Kerstin Oloff
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781781382950
- eISBN:
- 9781781384022
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781382950.003.0004
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Latin American Studies
In this chapter, Kerstin Oloff posits the zombie as a figure that registers the logic of capitalism-as-world-ecology. She examines the work of two contemporary writers – Puerto Rican Ana Lydia Vega ...
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In this chapter, Kerstin Oloff posits the zombie as a figure that registers the logic of capitalism-as-world-ecology. She examines the work of two contemporary writers – Puerto Rican Ana Lydia Vega and Cuban-Puerto Rican Mayra Montero – who have engaged with the Gothic from a perspective that is both overtly feminist and consciously ecological. Vega’s ‘Miss Florence’s Trunk’ (1991) and Montero’s You, Darkness(1995) are texts that critically and consciously probe the fault-lines of capitalist modernity, addressing issues of ecology, race and gender within a world context. In both texts, the zombie is merged with, or considered alongside, another classic Gothic figure: the madwoman. Oloff argues that it is through their engagement with the European Gothic and early US zombie films that the texts confront their readers with the Gothic’s gendered and racialized ecological unconscious.Less
In this chapter, Kerstin Oloff posits the zombie as a figure that registers the logic of capitalism-as-world-ecology. She examines the work of two contemporary writers – Puerto Rican Ana Lydia Vega and Cuban-Puerto Rican Mayra Montero – who have engaged with the Gothic from a perspective that is both overtly feminist and consciously ecological. Vega’s ‘Miss Florence’s Trunk’ (1991) and Montero’s You, Darkness(1995) are texts that critically and consciously probe the fault-lines of capitalist modernity, addressing issues of ecology, race and gender within a world context. In both texts, the zombie is merged with, or considered alongside, another classic Gothic figure: the madwoman. Oloff argues that it is through their engagement with the European Gothic and early US zombie films that the texts confront their readers with the Gothic’s gendered and racialized ecological unconscious.
Lena Burgos-Lafuente
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781789620252
- eISBN:
- 9781789623857
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789620252.003.0011
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Latin American Studies
The chapter provides a genealogy of the 2016 CILE (Congreso Internacional de la Lengua Española), during which the Spanish officialdom celebrated Puerto Rico's linguistic ties to Spain as a ...
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The chapter provides a genealogy of the 2016 CILE (Congreso Internacional de la Lengua Española), during which the Spanish officialdom celebrated Puerto Rico's linguistic ties to Spain as a 21st-century mercantile ploy. I review the language debates that raged in Puerto Rico in the 1940s, examining Pedro Salinas' 1944 Commencement Speech at the University of Puerto Rico, which would become his famed "Defensa del lenguaje"; revisiting Gov. Luis Muñoz Marín's 1953 speech "La personalidad puertorriqueña en el Estado Libre Asociado"; and ending with a brief coda on Ana Lydia Vega's 1981 short story "Pollito Chicken," to reflect on the positions shared by both Spanish exiles to the Caribbean and local intellectuals regarding language as a self-evident vessel of identity. The main argument is that a rhetoric of defense, crystallized in the 1940s, was redeployed by successive and presumptively opposite segments of the intelligentsia.Less
The chapter provides a genealogy of the 2016 CILE (Congreso Internacional de la Lengua Española), during which the Spanish officialdom celebrated Puerto Rico's linguistic ties to Spain as a 21st-century mercantile ploy. I review the language debates that raged in Puerto Rico in the 1940s, examining Pedro Salinas' 1944 Commencement Speech at the University of Puerto Rico, which would become his famed "Defensa del lenguaje"; revisiting Gov. Luis Muñoz Marín's 1953 speech "La personalidad puertorriqueña en el Estado Libre Asociado"; and ending with a brief coda on Ana Lydia Vega's 1981 short story "Pollito Chicken," to reflect on the positions shared by both Spanish exiles to the Caribbean and local intellectuals regarding language as a self-evident vessel of identity. The main argument is that a rhetoric of defense, crystallized in the 1940s, was redeployed by successive and presumptively opposite segments of the intelligentsia.
