{"product_id":"catastrophic-historicism-reading-julia-de-burgos-dangerously-9781531505646","title":"Catastrophic Historicism: Reading Julia de Burgos Dangerously","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eCatastrophic Historicism\u003c\/i\u003e 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 \u003ci\u003ereading\u003c\/i\u003e the text of history requires an attunement to \u003ci\u003edanger\u003c\/i\u003e--a modality that interrupts historicism by infusing the past with a contingency that evades total appropriation. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eAfter desedimenting the monumental tradition that has reduced de Burgos to a totemic figure, \u003ci\u003eCatastrophic Historicism \u003c\/i\u003ereads the poet's first collection, \u003ci\u003ePoema en 20 surcos\u003c\/i\u003e (1938). Mendoza-de Jes?s argues that the historicity of \u003ci\u003ePoema\u003c\/i\u003e 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, \u003ci\u003eCatastrophic Historicism\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Fordham University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50555037647122,"sku":"9781531505646","price":33.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_f0aeb8f7-407b-42c7-8fc0-f03d2220c252.jpg?v=1731726465","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/catastrophic-historicism-reading-julia-de-burgos-dangerously-9781531505646","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}