Labor, Love, and Murder in the Americas: Decolonizing the Human in Chicana/o Literature

My dissertation locates Paulo Freire's theory of conscientizaçāo within a genealogy of critical theory of the Americas. In contrast to the skepticism of poststructuralist theory, Freire offers an anti-skeptical view of language and provides a method for reading the decolonial hermeneutics contained in the works of the authors I study, each of which, in different ways, teaches us to read as listeners. In particular, I focus on the political significance of reading for what I term the decolonial literary imagination (Chapter 1), and the relation between the novel form and confession (Chapters 2 and 3). With this project, I hope to contribute to the emerging fields of Transnational American Studies and (Human Rights) Law and Literature by formulating a hermeneutical model that considers the ways in which queer of color and feminist conceptions of intersectionality have yet to be incorporated into the study of the novel form./nBy coupling María Lugones' theory of pilgrimage (or world-traveling) with Kimberlé Crenshaw's Critical Race Studies, I foreground intersectionality as a shared method for both legal and literary analysis. For Crenshaw and Lugones, the "civil identities" created or legitimated by either the nation-state or a traditional civil rights discourse are limiting insofar as they cannot account for the subject's multiple experiences of oppression. My formal reading of John Rechy's City of Night (1963) and Alicia Gaspar de Alba's Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders (2005) helps me to show that the novel can embody a similar critique. In this way, I build on what Marcial González names the "politics of form" insofar as my dissertation argues that it is the form of the novel, rather than exclusively the characters or the identity of the author, that teaches us a decolonizing history and ethics./nIn my first chapter, "The Decolonial Literary Imagination: Conscientizaçāo and a Marxist `politics of form,'" I lay out the theoretical framework for my dissertation by providing a comparative study of Emma Pérez's decolonial feminist praxis of "sitio y lengua" and Paulo Freire's dialogic conscientizaçāo. This attention to literary and social form, moreover, expands Pérez's decolonial imaginary for literary purposes and coincides with what I term the (w)holistic imperative of decolonial feminist thought. In the two long chapters that follow, I seek to establish the relation between American coloniality and the novel form. In Chapter 2, "`American' Child of Migrants: Confession and the Sexual Outlaw's Pilgrimage in John Rechy's City of Night," I argue that the decolonial literary imagination operates within Rechy's critical restructuring of the relationship between (non)waged-labor, liturgical temporality, and the logic of entrapment at work in legal, migrant, and sexual confession. In contrast to the polemics of a queer (literary) theory that fails to consider intersecting forms of oppression, I claim that the pilgrimage structure of Rechy's novel extends the problematic of narrating migration beyond the particular Mexican American history of the narrator's family to become the story of America itself. In chapter three, "Undoing the Value of Rape: A Hermeneutics for Redirecting the Necrophilic Gaze from Maquiladora Murders to Life in Juárez," my reading of representations of feminicide understands rape within a theory of sovereign power that remaps Juárez as a legible terrain of material and symbolic struggle. My comparative reading of Gaspar de Alba's Desert Blood and Gregory Nava's film, Bordertown (2007) historicizes the changing nature of transnational feminist organizing in general, and, more specifically, recasts this dynamic history by considering the emergence of the human rights protagonist within postcolonial studies and the Chicana/o detective novel. Furthermore, my reading of the extra-legal project of queer familia in Desert Blood envisions a decolonial feminist pedagogy for undoing the coloniality of gender operating in contemporary forms of Eurocentric conceptions of the human.

Advisor: Gonzalez, Marcial