Catastrophic Historicism: Reading Julia de Burgos Dangerously

By Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús

Catastrophic Historicism unsettles the historicist constitution of Julia de Burgos (1914-53), Puerto Rico's most iconic writer--a critical task that necessitates redefining the concept of historicism. Through readings of Aristotle, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Werner Hamacher, and Frank Ankersmit, Mendoza-de Jes s shows that historicism grounds historical objectivity in the historian's capacity to compose totalizing narratives that domesticate the contingency of the past. While critiques of historicism as a realism leave untouched the sovereignty of the historian, the book insists that reading the text of history requires an attunement to danger--a modality that interrupts historicism by infusing the past with a contingency that evades total appropriation.

After desedimenting the monumental tradition that has reduced de Burgos to a totemic figure, Catastrophic Historicism reads the poet's first collection, Poema en 20 surcos (1938). Mendoza-de Jes s argues that the historicity of Poema crystallizes in the lyrical speaker's self-institution as an embodied ipseity, which requires producing racialized/gendered allegorical figures--the bearers of an abject flesh--that lack any ontological resistance to modern alienation. Rather than treating de Burgos's poetics of selfhood as the ideal image of Puerto Rican sovereignty, Mendoza-de Jes s endangers this idealization by drawing attention to the abjection that sustains our attachments to ipseity as the form of a truly sovereign life. In this way, Catastrophic Historicism not only resets the terms of ongoing critiques of historicism in the humanities--it also intervenes in Puerto Rican historicity for the sake of its transformation.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1531505643
• ISBN13: 9781531505646
• Release Date: January 2024
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.12 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"