venue for contemporary literary criticism, forming anthologies, and establishing a publishing house--constructed the island's anti-colonial literary canon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the narrative works of Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro, we can identify the body and its fluids as an inscription of transit, in both literal and symbolic terms, between the spaces of gender identity. On the one hand, the presence of menstrual blood celebrates the body and fluids of women. On the other hand, the author's exploration of the body challenges the patriarchal and heteronormative stances that condemn women to reproduction while, at the same time, moving away from essentialist views of identity based, precisely, on biological discourses. Therefore, far from proposing an essentialist vision where a female subjectivity is drawn, we are presented with a subjectivity of fluidity, through characters in flux or transit, i.e., literally in trans. or that converge both sides of the gender binary from the fluidity of their bodies and actions, in manifest performance and challenge to heteronormativity. This fluidity points toward a queer stance that is not limited to the gender or sexuality of its characters, but transcends and questions the whole dualistic and colonial social apparatus. Through our analysis of the short story collections Lesbofilias (2014), Menorragia: histerias de octubre (2015), and Transmutadxs (2016) with the theoretical framework of Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti and others, we propose that Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro inscribes a praxis of fluidity as means to denounce injustices and to inscribe a nomadic subject in flux between binaries, creativity, and the paradoxical forces of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recognized in 2016 as the Writer of the Year in Queer Literature by the LGBTT Community Center of Puerto Rico, Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro is considered one of the most important lesbian authors in Puerto Rico. Although in her works she dialogues with island and diasporic pioneers such as Nemir Matos-Cintrón, Lilliana Ramos-Collado, and Luz María Umpierre, her creative and intellectual activities challenge the forced disappearance of lesbians and the myth of lesbian invisibility on the island and also highlight black experience. One of the examples is her novel Violeta (2013). This work undermines the heterosexual matrix of Puerto Ricanness, which promotes monogamy, heteropatriarchal family, and the experiences of kinships and motherhood as forcefully imposed on feminine sexuality. The sexual dissidence of Arroyo Pizarro's lesbian characters favors the creation of sexually diverse environments and polyamory, while the juxtaposition of their erotic autonomy and racial tensions makes visible the experiences of Afro-Puerto Rican lesbians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gabby Rivera's Juliet Takes a Breath (2016) is only the second coming-of-age lesbian novel written by a Puerto Rican in the diaspora. A signifcant development within the Young Adult genre, I propose that the book functions as a symbolic continuation to Magali García Ramis's Felices días, tío Sergio, and its main character, Lidia, a young girl who has been read as "proto-lesbian" (La Fountain-Stokes). Similarly, I suggest that Rivera's work indirectly converses with other Puerto Rican literary texts and activist icons produced in the diaspora through Juliet's journey to achieve socio-political awareness. Nineteen-year-old Juliet Palante leaves The Bronx to spend her summer in Portland, Oregon, working as an intern for Harlowe Brisbane, fctitious author of Raging Flower: Empowering your Pussy by Empowering your Mind. There she will learn about preferred gender pronouns and polyamory, among other terms that, as a "feminist," she is assumed to know. This essay elucidates how her experience reveals the gap between the white, hipster Portland community and the reality she lives in The Bronx--a breach exemplary of common issues of exclusion of the working classes from feminist movements, and the fissures between white queer theory and brown queer life. Therefore, I propose that Rivera's work presents her interaction with white feminism, as well as the library, as sources of hidden truths and ideologies that enable Juliet to follow her path to epistemic disobedience and decolonial thinking (Mignolo). Juliet Takes a Breath serves as an instrument for personal, but most importantly gender, sexual, racial, and national discovery that suggests a movement forward within Puerto Rican literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article intends to analyze the representation of sexual diversity and the process of making it visible in Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro's narrative work, so as to define the latter's political project. By focusing on the author's discursive, narrative, intertextual, and intermedial strategies, the article purposes to delineate a commitment far more diverse and complex than meets the eye, as it draws not only on queer theory but also on decolonial feminism and on the "Poetics of Relation" theorized by the Caribbean writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a 2002 interview with Puerto Rican actor and director Jorge B. Merced. He discusses his film adaptation of Puerto Rican author Manuel Ramos Otero's "El bolero fue mi ruina," and comments on the influence of his youth living in Puerto Rico through the mid-1980s on his works.

This article begins to redress the dearth of information about Puerto Rican and Latinx queer lives and cultural expressions prior to the 1960s. Specifically, it shows how Pedro Caballero's 1931 novel Paca Antillana: novela pedagógica puertorriqueña challenges heteronormative conventions and inscribes queer aesthetic codes in the cultural repertoire of diasporic Puerto Rican communities. By intertwining diasporic tales of racial transgression and gender inversion, Caballero's novel, I argue, formulates a specifically Latinx camp aesthetics that both responds to and destabilizes implicitly Anglo queer cultural practices. Reading the novel alongside archival materials relating to Caballero and his sociocultural milieu, this article makes the case for Paca Antillana as an important predecessor of the Puerto Rican and Latinx queer performance and literary aesthetics of today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses Puerto Rican musician and jazz singer Lucy Fabery. The author comments on the relationship between Puerto Rican music, literature, and society, and examines her influence on the arts in Puerto Rico and the wider Caribbean region, including Cuba. Her ethnicity as a black Puerto Rican woman is also explored.

This article presents a literary criticism for "Fe en disfraz" by Mayra Santos-Febres and "Las Negras" by Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro. The influence of Santos-Febres and Pizarro's ethnic identity as black Puerto Rican women on their works and literary characters is examined. Themes including eroticism, sexuality, and race in these novels is also explored.

Although within Puerto Rican literary studies Alejandro Tapia y Rivera is better-known for his novels, poems and plays, there have been few studies of what could be considered his minor works compared to his more well-known writings (La cuarterona, La santaniada, Póstumo el transmigrado). Many of these minor texts appeared in the magazine La Azucena: Literatura, Ciencias, Artes, Viajes y Costumbres, Dedicada alBello Sexo Pto-riqueño, edited by Tapia between 1870-1877. For this essay, I will analyze how Tapia, in one of his minor works titled "Un viaje a Monte-Edén," applied his romantic sensibility to articulate themes of great importance in his literary work: modernity and cosmopolitanism in the service of the "nation of the future." By analyzing this parodical satire I will demonstrate how Tapia combined diverse tropes and genres in this text to develop a vision of Puerto Rico as a "nation of the future." Aunque dentro del ámbito de estudios literarios puertorriqueños Alejandro Tapia y Rivera es más conocido por sus novelas, poemas y dramas, poco se ha estudiado de lo que podría considerarse como sus escritos menores comparados con sus obras más conocidas (La cuarterona, La santaniada, Póstumo el transmigrado). Muchos de estos textos menores aparecen en la revista La Azucena: Literatura, Ciencias, Artes, Viajes y Costumbres, Dedicada al Bello Sexo Pto-riqueño, editada por Tapia entre 1870-1877. Para este ensayo analizaré cómo Tapia, en uno de sus escritos menores titulado "Un viaje a Monte-Edén", aplicó su sensibilidad romántica para expresar temas que eran de gran importancia en su obra literaria: la modernidad y el cosmopolitismo al servicio de la "nación del porvenir". Analizaré esta sátira paródica para comprender cómo en este texto Tapia combinó tropos y géneros [End Page 33] diversos para desarrollar una visión de Puerto Rico como una "nación del porvenir". Même si dans le champ des études littéraires portoricaines Alejandro Tapia y Rivera est connu pour ses romans, ses poèmes et ses tragédies, il n'en demeure pas moins que ses œuvres mineures, comme La cuarterona, La santaniada, Póstumo el transmigrado, sont peu étudiées. La plupart de ses textes méconnus sont parus dans la revue La Azucena: Literatura, Ciencias, Artes, Viajes y Costumbres, Dedicada al Bello Sexo Pto-riqueño, éditée par Tapia entre 1870 et 1877. Cet essai se proposera d'analyser comment Tapia, dans l'un de ses écrits les moins connus intitulé "Un viaje a Monte-Edén", utilise sa sensibilité romanesque pour exprimer des thèmes qui eurent une grande importance dans son œuvre littéraire, à savoir la modernité et le cosmopolitisme au service de la « nation de l'avenir » (« nación del porvenir »). J'analyserai cette satire parodique afin de montrer comment Tapia mêle divers tropes et genres littéraires dans le but de décrire Porto Rico comme une « nation de l'avenir » dans ce texte. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The psycologist and writer Benito Massó, recently deceased, is the author of two recent books about Afro-Puerto Rican experience and history: Negro: este color que me queda bonito (2013), Massó's self-ethnobiography in which he narrates his experiences as a black man; and Rebelde: la historia de Juana Agripina (2016), a novel which recreates the story of the rebel Juana Agripina, a slave from Ponce, Puerto Rico. This essay analyzes the voice of the author of Negro: este color que me queda bonito exploring two concepts: "endorracism" and "social flesh". While the first refers to 'self-hatred' regarding one's own race, the second is a theoretical concept created by Chris Beasley y Carol Bacchi to explore the interrelations and codependency of every member of a community, taking into consideration differences of gender, age, race, and class, among others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes that the novel Luz y sombra (1903) by Ana Roqué develops an intertextual dialogue with La muñeca (1895) by Carmela Eulate Sanjurjo. This dialogue recognizes both La muñeca's artistic quality as well as its intent to transform the narrative in order to deliver a clearer moral message to its readers. While high levels of ambiguity and irony characterize Carmela Eulate's novel -features which are responsible for a wide range of diverse and even contradictory interpretations- Ana Roque's text develops a pedagogic discourse that avoids ambiguity. Her message emphasizes the importance of an education that allows women to choose a husband based on love and companionship instead of economic and social goals, so that marriage becomes the basis of a society capable of progressing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scientific agenda that framed the implementation and legitimation of the US invasion of Puerto Rico towards the end of the nineteenth century also enabled the transformation of the occupied territories into laboratories of medical experimentation with human beings. This article proposes the category of "hypochondriac fiction", which names an aesthetic space for the destabilization of biopolitics. This optic is particularly useful for an examination of the work of Pedro Cabiya, since it sets out to undermine regulatory practices (including literary and intellectual discourse), which have controlled bodies and ailments in the island. I first examine the negotiation of alterity in the contexts of economic and biological exploitation as represented in "Relato del piloto que dijo adiós con la malo" (2003) and in the novel Malas hierbas (2009). The manifold syndromes that resolve Cabiya's plot lines as well as the texts included in Historias tremendas (1999) will reveal the ways in which his work disrupts the causal—and etiological—mechanisms at stake in the Puerto Rican colonial laboratory. This essay thus seeks to explain those representational strategies, which replicate the clinical picture designed by intellectuals and medical experimenters while also boycotting, rewriting, and evading such pathological system from within. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the large umbrella of Latinx children's literature, the books and studies that specifically portray Puerto Rican characters, settings, and stories are limited, creating a gap in understanding the representations of Puerto Ricans in children's literature. This study explores the voices of Puerto Ricans through a critical content analysis of twenty contemporary realistic picture books published from 2000-2016. The collection shows 1) a magical but limiting representation of the island; 2) a consistent absence of the African or Afro-Puerto Rican identity; 3) a complex use of Spanish in English texts and, 4) a resistance against a colonial discourse and myths that have historically described the broad Latinx population as indifferent with regards to their children's educación. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will focus on the literary treatments of slaves and slavery in Puerto Rican literature in the 19th century. It argues that such treatments, including those in the Puerto Rican periodicals and other 19th century literary publications on the island, offer a much more complex understanding of slavery and human oppression in general than we can usually find in sociological or even psychological studies of these social phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the entanglement of fiction and historical memory. More particularly, it analyses how Santos-Febres' literary representation of slavery confronts traditional malecentered narratives, while reproducing the myth of the eroticized mulatta. Furthermore, this article focuses on how the (re/de)construction of sexual abuse of slave women challenges traditional sexual, gender, racial, and social dynamics in postcolonial societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an interview with Puerto Rican author Ana Celia Zentella. She discusses current trends in Puerto Rican literature and comments on the relationship between literature and linguistics. She also describes the concept of anthropolitical linguistics, which imbues language with social and political power.

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses the articles in this issue, which focus on art, literature, and culture in Puerto Rico.

In this paper I will discuss how Montañez redefines the term "diva" in her collection of short stories Las divas de mi barrio [Divas of my neighborhood]. I argue that this redefinition, values the role of female characters who differ physically from the ideas of beauty that tend to be associated with a diva. This is significant since these characters belong to the working class of the country where the plot develops. Thus, these short stories pay tribute to other forms of femininity and knowledge that tend to be excluded from the status quo for not going along with aesthetic preferences and behaviors that reinforce machismo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between wandering and everyday life in Simone (), a novel by the Puerto Rican writer Eduardo Lalo. Wandering, defined as an aimless movement around the city, is not only an instance to reflect and discover by walking the everyday life, but also to express a critical perspective towards the structures of power that articulates the daily life of San Juan. If the everyday relates to all daily activities, wandering is a representative movement of the rhythm of the city, which also enables to reveal the subversive potential of the everyday. Considering the figure of the flâneur, this article will analyze the way in which wandering is an instance to perceive the elusive and fragmentary nature of the everyday, which traces an emotional cartography of the postmodern city. Moreover, in the context of globalization, this aimless strolling has the potential to reflect on the non-places of everyday life. Finally, from the perspective of psychogeography, the article proposes that wandering in Lalo's novel provides a critical view on the ideological dimension of everyday life, and particularly on its monotony and alienating effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The novel Simone (2013) by the Puerto Rican Eduardo Lalo constitutes a “lettered epic" in which the intellectual is seen as a figure of resistance against the neoliberal economy and consumist society. From the defense of the absolute values of writing and art, the intellectual is configured as a “heroic loser" that remains outside of society because he refuses any kind of negotiation with die dominant order. Its hierarchical view and isolation from the crowd allows us to include this novel in the modernist (Rodó, Dario) and Puerto Rican traditions (Pedreira and Marqués) in which anti-imperialism has not necessarily meant a democratic or anti-classist position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Julia de Burgos and Dolores "Lolita" Lebrón are two leading female figures in Puerto Rican history and culture. This paper looks at their biographies to shed light on what their lives, iconographies, and writings have meant for Puerto Rican literature, history and politics. My aim is to query these master narratives and to propose their feminine bodies and interpellations of these narratives as "semiotic politics." According to Julia Kristeva, semiotic politics, related to the maternal body and the chora, are key formations in the symbolic. I deconstruct the feminine death drive in order to read the forms of agency and negotiation present in Burgos' and Lebrón's political activism, internationalism, and their experiences with hospitals and prison, respectively. In the case of Julia de Burgos, this death drive led to a construction of a lyrical voice that asserts itself in specific flights of nothingness (la nada) (bodily, philosophical, insular). In the case of Lebrón, this death drive led her into a more mystical poetry, centered on what she called "visions" filled with religious symbolism. By analyzing 1940s and 1950s newsprint and literary sources, including Burgos's and Lebrón's own writings, I argue that their semiotic politics is connected to a literary and cultural project aligned with the queer circumstances of Puerto Rico's histories of colonialism and struggle for sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the structure of loss in U.S. Puerto Rican literature in the historical and mythical persona of the jíbaro/a, a symbol of national and cultural identity of Puerto Ricans. Topics discussed include the apostheosis of the bind that U.S. colonial racialization places on a diasporic Puerto Rican, trope of the nostalgic jíbaro/a and the effect of intertextuality on racialization.

The article discusses the history and development of children's literature in Puerto Rico. Noted is the rich indigenous people Taínos' legends of the children's literature in the country. It is observed that Puerto Rican writers of children's books often used a folkloric view in their literary work reflecting storyteller Pura Belpré. The need for the country to have more African-Puerto Rican texts is also emphasized.