Maya Socolovsky, assistant professor of English, analyzes the works of a number of important Latina writers in the new work “Troubling Nationhood in U.S. Latina Literature: Explorations of Place and Belonging,” published by Rutgers University Press.
In this book, Socolovsky examines the ways in which recent U.S. Latina literature by authors such as Denise Chavez, Sandra Cisneros, Esmeralda Santiago, Ana Castillo, Himilce Novas and Judith Ortiz Cofer challenges popular definitions of nationhood and national identity.
The work explores a group of feminist texts that are representative of the U.S. Latina literary boom of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, when an emerging group of writers gained prominence in mainstream and academic circles. Socolovsky argues that select narratives by contemporary Mexican American, Puerto Rican and Cuban American authors are “remapping” the United States so that it is fully integrated within a larger, hemispheric Americas.
The book is “a wonderful extended meditation on the ways Latina writers have imagined and narrated alternative notions of 'community' in which the United States and Latin America are interdependent extensions of each other rather than strictly bounded and mutually exclusive," said reviewer Marta Caminero-Santangelo, author of “On Latinidad.”
A second reviewer, Rafael Pérez-Torres, author of “Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture,” wrote, “This timely and insightful book offers analyses of narratives both familiar and new depicting fruitfully disruptive Latina lives. Socolovsky's readings demonstrate that U.S. Latina literature is crucial to understanding how colonial legacies increasingly trouble the contemporary nation-state."