Postmemories of Migration: Cuban Exile and Poetics of Latinidad in Jennine Capó-Cruet’s Make Your Home Among Strangers

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-55
Author(s):  
Aarón Aguilar-Ramírez
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
First Century ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Cuban American ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Ethnic Memory ◽  
The U.S

Abstract Taking Juan Flores’s premise of historical memory and lived experience to foundational to U.S. latinidad as a starting point, this article asks how twenty-first century second-generation Latina writing intervenes in contemporary understandings of U.S. latinidad as a pan-ethnic cultural field. It analyzes the narrative techniques, structures, and conventions through which contemporary Latinx writing engages ethnic memory and lived experience, considering how, and whether, those narrative conventions coalesce into a “poetics of latinidad.” Specifically, this article analyzes Jennine Capó Crucet’s Make Your Home Among Strangers (2015), a novel comprising two interlaced storylines that animate the categories “lived experience” and “historical memory.” The novel intertwines its protagonist, Lizet’s, lived experience as a second-generation Cuban-American and the fictionalized re-rendering of the Elián Gonzalez case, a historical event that has proved an inflection point for Cuban-American exile identity in the U.S., destabilizing Cubans’ status as an “exceptional” community in the U.S. Latinx migrant imaginary. Thus, this article argues that Capó-Crucet’s novel fashions a poetics of latinidad in key ways. Engaging Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory,” it analyzes how the interwoven stories of Lizet and Ariel Hernández (the fictionalized Elián González) repurpose the role of historical memory toward the narrative intelligibility of the second generation’s lived experience in the U.S. while recuperating and memorializing the first-generation’s experience of exile. It then situates this novel within a burgeoning corpus of twenty-first century Latina college narratives, including Patricia Cardoso’s Real Women Have Curves (2002), Meliza Bañalez’s Life is Wonderful, People are Terrific (2015), and Gabby Rivera’s Juliet Takes a Breath (2016). These texts rely on postmemory to address the experiences of second-generation Latina college students; Capó-Crucet’s novel articulates a poetics of latinidad in this intertextual framework.

Military Operations and the Defense Department

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. P. Clark
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Gray Zone ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
Electronic Warfare ◽  
Defense Department ◽  
Force Structure ◽  
Joint Operations ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Strategic Context ◽  
The U.S

This article examines the U.S. military’s plans for carrying out combined joint operations across multiple theaters and domains in the twenty-first century. It summarizes the most likely strategic and operational approaches available to future adversaries, such as anti-access/area denial (A2/AD), gray zone warfare, and other asymmetric methods. The article also considers the respective challenges posed by the two likely catalysts for military operations: contested norms and persistent disorder. The U.S. military response to this strategic context is still forming, but there are common themes among the services: the recognition that future operations will entail greater risk; the need to disperse forces to survive on a more lethal battlefield; a desire to create networked forces attacking with a combination of physical and nonphysical (cyber and electronic warfare); and a rebalancing of force structure in terms of both weapon sophistication and mission type.

The Persecuted Body

Facing Fear ◽  
2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melani Mcalister
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
First Century ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Evangelical Christians ◽  
The World ◽  
Politics Of Fear ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
International Religious Freedom Act ◽  
The U.S

This chapter examines the politics of fear underlying the antipersecution discourse that revolved around evangelical Christians at the turn of the twenty-first century. A video made by the U.S.-based Christian evangelical group Voice of the Martyrs showed that Christians are being persecuted all around the world. By the turn of the twenty-first century, a passionate concern with the persecution of Christians united conservatives as well as liberal and moderate evangelicals. The chapter shows how antipersecution discourse resulted in the passage of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. It also considers the significance of spectacles of the violated body to the discourse of persecution and how intense attention to Christian persecution created a tension for evangelicals between the universalizing language of human rights and a specific commitment to the “persecuted body” of Christ. Finally, it explores how evangelicals' attention to Christian persecution intersects with Islamic concerns.

scholarly journals Distraction Machines? Augmentation, Automation and Attention in a Computational Age

2019 ◽  
Vol 98 (98) ◽  
pp. 85-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Beatrice Fazi
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Cultural Theory ◽  
First Century ◽  
Attention Deficits ◽  
Cognitive Agents ◽  
Cognitive Capacities ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Human Capacity ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Computing Machines

It is often argued (and feared) that the human capacity to pay attention is being transformed by computational technologies. Are computing machines distraction machines? This article takes this question as its starting point in order to address concerns about attention deficits visà-vis questions and issues about the mechanisation of cognitive procedures. I will claim that, when approaching the attention ecology of the twenty-first century, it is necessary to differentiate between augmentation and automation. While augmentation implies the extension of predefined forms or modes of behaviour, contemporary developments in computational automation ask us instead to consider the possibility of moving beyond phenomenological analogies. The article will thus discuss how transformations in the capacity to pay attention in a computational age need to be analysed in relation to the emergence of quasi-autonomous artificial cognitive agents driven by AI technologies, such as those known as machine learning. I will argue that these artificial cognitive agents can no longer be described in terms of technological add-ons to pre-existing human cognitive capacities. Today, we think alongside machines that are, is a sense, already thinking. Similarly, we pay attention alongside machines that are, in a sense, already paying attention. The challenge for philosophy and cultural theory is that of moving beyond 'projectionist' conceptions of such technological agency. This challenge, however, also involves overcoming the anthropomorphism that is implicit in expression such as 'thinking machines'. In a century where robot-to-robot communications have outpaced and outnumbered human-machine interactions, these artificial cognitive agents are not just reframing the human capacity to pay attention: they are also re-structuring the conditions for such capacity. Addressing the conditions for attention beyond augmentation and vis-à-vis computational automation involves considering the role and scope of both human and algorithmic decisionmaking, and engaging with the ways in which the humanities can intervene upon contemporary complex cognitive scenarios.

scholarly journals James Baldwin: Interventions

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 197-218
Author(s):  
Robert Jackson ◽  
Sharon P. Holland ◽  
Shawn Salvant
Keyword(s):  
James Baldwin ◽  
First Century ◽  
Modern Language Association ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
New Thinking ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Space Property ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Association Convention

“Interventions” was the organizing term for the presentations of three Baldwin scholars at the Modern Language Association Convention in Chicago in January of 2019. Baldwin’s travels and activities in spaces not traditionally associated with him, including the U.S. South and West, represent interventions of a quite literal type, while his aesthetic and critical encounters with these and other cultures, including twenty-first-century contexts of racial, and racist, affect—as in the case of Raoul Peck’s 2016 film I Am Not Your Negro—provide opportunities to reconsider his work as it contributes to new thinking about race, space, property, citizenship, and aesthetics.

The Violent Weight of Whiteness

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Yancy
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Black Male ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
First Century ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
A Site ◽  
White Hegemony

What is the lived experience of the black male body within the context of white America in the twenty-first century? How can we describe the deep existential and psychic dimensions of black male bodies as they negotiate their lives within the context of white hegemony? How do their bodies continue to be truncated according to a distorted and racist imago in the white imaginary? The black male body, within the context of this white imaginary, constitutes a site of “contamination.” As such, then, within the white body politic, black male bodies are thereby always already targets of the state, deemed “criminals,” “monsters,” and “thugs.” Textual testimony, coupled with social, political, and existential phenomenological analyses, demonstrates the sheer gravity of being black and male in a mythical postrace America.

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