Translating Limits: Salas Rivera’s Material Poetics at the Interstice of Gender and Coloniality

In the wake of Hurricane María, anticolonial poetry and protest have flourished, anew, in Puerto Rico. Taking up Roque Salas Rivera’s poetics, this talk traces how his poetry operates at the hinge and limit of two colonial languages, requiring us to contend with questions of translation, non-translation and the ongoing problem of reference. Salas Rivera’s poetry employs figures which register entanglements and displacements of colonial grammars, transgender terms and the material remains of empire. By tracing such figures in his poetics, this talk will turn to the limits of transformation: colonial foundations and fascist warfare. By entangling such foundations with non-futures, Salas Rivera articulates a material poetics that asks us to consider the tense relation between the glimmering possibility of change and the provenance of violence.

This event has been co-organized with UBC's Department of Theatre and Film.

Christina A. León is Assistant Professor of Literature at Duke University. She specializes in Latinx and Caribbean literatures, in addition to critical engagements with literary, feminist, queer, anticolonial and critical theories of ethnicity and race. Her first book, Matters of Inscription: Reading Figures of Latinidad, is forthcoming from New York University Press. Other writing can be found in Women and Performance, ASAP/Journal, Diacritics, GLQ, Sargasso, Small Axe, Representations and Post-45 Reviewed.