Insular interventions: Diasporic Puerto Rican literature bilanguaging toward a greater Puerto Rico

This dissertation critiques how traditional intelligentsia excludes diasporic Puerto Rican literature from the realm of national discourse in Puerto Rico, based on rejecting English influence related to U.S. colonization. Attentive to the legacy of U.S. colonialism and English imposition in Puerto Rico, as well as to a migration history that has resulted in nearly half of all Puerto Ricans living outside the country, this study challenges elite, hispanophile, cultural nationalist claims to a purist Spanish literary canon by examining a long tradition of insular vernacular literary practices, and argues for a continuum model of insular and diasporic literary language practices that allows for consideration of diasporic interventions in insular national discourses. Establishing links between nationalism, language and literary canons, the study examines cultural nationalism with attention to the way the insular canon has historically managed racial and linguistic tensions, focusing on uses of literary vernacular and the archetypal figure of the jibaro . Authors include Manuel Alonso, Antonio Pedreira, Luis Pales Matos, Tomas Blanco, Jose Luis Gonzalez, Luis Rafael Sanchez. The study then shows how diasporic literature, possessing a bilanguaging potential to critique both U.S. and Puerto Rican monolingual and monocultural nationalism, as theorized by Walter Mignolo, directly engages and critiques insular cultural nationalism. Works by Jesus Colon, Martin Espada and Tato Laviera illustrate diasporic interventions into insular racial discourses in particular. This study also complicates the term Nuyorican as an anachronistic label for diasporic literature, by historicizing 1980s and '90s sociological and migrational developments, as illustrated by authors that go beyond Nuyoricanism, such as Esmeralda Santiago, Rodney Morales, Gloria Vando, Diana Rivera, Alma Ambert. In-depth readings and critiques of Santiago's oeuvre complicate her controversial U.S. critical context and demonstrate her deep engagement with insular concerns, including discursive entanglement jibarismo that buttresses current historicizing of the Munoz era. The study closes with readings of Ana Lydia Vega and Giannina Braschi as two distinct examples of contemporary authors who divorce cultural nationalist discourses with literary language that breaks the bounds of canonical traditions into the translingual terrain of neologistic invention, as theorized by Lydia Liu.