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While it is rare for a poet to become a cultural icon, Julia de Burgos has evoked feelings of bonding and identification in Puerto Ricans and Latinos in the United States for over half a century. This book, the first book-length study written in English, examines poet and political activist Julia de Burgos's development as a writer, her experience of migration, and her legacy in New York City. The book situates de Burgos as part of a transitional generation that helps to bridge the historical divide between Puerto Rican nationalist writers of the 1930s and the Nuyorican writers of the 1970s. Focusing on the poet's contributions to New York Latino/a literary and visual culture, the book moves beyond the tragedy-centered narratives of de Burgos's life to examine her place within a nuanced historical understanding of Puerto Rico's peoples and culture. The book unravels the cultural and political dynamics at work when contemporary Latina/o writers and artists in New York revise, reinvent, and riff off of Julia de Burgos as they imagine new possibilities for themselves and their communities.

This book examines how African American women writers affiliated themselves with the post-World War II Black Communist Left and developed a distinct strand of feminism. This vital yet largely overlooked feminist tradition built upon and critically retheorized the postwar Left's “nationalist internationalism,” which connected the liberation of Blacks in the United States to the liberation of Third World nations and the worldwide proletariat. Exploring a diverse range of plays, novels, essays, poetry, and reportage, the book shows how Claudia Jones, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Rosa Guy, Audre Lorde, and Maya Angelou worked within and against established literary forms to demonstrate that nationalist internationalism was linked to struggles against heterosexism and patriarchy. In examining writing by Black Left women from 1945 to 1995, this book contributes to recent efforts to rehistoricize the Old Left, Civil Rights, Black Power, and second-wave Black women's movements.

Postcolonial and diaspora studies scholars and critics have paid increasing attention to the use of metaphors of food, eating, digestion, and various affiliated actions such as loss of appetite, indigestion, and regurgitation. As such stylistic devices proliferated in the works of non-Western women writers, scholars connected metaphors of eating and consumption to colonial and imperial domination. This book concentrates on the gendered and sexualized dimensions of these visceral metaphors of consumption in works by women writers from Haiti, Jamaica, Mauritius, and elsewhere. Employing theoretical analysis and insightful readings of English- and French-language texts, the book explores the prominence of alimentary-related tropes and their relationship to sexual consumption, writing, global geopolitics and economic dynamics, and migration. As the book shows, the use of cannibalism in particular as a central motif opens up privileged modes for mediating historical and sociopolitical issues. Ambitiously comparative, the book ranges across the works of well-known and lesser-known writers to tie together two geographic and cultural spaces that have much in common but are seldom studied in parallel.

In-depth and refreshingly readable, this book is a bold analysis of postfeminist gothic, a literary genre that continues to jar readers, reject happy endings, and find powerful new ways to talk about violence against women. The book explores the genre's challenge to postfeminist assumptions of women's equality and empowerment. The authors it examines—Patricia Cornwell, Jodi Picoult, Susanna Moore, Sapphire, and Alice Sebold—construct narratives around socially invisible and physically broken protagonists who directly experience consequences of women's ongoing disempowerment. Their works ask readers to inhabit women's suffering and to face the uncomfortable, all-too-denied fact that today's women must navigate lives fraught with risk. The book's analysis places the authors within a female gothic tradition that has long given voice to women's fears of their own powerlessness. But it also reveals the paradox that allows the genre to powerfully critique postfeminism's often sunshiney outlook while uneasily coexisting within the same universe.