Donna Lethal's debut is an authentic, can't-put-it-down page-turner, an astonishing first-time work about growing up in Lowell, Massachusetts (Jack Kerouac's home town) in the 1970s. With a stern ex-nun for a mother, a rascally bookie for a dad and a brother behind bars as often as not, Donna's purgatory years in Lowell make for unforgettable reading. Her book is peopled with a rogues' gallery of memorable local personalities, most hovering on the edge of small time crime, alcoholism, drug abuse and general oblivion. Funny and melancholic, sweet and brutal, it is everything a family memoir should be, a vivid flashback of haunting and hilarious memories arriving unbidden in the consciousness. Unlike some compulsive reads that evaporate after you've finished them, MILK OF AMNESIA's images will stay with you, making you laugh or tear up at unexpected moments.
Contemporary Latina/o Performing Arts of Moraga, Tropicana, Fusco, and Bustamante demonstrates the crucial significance of looking at theatrical performance for rethinking critical inquiry. Leah Garland closely analyzes the theoretical tools with which prominent theater artists - Cherríe Moraga, Carmelita Tropicana, Coco Fusco, and Não Bustamante - challenge neocolonial parameters for self-examination. Garland shows how the self-affirmative maneuvers that these artists deploy reconceptualize the subject in literary theory.
fire / and water surging on the screen - / since children, metros, planets, beds, and lovers are / so lightly swept away - I must not even breathe. Danielle Janess's debut poetry collection resists the erasing effects of war, nationalism, and forced migration. Following the speaker's arduous relocation to a twenty-first-century Europe still etched with the wounds of the past, the poems take on daring forms and language, becoming theatre, film clips, photographs, and dance, all embodied by a cast of characters marked by the violence of the last century. Arrested in Warsaw within the first twenty days of the Second World War, Janess's maternal grandfather was sent to a Soviet gulag where he survived for three years before joining the Free Polish Army in Russia and later the battle of Monte Cassino in the Italian Campaign. Many of the poems in The Milk of Amnesia grow from the soil of Warsaw and Berlin, where the poet-speaker catapults herself and her young child in an effort to locate and unearth their family inheritance. Drawing from the tradition of poetry of witness, The Milk of Amnesia performs a visionary resistance, lit with signposts in a charged atmosphere. An address to our ongoing struggles with historical memory, these poems act as both artifact of and antidote to our time.
Latina theater and solo performance emerged in the 1990s as vibrant, energetic new genres found on stages from New York to Los Angeles. Many women now work in all aspects of Latina theater—often as playwrights or solo performers—with practitioners ranging from teenagers to grandmothers. Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez and Nancy Saporta Sternbach have previously published a groundbreaking anthology of Latina theater, Puro Teatro. They now offer a critical analysis of theatrical works, presenting a theoretical perspective from which to examine, understand, and contextualize Latina theater as a genre in its own right. This is the first in-depth study of the entire corpus of Latina theater, based on close readings of works both published and in manuscript. It considers a large body of productions and performances, including works by such internationally known authors as Dolores Prida, Cherríe Moraga, and Janis Astor del Valle. Applying feminist and postcolonial theory as well as theories of transculturation, Sandoval-Sánchez and Sternbach show how, despite cultural differences among Latinas, their works share a common poetics by building upon the politics of representation, identity, and location. In addition to covering theater, this study also shows that solo performance has its own history, properties, structure, and poetics. It examines performances of Carmelita Tropicana, Monica Palacios, and Marga Gomez—artists whose hybrid identities as Latina lesbians constitute living examples of transculturation in the making—to show how solo performance has roots in and digresses from more traditional modes of theater. With their Latina heritage as a unifying link, these women reflect common traits, patterns, dramatic structures, and properties that overcome regional differences. Stages of Life reads these eclectic cultural productions as a unified body of work that contributes to the formation of Latina identity in America today.
Latina Performance considers the emergence of a Latina aesthetics developed in the United States, but simultaneously linked with Latin America. As dramatists, performance artists, protagonists, and/or cultural critics, the women Arrizon examines in this book draw attention to their own divided position. They are neither Latin American nor Anglo, neither third- nor first-world; they are feminists, but not quite "American style." This in-between-ness is precisely what has created Latina performance and performance studies, and has made "Latina" an allegory for dual national and artistic identities. Book jacket.
Explore a little-known side of the lesbian artistic world! With this book, you’ll explore the work of the most significant contemporary Latina lesbian writers, artists, and performers in the United States, Latin America, and Spain. This book presents and analyzes literature, art, and poetry by women who, despite markedly different backgrounds and experiences, are all strongly influenced by the concept of lesbian identity. Latina Lesbian Writers and Artists begins with an essential A-to-Z overview of modern Latina lesbian authors and performers. From Cuban writer Magaly Alabau to literary critic Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, you’ll learn who these women are, where they’re from, and what they’ve chosen as the focus of their work. The rest of the book is structured to give you a look at the work Latina lesbians in the United States and then moves geographically outward, first to Latin America, then to Spain. “Tortilleras on the Prairie: Latina Lesbians Writing the Midwest” provides a unique look at a much-neglected component of Latina lesbian writing—that of the Latinas living far from the East and West Coast hubs of both Latino and queer cultures, exploring Latina lesbian literary production in places like Kansas and Nebraska. “The Role of Carmelita Tropicana in the Performance Art of Alina Troyano,” appraises the imaginative, hilarious, and insightful work of Cuban-American performance artist Alina Troyano (better known by her stage name, Carmelita Tropicana), examining the strategies she used (code switching, the breaking of heterosexist norms, the development of alter-egos, and more) to create a hybrid identity as an artist and performer. “Moving La Frontera Toward a Genuine Radical Democracy in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Work” shows us how Anzaldúa’s pivotal work Borderlands has revolutionized academic perceptions of the border and of identity in Latin American/U.S. Latino literature. You’ll also find passionate poetry created by Latina lesbians. “Como Sabes, Depresión” is a fragment of a passionate bilingual poem written by an English-speaking poet enamored of the Spanish language, and “To Sor Juana” is a poem dedicated to the seventeenth century poet and nun who has become an icon among Latina lesbians. “Lesbianism and Caricature in Griselda Gambaro’s Lo impenetrable” shows how lesbian characters and themes in the works of this Argentine novelist are used to satirize and undermine the perverse social values of patriarchal dictatorship. “The (In)visible Lesbian: The Contradictory Representations of Female Homoeroticism in Contemporary Spain” introduces us to some of Spain’s lesbian authors and communicates the difficulties lesbian writers in that country and around the world have had in finding a receptive audience.
Alina Troyano's one-woman shows, plays, and essays have astonished audiences and readers with their creativity, humor, and crackling political energy. I, Carmelita Tropicana offers the first comprehensive collection of her work, from "Memorias de la Revolución" (with Uzi Parnes) to "Your Kunst is Your Waffen" (with Ela Troyano).
