The smell of an impossible dream: Dallas, migration, and creative failure in Angie Cruz's Let It Rain Coffee  

Oleh:

Valovirta, Elina ; Kokkola, Lydia ; Korkka, Janne

Jenis: Article from Article
Dalam koleksi: The Journal of Commonwealth Literature vol. 49 no. 2 (Jun. 2014), page 229-242.
Topik: American Dream; Angie Cruz; consumerism; Dallas; failure; Let It Rain Coffee; mass culture; migration; success
Fulltext: The smell of an impossible dream.pdf (333.62KB)

Isi artikel

A Latin Caribbean (forced) migration experience is at the centre of Angie Cruz’s 2005 novel, Let It Rain Coffee, which depicts the life and history of the Colón family in three different time periods (the early 1920s, the 1960s, and the 1990s) in the Dominican Republic as well as in New York City. This article focuses on the early 1990s immigrant experience of Esperanza Colón, whose addiction to the television show Dallas becomes illustrative of a cultural identity formed by the ideal of the American Dream and mass culture. Although Esperanza fails to live up to the impossible standards she has set herself, the novel’s presentation of failure as a creative activity (as envisioned by Halberstam, 2011) challenges the hegemony of capitalism and globalization. Instead of reading the novel in terms of the two extremes of success or failure which typically characterize migrant narratives (Pearce, 2010), we focus on Esperanza’s “middle ranges of agency” (Sedgwick, 2003: 13) to show how the commonplace terms in which migration is often presented fail to capture the nuances of immigrant experience at odds with the promise of the metropolis as negotiated by Cruz in the novel.

Opini Anda

Klik untuk menuliskan opini Anda tentang koleksi ini!

Kembali