T U C S P S

Saberes americanos: subalternidad y epistemología en los escritos de Sor Juana [American Knowledges: Subalternity and Epistemology in Sor Juana’s Works] is the first book-length analysis of the constitution of an epistemological subjectivity in the works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.  My critical reading of this author explores three specific dimensions in the constitution of a cognitive subject: her feminine condition, the colonial context in which knowledge was produced, and the emergence of a “Creole” perspective during the second half of the seventeenth century.  This is also one of the first books devoted to the history of ideas in New Spain, by deconstructing the “criollista” and nationalist perspective currently dominating many of the studies of the Colonial period in Latin America. Finally, I analyze colonial writing as a discursive practice that legitimizes an intellectual field in the Americas, that is conceived as part of the metropolitan networks of education and knowledge, and not necessarily as a space from which to propose a nationalist agenda.

From Lack to Excess: ‘Minor’ Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse (Bucknell UP, 2008) will be released in the Fall 2008. Here I analyze the narrative and rhetorical structures of Latin American colonial texts by establishing a dialogue with contemporary studies on minority discourse, minor literatures, and colonial and postcolonial theory. Instead of focusing exclusively on a historical context to explain the thematic representation of unequal relationships of power in the colonial period, or reading these texts as an extension of the ambiguous identity characteristic of a colonial subjectivity—as in the foundational works of Memmi, Fanon and Nandy, for example—this book studies how this “colonial” condition is incorporated into the verbal strategies of the chronicles and written texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Latin America. I take as a point of departure the subtle yet pervasive semantic link established in contemporary studies on ethnic and sexual identity between “minority discourse” and the “colonial condition.” The first chapter reviews the current disciplinary debate between Colonial Latin American studies and Early Modern, Transatlantic and Postcolonial studies, paying attention to the epistemic and institutional junctures that explain the current reconfiguration of these fields of scholarship.  As a productive alternative to this debate, in this book I use Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion of a “minor literature,” along with current studies on minority discourse to propose new close readings of canonical texts by Hernán Cortés (Chapter II), Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (Chapter III), the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (Chapter IV), Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Chapter V).

Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking Intra-Colonial Migrations in a Pan-Caribbean Context—will allow me to propose a theory of Caribbean colonialisms by focusing on the continuity of colonial structures to the present.  Departing from Aníbal Quijano’s study of the legacies of colonialism as seen in contemporary social structures in Latin America, I propose the notion of the  “coloniality of diasporas” to analyze displacements taking place within colonial circuits as crucial to understand the specific inflection of coloniality in the Caribbean. Given that Puerto Rico, Martinique and Guadeloupe seem to be suspended between a colonial and post-colonial status, in the first section of the study I propose a comparative analysis of French and Hispanic Caribbean literary texts to trace the development of national and neocolonial discourses. The second part of the book presents a comparative reading of English-speaking and Puerto Rican authors, to trace another inflection of the coloniality of diasporas in the supposedly “postcolonial” Caribbean.