Event Date
"The Spirit of Modernism/o: Rita Arteaga’s ‘Plátanos’ (1929) and the Antinomy of Literary Autonomy"
Tues, 4/8, 4pm
Voorhies 126
Abstract: Newspapers were the most important literary institutions for US Latino/a/x communities in the early twentieth century. But though the archive of newspaper literature is vast, scholarship on this period tends to focus on a few exceptional, recovered books. Attending to newspaper literature not only provides a more complete portrait of Latino/a/x literary history; it also foregrounds important questions about the nature of literary discourse. Rita Arteaga’s “Plátanos” (1929), a short story published in the Puerto Rican newspaper Gráfico, emblematizes the antinomy of literary autonomy—that is, the way the newspaper highlights simultaneously the singularity of literature and the impossibility of its autonomy. “Plátanos” plays with this antinomy through a metanarrative consciousness of the story itself as one among a variety of commodities circulating hemispherically at the cost of obscuring the labor of racialized bodies.