Other-Than-Human Movement
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.22439/asca.v57i2.7659Keywords:
transnational literature, borderlands, other-than-humans, nonhumans, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Chicana poetryAbstract
This article focuses on the work of American poet Lorna Dee Cervantes (1954- ), who is concerned with Chicana and Native American experiences in her poetry and is a transnationally oriented poet who is interested in “the treatment of borders and border zones in all of their various forms,” an aspect that Paul Jay names as important for transnational literature (Transnational 94). In her first collection, Emplumada (1981), Cervantes writes frequently about crossing borders, a notion that is evident in frequent references to the movement of other-than-human beings and elements that cross or delineate borders. Her most recent collection, Sueño (2013), is thematically broader but similarly evokes the other-than-human. Metaphors related to other-than-human beings, movement, and border crossing can be connected to posthumanism in ways similar to those Thomas Nail employs when he argues that borders are in motion. I examine the experiences of crossing and living on various kinds of borders as they are evident in Emplumada and Sueño, and suggest that Cervantes’s other-than-human animals display an expanded vision for transnational situations where movement is freer and more choices are available than for the poems’ humans.
References
Ambroży, Paulina. “’Alma entre dos mundos’: Spatial Metaphors in the Poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes.” Narrating American Gender and Ethnic Identities, edited by Alexandra M. Różalska and Grażyna Zygadło, Cambridge Scholars, 2013, pp. 129-43.
Amich, Candice. “A Review of Lorna Dee Cer-vantes's Sueño: New Poems.” Wax Wing Mag no. 3, summer 2014. https://waxwingmag.org/items/126.php.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
Cervantes, Lorna Dee. Emplumada. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5vkfn5.
---. "Lorna Dee Cervantes on Allen Ginsberg and the Interplay Between Beat and Chica-no Poetry." Literary Hub, 21 Dec., 2020. https://lithub.com/lorna-dee-cervantes-on-allen-ginsberg-and-the-interplay-between-beat-and-chicano-poetry/.
---. Sueño. Wings Press, 2013.
Contreras, Sheila Marie. Blood Lines: Myth, In-digenism, and Chicana/o Literature. University of Texas Press, 2008.
Fagan, Allison E. From the Edge: Chicana/o Border Literature and the Politics of Print. Rutgers University Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.36019/9780813583907.
Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. “Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies: Presidential Address to the American Stu-dies Association, November 12, 2004.” Ame-rican Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 1, 2005, pp. 17-57. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2005.0004.
González, Sonia V. “Poetry Saved My Life: An Interview with Lorna Dee Cervantes.” MELUS, vol. 32, no. 1, 2007, pp. 163-80. https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/32.1.163.
Heise, Ursula K. “Ecocriticism and the Transna-tional Turn in American Studies.” American Literary History, vol. 20, no. 1-2, 2008, pp. 381-404. https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajm055.
Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann. “In-troduction: Stories Come to Matter.” Mate-rial Ecocriticism, edited by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Opperman, Indiana University Press, 2014, pp. 1-17.
Jay, Paul. Transnational Literature: The Basics. Routledge, 2021. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429286667.
---. Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Lit-erary Studies. Cornell University Press, 2010.
Kaup, Monika. “The Architecture of Ethnicity in Chicano Literature.” American Literature, vol. 69, no. 2, 1997, pp. 361-97. https://doi.org/10.2307/2928275.
Khazaal, Natalie. “Introduction.” Like an Animal: Critical Animal Studies Approaches to Borders, Displacement, and Othering, edited by Natalie Khazaal and Núria Almiron, Brill, 2021, pp. 1-41. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004440654_002
MacDonald, Katherine. “On the Importance of Caribou Stories.” Ojibwe Cultural Foundation, 10 Oct. 2017. https://ojibwe-cultural-foundation.myshopify.com/blogs/mishi-group-2017/on-the-importance-of-caribou-stories.
Matsuoka, Atsuko, and John Sorenson. “’Like an Animal’: Tropes for Delegitimization.” Like an Animal: Critical Animal Studies Ap-proaches to Borders, Displacement, and Other-ing, edited by Natalie Khazaal and Núria Almiron, Brill, 2021, pp. 101-24. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004440654_005
Nail, Thomas. “Kinopolitics: Borders in Mo-tion.” Posthuman Ecologies, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Simone Bignall, Rowman & Littlefield, 2019, pp. 183-203. https://doi.org/10.5040/9798881811747.ch-10.
Pérez-Torres, Rafael. Movements in Chicano Po-etry: Against Myths, Against Margins. Cam-bridge University Press, 1995. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511527166
Price, Catherine, and Sophie Chao. “Multi-species, More-Than-Human, Non-Human, Other-Than-Human: Reimagining Idioms of Animacy in an Age of Planetary Unmaking.” Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Jour-nal, vol. 10, no. 2, 2023, pp. 177-93. https://doi.org/10.31273/eirj.v10i2.1166.
Rodriguez y Gibson, Eliza. “The Poetry of Im-probability: Lorna Dee Cervantes’s Global Chicana Feminism.” Stunned into Being: Es-says on the Poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes, ed-ited by Eliza Rodriguez y Gibson, Wings Press, 2012, pp. 136-54.
Saldívar, José David. Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. University of Cali-fornia Press, 1997. https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=80473ff9-8484-376a-a5e5-c6e34faef63e.
Saldívar, Ramón. The Borderlands of Culture: Americo Paredes and the Transnational Imagi-nary. Duke University Press, 2006. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822387954.
Saldívar-Hull, Sonia. Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature. Univer-sity of California Press, 2000. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520354418.
Sánchez, Marta Ester. Contemporary Chicana Po-etry: A Critical Approach to an Emerging Litera-ture. University of California Press, 1986. UC Press E-Books Collection, http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft5w1007fd/.
Seator, Lynette. “Emplumada: Chicana Rites-of-Passage.” MELUS, vol. 11, no. 2, 1984, pp. 23-38. https://doi.org/10.2307/467069.
Taylor, Paul Beekman. “The Writer with Wings: Flight as Chicano Survival in the Fiction of Rudolfo A. Anaya.” Bilingual Review/La Re-vista Bilingüe, vol. 21, no. 2, 1996, pp. 131-45.
Velasco, Juan. “The Language of Nation beyond Borders: The Bilingual Trilogy of Francisco Jiménez.” Ethnic Literatures and Transnational-ism, edited by Aparajita Nanda, Routledge, 2015, pp. 217-27.
Villa, Raúl Homero. Barrio-Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture. University of Texas Press, 2000.
Williams, Nerys. Contemporary Poetry. Edin-burgh University Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780748646036.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Elina Siltanen
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
