Saberes americanos: subalternidad y epistemología en los escritos de Sor Juana.
Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana—Serie Nuevo Siglo, 1999.
This is a book-length analysis of the constitution of an epistemological subjectivity in the works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. My critical reading of this author explores three specific dimensions in the constitution of a cognitive subject: her feminine condition, the colonial context in which knowledge was produced, and the emergence of a “Creole” perspective during the second half of the seventeenth century. This is also one of the first books devoted to the history of ideas in New Spain, by deconstructing the “criollista” and nationalist perspective currently dominating many of the studies of the Colonial period in Latin America. Finally, I analyze colonial writing as a discursive practice that legitimizes an intellectual field in the Americas, which is conceived as part of the metropolitan networks of education and knowledge, and not necessarily as a space from which to propose a nationalist agenda.
Available at: Exodus
Caribe Two Ways: cultura de la migración en el Caribe insular hispánico.
San Juan: Ediciones Callejón, 2003
This book focuses on the representation of displacement and the reconfiguration of a contemporary Caribbean identity in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and the Caribbean enclaves in New York City. My work is an attempt to assess what impact this displacement of the “national” has had on the reformulation of those subjectivities that are not “migrating subjects” themselves, but are also experiencing both massive emigration and immigration to and from their places of origin. Another objective of this project is to identify some of the most significant cultural manifestations—including literature, cinema, graffiti, music, and graphic arts—that incorporate migration into their definition of national and Caribbean identities, and to explore the limits of some of the theoretical categories produced within Regional, Migration and Cultural Studies in the United States.This book has three parts: the first one discusses the cultural impact of Cuban and Dominican immigration to Puerto Rico, the second part focuses on artistic representations of the massive migrations taking place in Cuba and the Dominican Republic since the 1960s, and the last section analyzes the cultural interaction of Cubans, Dominicans and Puerto Ricans in New York. Ediciones Callejón published my book in 2003, and in 2004 it was awarded Second Prize from the Instituto de Literatura Puertorriqueña for a “study of literary criticism published in the island."
Available from Amazon.com
From Lack to Excess: ‘Minor’ Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse.
Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2008.
This book analyzes the narrative and rhetorical structures of Latin American colonial texts by establishing a dialogue with contemporary studies on minority discourse, minor literatures, and colonial and postcolonial theory. Instead of focusing exclusively on a historical context to explain the thematic representation of unequal relationships of power in the colonial period, or reading these texts as an extension of the ambiguous identity characteristic of a colonial subjectivity—as in the foundational works of Memmi, Fanon and Nandy, for example—this book studies how this “colonial” condition is incorporated into the verbal strategies of the chronicles and written texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Latin America. I take as a point of departure the subtle yet pervasive semantic link established in contemporary studies on ethnic and sexual identity between “minority discourse” and the “colonial condition.” The first chapter reviews the current disciplinary debate between Colonial Latin American studies and Early Modern, Transatlantic and Postcolonial studies, paying attention to the epistemic and institutional junctures that explain the current reconfiguration of these fields of scholarship. As a productive alternative to this debate, in this book I use Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion of a “minor literature,” along with current studies on minority discourse to propose new close readings of canonical texts by Hernán Cortés (Chapter II), Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (Chapter III), the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (Chapter IV), Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Chapter V). The reading proposed in this book traces a discursive voyage that configures a linguistic matrix from the initial lack of language to the excessive or Baroque representation of the American reality. The book ends with an exploration of the limits of the transatlantic paradigm using in-depth analysis of texts by Sigüenza y Góngora and Sor Juana that question the metropolitan appropriations of their works, by creating an ambivalent locus of enunciation in which their narratives written in Spanish function as the founding discourse of a minor literature in Latin America.
Available at Bucknell University Press.
Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking Intra-colonial Migrations in a Pan-Caribbean Context.
New York: Palgrave, 2014.
Using Aníbal Quijano’s notion of the “coloniality of power” as a point of departure, this book proposes “coloniality of diasporas” to analyze how displacements within colonial circuits are a foundational motive in the Caribbean from the 17th century to the present. This book is divided in three parts: (1) a comparative analysis of piracy and filibustering in colonial archipelagos in the 17th and 19thth centuries (Alonso Ramírez, Pére Labat, Cirilo Villaverde and José Rizal), (2) a close-reading of the cultural inflections of intra-colonial migrations in the case of Puerto Rico and Martinique (Aimé Céisare, Luis Muñoz Marín, Frantz Fanon, Piri Thomas); and (3) a comparative analysis of the depiction of créolité and sexuality in Anglo, French and Hispanic Caribbean writers to explore further the colony-metropole network as a significant element to understand contemporary Antillean identities (Mayote Capécia, Pedro Juan Soto, Brathwaite, Créolité group, Ana Celia Zentella, Ana Lydia Vega, Michelle Cliff, Giselle Pineau and Maryse Condé).
Available at Palgrave Macmillan.
New York: Palgrave, 2014.
Using Aníbal Quijano’s notion of the “coloniality of power” as a point of departure, this book proposes “coloniality of diasporas” to analyze how displacements within colonial circuits are a foundational motive in the Caribbean from the 17th century to the present. This book is divided in three parts: (1) a comparative analysis of piracy and filibustering in colonial archipelagos in the 17th and 19thth centuries (Alonso Ramírez, Pére Labat, Cirilo Villaverde and José Rizal), (2) a close-reading of the cultural inflections of intra-colonial migrations in the case of Puerto Rico and Martinique (Aimé Céisare, Luis Muñoz Marín, Frantz Fanon, Piri Thomas); and (3) a comparative analysis of the depiction of créolité and sexuality in Anglo, French and Hispanic Caribbean writers to explore further the colony-metropole network as a significant element to understand contemporary Antillean identities (Mayote Capécia, Pedro Juan Soto, Brathwaite, Créolité group, Ana Celia Zentella, Ana Lydia Vega, Michelle Cliff, Giselle Pineau and Maryse Condé).
Available at Palgrave Macmillan.
Nictimene sacrílega: Estudios coloniales en homenaje a Georgina Sabat-Rivers
Mabel Moraña and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, eds.
Este libro en homenaje a la profesora Georgina Sabat-Rivers es una coedición entre la Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana, de México, y el Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana. Su objetivo es doble: por un lado, dar cuenta de la importancia de Georgina Sabat-Rivers en el estudio de la obra de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz y sobre la escritura de mujeres durante la Colonia y, por otro, recoger algunas de las direcciones más recientes en los estudios de los discursos coloniales. En su introducción, Yolanda Martínez–San Miguel advierte que “esta colección de ensayos recoge ese doble impulso de la crítica que reconstituye contextos y marcos históricos a la misma vez que redefine los modos en que se piensa el presente. Los estudios coloniales ocupan un doble lugar fundacional, como punto de arranque de una discursividad específicamente americana y como una experiencia que caracteriza de tantos modos el presente latinoamericano del mundo global y neoliberal. También encontramos en estos ensayos la vitalidad y pasión que ha caracterizado la obra crítica y pedagógica de Georgina Sabat-Rivers”.
Trans Studies: The Challenge to Hetero/Homo Normativities
Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Sarah Tobias, eds.
This volume includes a collection of some of the lectures hosted by the IRW during the 2012-2103 year, as well as invited interventions from other colleagues with significant contributions in this field. The title of the anthology is inspired in Trans Studies as a way of knowing that contests normative knowledge produced by established theoretical paradigms like Women and Gender Studies and Queer Theory. The subtitle also evokes crucial interrogations to the workings of masculinity and femininity within the hetero and homo paradigms, as binary oppositions that replicate the material foundation of biological sex that has traditionally being used to define human notions of gender. The essays included in this volume interrogate three important areas in which trans studies have made key contributions: productive intersections between feminist, queer and trans studies, trans activist mobilizations, and transformative trans-inclusive policy, pedagogical and disciplinary interventions.
Available at Rutgers University Press, 2016.
Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought: Historical and Institutional Trajectories
Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui and Marisa Belausteguigotia, eds.
This volume is a collection of critical essays on twelve keywords central in Latin American and Caribbean Studies: indigenismo, Americanism, colonialism, criollismo, race, transculturation, modernity, nation, gender, sexuality, testimonio, and popular culture. Each one of these keywords is conceived in conversation with a broader cluster of terms The central question motivating our work is how can we think—epistemologically and pedagogically—about Latin American Studies as a field that has taken different historical and institutional trajectories across the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States. Each keyword is presented in the anthology through a lead essay that reflects on a notion in conversation with other terms that are either derived, related, or posed as potential responses, subversions, or interrogations of the original keyword. The response essays supplement the lead essay by exploring the debate from a different disciplinary perspective or field (including discussions in Latin American, American, Caribbean, Ethnic and Latino, and Women and Gender Studies), or exploring an angle or aspect of the concept that was not necessarily discussed in the lead essay. The lead essay and response format encourages further debate around each specific term, highlighting North-South, South-South and South-North approaches to each critical term.
Available at Palgrave, 2016.
Términos críticos en el pensamiento caribeño y latinoamericano: Trayectoria histórica e institucional.
Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui and Marisa Belausteguigotia, eds.
“Este recorrido (y tour de force) de palabras clave promueve diálogos urgentes y controversias amistosas, al mismo tiempo que pone a Latinoamérica en el centro de los debates teóricos contemporáneos. Este libro nos reta a pensar más profunda y complejamente sobre nuestro buen y mal uso de la teoría. Este texto pronto se convertirá en una lectura esencial en nuestros salones de clases.”
- Debra A. Castillo, Emerson Hinchliff Professor of Hispanic Studies, Cornell University, USA
“Este volumen es un referente intelectual indispensable de términos críticos para autores en varias regiones latinoamericanas, permitiendo que se hagan visibles los vínculos políticos e intelectuales en que surgen estos conceptos claves.”
— Juana María Rodríguez, Professor in Ethnic Studies and Gender and Women's Studies, University of California, Berkeley, USA
“Esta antología innovadora traza los debates intelectuales más importantes en los estudios caribeños y latinoamericanos, desarrollados por académicos basados en los Estados Unidos, el Caribe y Latinoamérica, y ofrece una perspectiva inusual y rigurosa de la trayectoria de estas palabras clave. Estos ensayos nos recuerdan la urgencia de compartir términos críticos entre diversas tradiciones culturales.”
- Marta Lamas, Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios de Género (CIEG), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Ciudad de México, México.
Available in https://secure.touchnet.net/C21525_ustores/web/classic/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCTID=1014
Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui and Marisa Belausteguigotia, eds.
“Este recorrido (y tour de force) de palabras clave promueve diálogos urgentes y controversias amistosas, al mismo tiempo que pone a Latinoamérica en el centro de los debates teóricos contemporáneos. Este libro nos reta a pensar más profunda y complejamente sobre nuestro buen y mal uso de la teoría. Este texto pronto se convertirá en una lectura esencial en nuestros salones de clases.”
- Debra A. Castillo, Emerson Hinchliff Professor of Hispanic Studies, Cornell University, USA
“Este volumen es un referente intelectual indispensable de términos críticos para autores en varias regiones latinoamericanas, permitiendo que se hagan visibles los vínculos políticos e intelectuales en que surgen estos conceptos claves.”
— Juana María Rodríguez, Professor in Ethnic Studies and Gender and Women's Studies, University of California, Berkeley, USA
“Esta antología innovadora traza los debates intelectuales más importantes en los estudios caribeños y latinoamericanos, desarrollados por académicos basados en los Estados Unidos, el Caribe y Latinoamérica, y ofrece una perspectiva inusual y rigurosa de la trayectoria de estas palabras clave. Estos ensayos nos recuerdan la urgencia de compartir términos críticos entre diversas tradiciones culturales.”
- Marta Lamas, Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios de Género (CIEG), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Ciudad de México, México.
Available in https://secure.touchnet.net/C21525_ustores/web/classic/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCTID=1014
Queer Puerto Rican Sexualities, Second Issue
Revisiting Queer Puerto Rican Sexualities
Revisitando las sexualidades puertorriqueñas queer
CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies
Volume 30, Number 2 • 2018
Eds. Lawrence LaFountain-Stokes and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel
Table of Contents: https://centropr.hunter.cuny.edu/publications/journal-2018
Revisiting Queer Puerto Rican Sexualities
Revisitando las sexualidades puertorriqueñas queer
CENTRO: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies
Volume 30, Number 2 • 2018
Eds. Lawrence LaFountain-Stokes and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel
Table of Contents: https://centropr.hunter.cuny.edu/publications/journal-2018
Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking Towards New
Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary
Formations
Edited by Michelle Stephens and Yolanda Martínez-San
Miguel
Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking takes as point of departure the insights of
Antonio Benítez Rojo, Derek Walcott and Edouard Glissant on how to
conceptualize the Caribbean as a space in which networks of islands are
constitutive of a particular epistemology or way of thinking. This rich
volume takes questions that have explored the Caribbean and expands them to
a global, Anthropocenic framework.
This anthology explores the archipelagic as both a specific and a generalizable
geo-historical and cultural formation, occurring across various planetary spaces
including: the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas, the Caribbean basin, the Malay
archipelago, Oceania, and the creole islands of the Indian Ocean. As an
alternative geo-formal unit, archipelagoes can interrogate epistemologies, ways
of reading and thinking, and methodologies informed implicitly or explicitly by
more continental paradigms and perspectives. Keeping in mind the structuring
tension between land and water, and between island and mainland relations, the
archipelagic focuses on the types of relations that emerge, island to island,
when island groups are seen not so much as sites of exploration, identity,
sociopolitical formation, and economic and cultural circulation, but also, and
rather, as models.
The particular strength of this handbook is the diversity of fields and theoretical
approaches in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences that the
included essays engage with. There is an editor's introduction in which they
meditate about the specific contributions of the archipelagic framework in
interdisciplinary analyses of multi-focal and transnational socio-political and
cultural context, and in which they establish a dialogue between archipelagic
thinking and network theory, assemblages, systems theory, or the study of
islands, oceans and constellations.
Table of contents: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781786612762/Contemporary-
Archipelagic-Thinking-Towards-New-Comparative-Methodologies-and-Disciplinary-
Formations
Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary
Formations
Edited by Michelle Stephens and Yolanda Martínez-San
Miguel
Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking takes as point of departure the insights of
Antonio Benítez Rojo, Derek Walcott and Edouard Glissant on how to
conceptualize the Caribbean as a space in which networks of islands are
constitutive of a particular epistemology or way of thinking. This rich
volume takes questions that have explored the Caribbean and expands them to
a global, Anthropocenic framework.
This anthology explores the archipelagic as both a specific and a generalizable
geo-historical and cultural formation, occurring across various planetary spaces
including: the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas, the Caribbean basin, the Malay
archipelago, Oceania, and the creole islands of the Indian Ocean. As an
alternative geo-formal unit, archipelagoes can interrogate epistemologies, ways
of reading and thinking, and methodologies informed implicitly or explicitly by
more continental paradigms and perspectives. Keeping in mind the structuring
tension between land and water, and between island and mainland relations, the
archipelagic focuses on the types of relations that emerge, island to island,
when island groups are seen not so much as sites of exploration, identity,
sociopolitical formation, and economic and cultural circulation, but also, and
rather, as models.
The particular strength of this handbook is the diversity of fields and theoretical
approaches in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences that the
included essays engage with. There is an editor's introduction in which they
meditate about the specific contributions of the archipelagic framework in
interdisciplinary analyses of multi-focal and transnational socio-political and
cultural context, and in which they establish a dialogue between archipelagic
thinking and network theory, assemblages, systems theory, or the study of
islands, oceans and constellations.
Table of contents: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781786612762/Contemporary-
Archipelagic-Thinking-Towards-New-Comparative-Methodologies-and-Disciplinary-
Formations
The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin
America and the Caribbean (1492-1898)Edited by Yolanda
Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias
The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492-
1898) brings together an international team of scholars to explore new interdisciplinary and
comparative approaches for the study of colonialism.
Using four overarching themes, the volume examines a wide array of critical issues, key texts,
and figures that demonstrate the significance of Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean across
national and regional traditions and historical periods.
This invaluable resource will be of interest to students and scholars of Spanish and Latin
American studies examining colonial Caribbean and Latin America at the intersection of cultural
and historical studies; transatlantic, postcolonial and decolonial studies; and critical approaches
to archives and materiality. This timely volume assesses the impact and legacy of colonialism
and coloniality.
Table of contents: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Hispanic-Studies-Companion-to-
Colonial-Latin-America-and/Miguel-Arias/p/book/9781138092952
America and the Caribbean (1492-1898)Edited by Yolanda
Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias
The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492-
1898) brings together an international team of scholars to explore new interdisciplinary and
comparative approaches for the study of colonialism.
Using four overarching themes, the volume examines a wide array of critical issues, key texts,
and figures that demonstrate the significance of Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean across
national and regional traditions and historical periods.
This invaluable resource will be of interest to students and scholars of Spanish and Latin
American studies examining colonial Caribbean and Latin America at the intersection of cultural
and historical studies; transatlantic, postcolonial and decolonial studies; and critical approaches
to archives and materiality. This timely volume assesses the impact and legacy of colonialism
and coloniality.
Table of contents: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Hispanic-Studies-Companion-to-
Colonial-Latin-America-and/Miguel-Arias/p/book/9781138092952
