Dr. Joseph Miranda: "What's In a Joke: Repetition and the Punchline of Latinx Literature"

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The Organization of Graduate Students in Comparative Literature (OGSCL) invites you to a talk + Q&A, followed by an informal reception!

"What's In a Joke: Repetition and the Punchline of Latinx Literature"

Jennine Capo Crucet’s debut novel Make Your Home Among Strangers (2015) begins with a joke. The narrator, Lizet, falls into a canal in Los Angeles and begins to drown. Forgetting how to swim, she is pulled out of the canal by a co-worker who jokes about the series of Cuban refugees who were saved by the US Coast Guard from death. What this joke surfaces is an anxiety about the dispersal of post-revolutionary energy in exile and the looming end to the exceptionalism of Cuban citizenship under the Obama administration.

Mourning twice, this talk explores how the novel, both a bildungsroman (about a young first-generation college student from Hialeah attending an Ivy League school) and a roman a clef (about a fictionalized re-telling of the Elían Gonzalez dispute) stages a dialectical tension between the historically delicate contract Cubans have with the US and the fraught relationship such exceptionalism has within a larger field of Latino Studies (built on narratives of unbelonging and social struggle). Miranda argues that the novel's reliance on the joke registers a repetition compulsion for Latinx literature; whereby resistance to the formal conventions of the genre only affirms the punchline; a punchline that confronts how the field’s protocols are stuck to this genre of becoming that reaffirms Latinidad within the overdetermined racializing discourses of perpetual underdevelopment that only reassert the US matrix of control.

Miranda’s talk is drawn from his book project tentatively titled How to Mourn a Fiction: Latinidad and its Law of Underdevelopment where he argues that the racialization of US Latinos relies on the legacy of a literary form emplotted into the law––the suspended narrative of development. In particular, he reads post-45 Latino Literature to contend with the long durée of the Insular Cases––which are a set of Supreme Court Cases about the suspension of Puerto Rican sovereignty––as they transform over the 20th century into an ethnographic hermeneutic that views Latinos at large as suspended from normativity. Miranda demonstrates how the protocols of Latino Literature simultaneously mourn this legacy of deferred freedom and uphold its law of underdevelopment as its central narrative imperative. Thus, How to Mourn a Fiction contends that this contradictory relation between aesthetics and politics underpins a loss at the center of an ever-emergent Latino subject.