Changing Women, Changing Nation: Female Agency, Nationhood, and Identity in Trans-Salvadoran Narratives (Suny Series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture)

ISBN: 1438442769

Author: Padilla, Yajaira M.

Condition: New

Analyzes the literary representations of women in Salvadoran and US-Salvadoran narratives since 1980. Changing Women, Changing Nation explores the literary representations of women in Salvadoran and US-Salvadoran narratives during the span of the last thirty years. This exploration covers Salvadoran texts produced during El Salvadors civil war (1980-1992) and the current postwar period, as well as US-Salvadoran works of the last two decades that engage the topic of migration and second-generation ethnic incorporation into the United States. Rather than think of these two sets of texts as constituting separate literatures, Yajaira M. Padilla conceives of them as part of the same corpus, what she calls trans-Salvadoran narratives-works that dialogue with each other and draw attention to El Salvadors burgeoning transnational reality. Through depictions of women in trans-Salvadoran narratives, Padilla elucidates a story of female agency and nationhood that extends beyond El Salvadors national borders and imaginings. Changing Women, Changing Nation is a project of intellectual significance. Evidencing great mastery of theory, while prioritizing the concrete analysis of specific texts, Padilla reframes our understanding of the impact of the Central American imaginary not only in its place of origin, but also within mainstream US culture. - Arturo Arias, author of Taking Their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America Yajaira M. Padilla is Associate Professor of Central American and US Latina/o Literatures and Cultures at the University of Kansas.