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Lucía M. Suárez |
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Areas
Caribbean and Latin American Cultural Studies and Literature (Spanish, Portuguese, and French), Caribbean Diaspora Literature and Theory, Latino/a Studies, Dictatorship and Human Rights Interests and Current Work Currently I am working on a new book project, Citizenship and Dance in Brazil, which explores how African tradition, European migrations and Brazil's status as an international destination have defined citizenship and socio-national exclusion in Brazil. This book project will trace the connections between dance movement arts and socio-cultural citizenship. I examine the relationships between dance and the city, the city and the body, and bodies in motion as cultural metaphors for new delineations of identity, representation, and possible access to, or exclusion of, new configurations of socio-cultural, national, and political citizenship in a global world. I am also continuing with my long-standing research on memory, analyzing its meaning and uses in order to revisit utopian dreams and exhibit existential crises in Cuban and Cuban Diaspora literatures and films. In my forthcoming book, The Tears of Hispaniola: Haitian and Dominican Caribbean Diaspora Memory (University Press of Florida, The New World Diaspora Series, March 2006), I argue that the experience and memory of the Caribbean diaspora foregrounds psychological pain, which follows personal, communal, and national experiences of violence in the countries of origin, and in the host nation (the United States). In my analysis of the intersections between memory and human rights issues in some of the most important works within this powerful, growing body of literature, I suggest that diaspora authors have opened a new window on the intergenerational effects of human rights and other abuses in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. I take the unusual and highly significant approach of merging literary, psychological, and social perspectives to go beyond the recognition of traumatic culture, and to study the ways in which autobiography and fiction create a path toward healing, understanding, and socio-political action by exposing violence, trauma, and pain. Yet, rather than focus on debilitating trauma, I point to the work of Haitian and Dominican Caribbean diaspora authors in the United States to highlight how they transform unspeakable experiences into strengthening memoirs of survival and poignant literature of resistance. Recent and Selected Publications The Tears of Hispaniola: Haitian and Dominican Caribbean Diaspora Memory. University Press of Florida, The New World Diaspora Series, March 2006. "Breath, Eyes, Memory: Rape, Memory, and Denunciation" (Journal of Haitian Studies, volume 9, number 2). "Julia Alvarez: The Anxiety of Latina Representation" (Meridians, 5.1, Fall 2004) |