Dangerous Constellations: The Catastrophic Modernity of Julia de Burgos

Ronald Menodoza-de Jesús • University of Southern California

March 26th, 2024 5-6:30PM • Center for the Humanities, Room 106

Lecture & Discussion • Food provided

In December 20, 1938, Julia de Burgos -a 24-year-old poet and activist in the Puerto Rican independence movement-  published her first poetry volume, Poema en 20 surcos (Poem in 20 Furrows), launching a short but intense poetic career that would culminate with her consecration as Puerto Rico's "national poet" after her tragic death in New York City in 1953. To this day, de Burgos's reception has largely unfolded according to the concept of tradition that Walter Benjamin calls "catastrophe": her "enshrinement as heritage" has reduced her image to the status of "spoils" that Puerto Ricans of many intellectual and ideological persuasions carry along in an ethno-nationalist "triumphal procession" in anticipation of the island's eventual attainment of sovereignty.

Mendoza-de Jesús's new book, Catastrophic Historicism: Reading Julia de Burgos Dangerously (Fordham 2023), interrupts this catastrophic tradition by drawing a Benjaminian "constellation" between our now and de Burgos's past. In the process, Mendoza-de Jesús argues for a major overhaul of ongoing critiques of historicism within the theoretical humanities. Rather than continuing to criticize historicism for its empiricist or realist reduction of historical significance to positive evidence, Mendoza de Jesús argues that historicism must be understood in its transcendental dimension, which grounds the conditions of possibility of historical objectivity in the power of historians to produce what he calls "cosmo-poietic" narratives- that is, plenary representations in which the past loses its spectral contingency and becomes a "world without gaps." After showing that critiques of historicism as a realism leave untouched the sovereignty of the historian, Mendoza-de Jesús builds on the work of Walter Benjamin and Jaques Derrida to make the case that a critique of historicism requires a different approach to the legibility of historical narratives.  Reading the text of history against their historicist grain requires an attunement to danger- a modality that interrupts historicism by infusing the past with a contingency that evades total appropriation.

Social, Cultural, and Crtical Theory Certificate

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