Disrupting Colonial Identity: Puerto Rican Subjectivities in Cultural Essays.

This article explores Puerto Rican cultural and political subjectivities in essays by Arcadio Díaz Quiñones, Rubén Ríos Ávila, and Frances Negrón-Muntaner as discursive spaces of disruption, exposing the island's lived experience as a process of negotiation with power and precariousness. My analysis...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Centro Journal Vol. 32; no. 1; pp. 33 - 64
Main Author: ESTEVES-WOLFF, CRISTINA
Format: Article
Published: Centro de Estudios Puertorriquenos (Center for Puerto Rican Studies) Spring2020
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Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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Summary:This article explores Puerto Rican cultural and political subjectivities in essays by Arcadio Díaz Quiñones, Rubén Ríos Ávila, and Frances Negrón-Muntaner as discursive spaces of disruption, exposing the island's lived experience as a process of negotiation with power and precariousness. My analysis considers methods of resistance condensed in particular allocutions -- la brega, "queerness," and jaibería -- used by a subject or community to negotiate its relationship to political, economic, cultural, and social paradigms dictated by a colonial status quo as a vehicle for surviving and prospering within a hostile system. I situate the tension between collective narratives propagated by dominant interests within Puerto Rican society and subsequent disruptive counter and alternative narratives as the locus of a convoluted identity that allows for shifting loyalties. Finally, these essays embody a vital dialogue between generations and sites of enunciation: the island and its diaspora.