Gender and Allegory in Transamerican Fiction and Performance [Paperback]

By rethinking contemporary debates regarding the politics of aesthetic forms, Gender and Allegory in Transamerican Fiction and Performance explores how allegory can be used to resolve the problem of identity in both political theory and literary studies. Examining fiction and performance from Zo? Vald?s and Cherr?e Moraga to Def Poetry Jam and Carmelita Tropicana, Sugg suggests that the representational oscillations of allegory can reflect and illuminate the fraught dynamics of identity discourses and categories in the Americas. Using a wide array of theoretical and aesthetic sources from the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean, this book argues for the crucial and potentially transformative role of feminist cultural production in transamerican public cultures.Cultural Politics in Trans-America: Identity, Narrativity,?and Allegory * 'The Ultimate Rebellion': The Political Fictions of Chicana?Sexuality and Community * Apocalyptic Modernities: Transamerican Allegory, Revolution, and Indigeneity in Almanac of the Dead * ?Allegory and Transcultural Narrative Ethics: Difference and Storytelling in Rosario Castellanos's Oficio de Tinieblas *? Encrypted Diasporas: Writing, Affect, and the Nation?in Zo? Vald?s's Caf? Nostalgia ?*?Performing Suspended Migrations: Novels and Spoken?Word by U.S. Latinas?* Gender and Narrative Pedagogies in the Americas

In Meditations on Quixote, Ortega y Gasset notes that the writer's choice of literary genre reflects 'at one and the same time a certain thing to be said and the only way to say it fully.' Sugg brilliantly affirms this insight by showing how writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Rosario Castellanos, Zo? Vald?s, Cherrie Moraga, and Julia ?lvarez, engage allegorical and performative strategies to say things that the novel can no longer say, to transcend identity politics and its positivist paradigms, to reposition the relations of consciousness and community. Furthermore, her transamerican perspective on theslÓ6