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Shared Selves : Latinx Memoir and Ethical Alternatives to Humanism
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Description
Memoir typically places selfhood at the center. Interestingly, the genre's recent surge in popularity coincides with breakthroughs in scholarship focused on selfhood in a new way: as an always renewing, always emerging entity. Suzanne Bost draws on feminist and posthumanist ideas to explore how three contemporary memoirists decenter the self. Latinx writers John Rechy, Aurora Levins Morales, and Gloria E. Anzaldúa work in places where personal history intertwines with communities, environments, animals, plants, and spirits. This dedication to interconnectedness resonates with ideas in posthumanist theory while calling on indigenous worldviews. As Bost argues, our view of life itself expands if we look at how such frameworks interact with queer theory, disability studies, ecological thinking, and other fields. These webs of relation in turn mediate experience, agency, and life itself. A transformative application of posthumanist ideas to Latinx, feminist, and literary studies, Shared Selves shows how memoir can encourage readers to think more broadly and deeply about what counts as human life.
ISBN
978-0-252-08462-1
Publication Date
10-7-2019
Publisher
University of Illinois Press
City
Champaign, Illinois, USA
Keywords
Hispanic Americans, Mexican American Literature, Autobiography, Latin American Literature, Women authors
Disciplines
English Language and Literature | Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority | Other English Language and Literature
Recommended Citation
Bost, Suzanne, "Shared Selves : Latinx Memoir and Ethical Alternatives to Humanism" (2019). Faculty Books. 231.
https://ecommons.luc.edu/facultybooks/231
