Queering American space in Piri Thomas’ "Down these mean streets"a glissantian approach to kinshi

  1. MÓNICA FERNÁNDEZ JIMÉNEZ 1
  1. 1 Universidad de Valladolid
    info

    Universidad de Valladolid

    Valladolid, España

    ROR https://ror.org/01fvbaw18

Revista:
Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos

ISSN: 1133-309X,  2253-8410

Año de publicación: 2020

Número: 24

Páginas: 47-66

Tipo: Artículo

DOI: 10.12795/REN.2020.I24.03 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openAcceso abierto editor

Otras publicaciones en: Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos

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Resumen

This article analyzes Piri Thomas’s autobiographical novel Down These Mean Streets (1967) through the critical framework of the plantation theorised by Caribbean cholars Édouard Glissant and Antonio Benítez-Rojo. Taking into account the alternative affiliative networks that developed in the plantation, the novel by Thomas presents a similar contestation to biological kinship along the protagonist’s peregrination across different American post-plantation paces through the relationships that he establishes there. Following the bildungsroman tradition, the protagonist undergoes a process of knowledge acquisition which serves to unveil the everasting presence of the coloniality of power theorised by Aníbal Quijano in the lives of black youths in the United States. Nevertheless, these spaces recall the lantation’s potential, as Glissant saw it, for the subversion of the state’s racist ideologies, as their underlying structures differ from the epistemologies institutionalised in the course of Western colonial history

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Información de financiación

1Financial assistance for this essay was provided by the R&D Project “Strangers and Cosmopolitans: Alternative Worlds in Contemporary Literature” (RTI2018-097186-BI00), funded by the Spanish National Research Program; and the Research Group Intersecciones

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