Decolonial Puerto Rican Women's Writings: Subversion in the Flesh
This book examines writings by Puerto Rican women in the continental United States for representations of “sentient flesh,” which is flesh that holds within it consciousness of being, as part of a decolonial praxis of empowerment. Bridging studies in epigenetics, cognitive development, and corporeal feminism, this book explores how the very act of creating art can have subversive potential for women living within the belly of the beast. Written as five main chapters, each analyzes a different literary device for its specific attunement for either identifying, delineating, or subverting mappings by Anglo-U.S. colonial practices. Finally, this book seeks to argue on behalf of the literary arts as an arena in which social justice shifts can occur.
“Hurtado’s conceptualization of enfleshment and her focus on healing in the face of multi-generational colonial violence is a must-read for anyone interested in diasporic narratives.”
-Angela Ginorio, Boricua Feminist Social Scientist, Professor Emerita from the University of Washington, Department for Gender, Women and Sexual Studies
“By establishing a rich intellectual dialogue between medical and colonial discourses, Roberta Hurtado’s provocative literary study challenges us to consider how a ‘sentient flesh,’ a consciousness of being, experienced through the Puerto Rican women’s body, functions as a work of memory that heals and empowers female inhabitants of coloniality.”
-Judith Sierra-Rivera, author of Affective Intellectuals and the Space of Catastrophe in the Americas
“Hurtado has created an innovative approach to studying Puerto Rican women’s literary works.”
Elizabeth García, University of Florida, author of Healing Memories: Puerto Rican Women’s Literature in the United States
