Shared Selves: Latinx Memoir and Ethical Alternatives to Humanism
Suzanne Bost
Abstract
Writing about marginalized lives has the power to shift norms. In telling their own stories, John Rechy, Aurora Levins Morales, Gloria Anzaldúa, and other Latinx writers make visible experiences and bodies that are rarely at the center of the stories we read, and they dramatize the complexity of human agencies and responsibilities. Yet the memoirs this book analyzes move beyond focus on the human as their subjects’ personal histories intertwine with communities, animals, spirits, and the surrounding environment. This interconnectedness resonates with critical developments in posthumanist theor ... More
Writing about marginalized lives has the power to shift norms. In telling their own stories, John Rechy, Aurora Levins Morales, Gloria Anzaldúa, and other Latinx writers make visible experiences and bodies that are rarely at the center of the stories we read, and they dramatize the complexity of human agencies and responsibilities. Yet the memoirs this book analyzes move beyond focus on the human as their subjects’ personal histories intertwine with communities, animals, spirits, and the surrounding environment. This interconnectedness resonates with critical developments in posthumanist theory as well as recalling indigenous worldviews that are “other-than-Humanist,” outside of Western intellectual genealogies. Bringing these two frameworks into dialogue with feminist theory, queer theory, disability studies, and ecocriticism enables an expansive way of viewing life itself. Rejecting the structures of Humanism, Shared Selves decenters the individualism of memoir and highlights the webs of relation that mediate experience, agency, and identity.
Keywords:
Latina literature,
Latino literature,
Latinx literature,
Posthumanism,
memoir,
feminist New Materialism,
queer theory,
ecocriticism,
disability studies
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2019 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780252042799 |
Published to Illinois Scholarship Online: May 2020 |
DOI:10.5622/illinois/9780252042799.001.0001 |