Title: Ends of assimilation : the formation of Chicano literature /
Authors: Cutler, John Alba,
Year: 2015
Subjects: American literature Mexican American authors History and criticism; Assimilation (Sociology) in literature.
Abstract: Ends of Assimilation examines how Chicano literature imagines the conditions and costs of cultural change, arguing that its thematic preoccupation with assimilation illuminates the function of literature. John Alba Cutler shows how mid-century sociologists advanced a model of assimilation that ignored the interlinking of race, gender, and sexuality and characterized American culture as homogenous, stable, and exceptional. He demonstrates how Chicano literary works from the postwar period to the present understand culture as dynamic and self-consciously promote literature as a medium for influencing the direction of cultural change. With original analyses of works by canonical and noncanonical writers - from Américo Paredes, Sandra Cisneros, and Jimmy Santiago Baca to Estela Portillo Trambley, Alfredo Véa, and Patricia Santana - Ends of Assimilation demands that we reevaluate assimilation, literature, and the very language we use to talk about culture. -- from back cover.
Contents: Representing race, producing culture: Chicano/a literature and the sociology of assimilation -- Becoming Mexican-American literature -- Quinto sol, Chicano/a literature, and the long march through institutions -- Cultural capital and the singularity of literature in Hunger of memory and The rain god -- Lyric subjects, cultures of poverty, and Sandra Cisneros's Wicked wicked ways -- Segmented assimilation and Jimmy Santiago Baca's prison counterpublics -- Disappeared men: Chicano/a authenticity and the American war in Viet Nam.