David Vazquez (Assistant Professor)
Statement
I'm interested in the relationship(s) between autobiographies written by Latina/os during the last third of the twentieth century and various insurgent nationalist movements. Specifically, I compare works by Chicana/os, Puerto Ricans, and other Latina/o groups in order to understand how these authors contest mainstream notions of individual identity, communtiy formation, and ultimately, national belonging. By "matrixing" the individual with the history and culture of the community, I argue that these texts offer alternative formulations of self, community, and nation that contest liberal individualism by representing communal subjectivities.
Publications
"I Can't Be Me Without My People: Julia Alvarez and the Postmodern Personal Narrative," in Latino Studies 1:3; "An Epistemology of Ignorance: Hierarchy, Exclusion, and the Failure of Multiculturalism in the Modern Library Top 100" in Erasing Public Memory: Race, Aesthetics and Cultural Amnesia in the Americas, eds. Jana Evans-Braziel and Joseph Young. Mercer University Press, 2007.
