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151 pages

English

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This is the first collection of critical essays on the works of Dominican American author Julia Alvarez. A prolific writer of nearly two dozen books of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and children's literature, Alvarez has garnered numerous international accolades, including the impressive F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. She was one of only ten poets invited to write for President Obama's inauguration in 2009, and her In the Time of the Butterflies was selected as a National Endowment for the Arts "Big Read," putting her in the company of Mark Twain, Zora Neale Hurston, and Harper Lee. Yet, despite Alvarez's commercial success and flourishing critical reputation, much of the published scholarship has focused on her two best-known novels—In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.

Moving beyond Alvarez's more recognizable work, the contributors here approach her wider canon from different points of access and with diverging critical tools. This enriches current discussions on the construction of selves in life writing, and nonfiction more generally, and furthers our understanding of these selves as particular kinds of participants in the creation of nation and place. In addition, this book provides fresh insight for transnational feminist studies and makes a meaningful contribution to the broader study of the gendered diaspora, as it positions Alvarez scholarship in a global context.
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Inhabiting La Patria: Identity, Agency, and Antojo in the Work of Julia Alvarez
Rebecca L. Harrison and Emily Hipchen

1. Julia Alverez and the Autobiographical Antojo
Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle

2. ¡Yo! On the Margins: Dividing the Family and the Ethnic Writer as Traitor
Marion Rohrleitner

3. “Super-Size Me”: Ritual as Affluenza in Julia Alvarez’s Once upon a Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the USA
Sara Gerend

4. Rewriting Master Narratives: Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies
Katie Daily-Bruckner

5. Patriots and Citizens of the Planet: Friendship and Geopolitics in Julia Alvarez’s Young Adult Fiction
Susana S. Martínez

6. Isolation on Hybridity Road: Complexities of Identity Formation in Julia Alvarez’s Something to Declare
Karina A. Bautista

7. “Between the Scylla and the Charybdis”: Remapping Subjectivity in the Dialogic Waters of Julia Alvarez’s “The Other Side/El Otro Lado”
Andrea Witzke Slot

8. In the Name of Salomè: Julia Alvarez’s Feminist Discourse on La Patria
Tegan Zimmerman

9. The Hidden Archivist; Or, Julia Alvarez’s Historical Fiction beyond the Borders
Frans Weiser

List of Contributors
Index

Sujets

Caribbean

Latin America

Ethnic studies

Latin American

Informations

Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	08 novembre 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438449067
Langue	English

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Extrait

SUNY series in Multiethnic Literature

Mary Jo Bona, editor
INHABITING LA PATRIA
Identity, Agency, and Antojo in the Work of Julia Alvarez
Edited by
Rebecca L. Harrison
and
Emily Hipchen
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2013 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production by Diane Ganeles
Marketing by Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Inhabiting la patria : identity, agency, and antojo in the work of Julia Alvarez / edited by Rebecca L. Harrison and Emily Hipchen.
pages cm. — (SUNY series in Multiethnic Literature)
Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Provides insightful criticism from many perspectives and grants in-depth analyses of both well-known and lesser studied texts”—Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4905-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Alvarez, Julia—Criticism and interpretation. I. Harrison, Rebecca L., 1970– editor of compilation. II. Hipchen, Emily, 1964– editor of compilation.
PS3551.L845Z68 2013
818'.5409—dc23
2013002108
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my dear Grandparents, Betty and Richard Harrison, who ensured borders never got in my way.
—Rebecca
Acknowledgments
An edition of this kind never materializes without creating a number of personal and professional arrears. First, we owe a heartfelt debt of gratitude to our contributors. Your work makes this book. Thank you for your writing, your revisions, and for always meeting with good humor the tight deadlines we imposed. Second, we would like to thank the editors at the State University of New York Press—especially Beth Bouloukos, Mary Jo Bona, Rafael Chaiken, and Diane Ganeles—for their work on this volume. Beth believed in this project from its inception and gave us crucial support in moving it through the various channels; Rafael made important suggestions and caught all our errors, despite our best efforts not to have any. Had it not been for the assistance of our anonymous outside readers, this edition would not have cohered as it does now; simply put, their input made it a better book, and we are grateful. Thank you to our cover artist, and to Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill for allowing us to reprint images from In the Time of the Butterflies .
Others helped along the way, too many to list by name, though we remain grateful to all and certainly will list a few. Thanks to Devoney Looser, who suggested SUNY as a good fit for this project and who has been one of Emily's most important friends, professionally and personally, for more than a decade. Also, a big shout out to our assistants and graduate students, now known as Team Alvarez; without the support of you all—Josh Black, Shelley Decker, Kate Peterson, Krista Roberts, and Stephanie Urich—the vast amount of clerical work required to bring a project like this to fruition would have been much more onerous. Thank you.
The University of West Georgia, our home institution, contributed to this piece in a number of ways. The Department of English and Philosophy invested in our research by gladly granting us necessary resources to complete the manuscript and by obviously caring about our work. We're especially grateful to our colleagues for their expressions of professional and personal support. Our thanks, too, to the interdisciplinary committee of academics and staff, to administrators at the college and university levels, to Pearson Publishing (and especially our representative, Barbara Robinson), and to South Arts, a division of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Georgia Council for the Arts, for donating the money, time, and labor necessary to bring Julia Alvarez to our campus, a meeting out of which this project grew. And of course, our profound gratitude to Julia Alvarez herself, not simply for her rich and provocative writing, but also for providing gracious inspiration on her visit for this project.
Finally, our sincere thanks to our support networks at home:
I am deeply grateful to have had for the production of this text one of the best working partnerships I've ever experienced. Through all the messes of death and illness and shifting responsibilities at home and work, it's been the truest pleasure. Rebecca and I discovered in writing the proposal and introduction together that our voices knit virtually seamlessly; this is how we worked, too, as if we were two limbs on a single tree moving in the same wind. Let's do it again. Thank you to Becky and Joe Hogan, my mentors, who taught me to be an editor and a great deal else. My deepest gratitude goes to Chuck, forever jollying me out of some problem, making the sea smooth and the road straight: without you I would not have had the peace of mind and the intellectual space to have done this. Thank you.—Emily
There are few words to express—at least ones that don't evoke unicorns and rainbows—my appreciation and affection for my coeditor and dear friend who has impacted my life personally and professionally on so many levels. We sat in my office, I spoke of my admiration for Alvarez's writing, and you made her appear. It was magic. Thank you. Without Tom and Pearl McHaney, my mentors and extended family, I wouldn't be a teacher or scholar today; your influence impacts me daily, even years after being your student. And, most of all, an eternal thank you to my cherished three—Patrick, Samuel, and Ruby Erben; you are the people who bring joy into my life. No journey, professional or personal, would be possible or worthwhile without each of you; you make me better and my life immeasurably rich. In Liebe .—Rebecca
Introduction
Inhabiting La Patria
Identity, Agency, and Antojo in the Work of Julia Alvarez
Rebecca Harrison and Emily Hipchen
Emily in one hand, Walt in the other, That's how I learned my craft, struggling To navigate my own way between them And get to where I wanted to end up: Some place dead center in the human heart. I've had an odyssey with both along: Emily with her slant sense of directions; And rowdy Walt, so loud and in my face, I've had to stuff his mouth with leaves of grass At times to hear my own song of myself!
—Julia Alvarez, “Passing On”
It is just the right time to be talking of Julia Alvarez. Her work engages all our contemporary intellectual obsessions, intersects all our coffee shop talk, all our most volatile news. It gets us at every age, arrives in every possible written form. Our children listen to us read her beautifully illustrated books, fingering pictures of Tía Lola's bright dresses and bag, and ask us (if we are English speakers) to say again and again the unfamiliar words: adiós , buenos dias , tía , mami . If we are Spanish speakers, and all of Alvarez's works come in both languages, the children may ask about Vermont, the snow, why what's so familiar—Tía Lola's colorful personality, her language, her food—is so hard for Americans. Our teenagers can pick up Before We Were Free , Finding Miracles , and Return to Sender . They can read about people their age negotiating situations both like and perhaps unlike their own. That is, they can read about Anita, who falls in love with a boy and writes her secret attraction in her diary; meantime her world, under the dictator Raphael Leónidas Trujillo, falls apart. The regime endangers Anita's sister and members of her extended family, who must flee the country (as Anita herself does, eventually). Trujillo's rule suppresses speech, makes Mami careful, makes everyone paranoid and overwatchful. How does anyone survive that? Alvarez's books model endurance and a kind of good humor under trying circumstances common to any teen: the hidden boyfriend, the surveillance of parents, the difficulties of moving. But almost uniquely, they contextualize these trials in larger ones, in visions of the incomprehensible grinding of individuals caught in history. Trujillo and his goons threaten Anita's sister with rape and torture, and Anita herself survives attacks on the family compound by living in a closet; Milly, a transnational adoptee, discovers she will never know her birthparents because they were killed in a civil war that decimated her original home; the Cruz family, whose matriarch was kidnapped by a coyote and must be ransomed, is caught in an ICE raid and deported to Mexico.
But it is in Alvarez's writing for adults that the difficult questions about the intersection of the political and the personal, of history and the quotidian ticking of nonevents, are presented with all their complexities. In a book like Alvarez's award-winning In the Time of the Butterflies , historical fiction that reanimates Las Mariposas—the sisters who helped bring Trujillo to curb at the cost of their lives—we see characters struggle with how much and what kind of involvement they should have in injustices perpetrated outside their control. We ask ourselves what brings people to a government that so abuses them; what makes it possible to endure its oppressions and its tortures? We have to think about concepts such as strength : is active revolution, is speaking and doing as Minerva does, really strength if it brings her and her family such