Abstract
This paper explores how death and mourning have been addressed in various Puerto Rican cultural artifacts, revealing their potential as a means of both understanding and contesting life’s precarious conditions under the archipelago’s colonial history. Works produced in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria (2017-present) —such as the poetry of Roque Raquel Salas Rivera— along with earlier pieces such as Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá’s wake chronicles from the early 1980s, uncover the subversive potential embedded in the practices of mourning. While these two moments in Puerto Rican cultural production explicitly foreground mourning, the years between them—marked by escalating social, economic, and political violence—appear underexplored in terms of how death and mourning are addressed. This period can be seen as a gradual accumulation of unresolved griefs, culminating in the devastation brought by Hurricane María. Drawing on Cristina Rivera Garza’s concept of necro-writings as a theoretical framework, this paper examines how less-studied cultural artifacts from this period—such as music, sounding practices, protest art, and personal testimonies—engage with these themes in more implicit ways. It asks what forms of resistances (and re-existences), and landscapes of suffering emerge from the itinerant voices expressing pain from the margins.
Presenters
Adriana Guzman GarciaStudent, Political Science and Comparative Literature, University of Puerto Rico- Rio Piedras Campus, Puerto Rico, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Puerto Rico, Necropolitics, Mourning, Death, Literature, Performance, Soundscapes
