Masculinity and Self-Representation in Latino-Caribbean Narrative

Masculinity and Self-Representation in Latino-Caribbean Narrative: Macho Ethics examines the vicissitudes and ambiguities behind literary authorship and authority in the narrative prose of four major Caribbean authors: the Cuban Severo Sarduy, the Dominican American Junot Diaz, and the Puerto Ricans Luis Rafael Sanchez and Edgardo Rodriguez Julia. This book argues that by attempting to assert their authority and destabilize traditional hierarchies based on heteronormative masculinity, these writers and their avatars within the story face an ethical conflict that demands either a response-a responsibility-to these authoritarian genealogies, or an acknowledgment of their own complicity with power and violence. This destabilizing effort ultimately undermines the foundation of both masculine and literary authority, as the purging of the oppressive voices of tradition entails the use of violence (even if symbolically), and thus becomes open to an ethical interrogation. This ethical interrogation constitutes the core of an ethics of male self-representation, or "macho ethics." Understood as a critical engagement that questions heteronormativity and the oppression usually attributed to it, a "macho ethics" seeks to render the workings of masculinity discernible. The inherent instability of masculinity as a term and as a practice makes this task difficult. Masculinity is not a monolithic concept, but a historically discontinuous one-a fabrication as it were, of a given cultural circumstance. That said, masculinity, as other systems of oppression, "intersects" with other elements of identity formation, and as such we can examine its effects in a wide range of cultural artifacts. Thus, this project is not invested in analyzing the works of the aforementioned authors as representations of an all-encompassing Caribbean masculinity, or in historicizing constructions of dominant, subordinate, or, conceivably, colonial masculinities. This book focuses on identifying continuities within the texts to reveal the inner workings and struggles of masculinity, and to examine how these continuities operate within a Latino Caribbean cultural context.