Chicano Poetics

Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities examines the crossing of literary and social forces – be they linguistic, political, poetic - that forms the context for being Chicano. It reveals how a poetry of the cross can influence identity, in readings ranging from the poetry of gender and race by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to that of the fragmentary, postmodern subject of Juan Felipe Herrara. How the text of Spanish and Indian miscegenation and the story of Aztlán propagate identity is demonstrated in texts from Bernal Diaz del Castillo to Gloria Anzaldúa. The international space and the interlingual language of the borderlands are read as factors of nationalism and postcoloniality in discussion ranging from cowboy lingo to the essential Mexicanism of Octavio Paz. Heterotextuality is the medium in which xicanismo is articulated and comes to be a hybrid subject of textual difference.

• Places Chicano studies within larger studies of postcolonialism, European literature, nationalism, contemporary literary theory, postmodernism • Explores how the literary shapes the social • Its consideration of hybrid texts is exemplified in the poetry by the author

Introduction; Canto Primero; Mestizaje/Difrasismo; Part I. Sex and Color: Respuesta a Frida; Heterotextual Reproduction; Tricks of Gender Xing; Part II. Nation and States: Net Laguna; An Other Tongue; Beasts and Jagged Strokes of Color; Part III. Space and Time: Small Sea of Europe; Blood Points; Late Epic, Post Postmodern.