Join us as Clark University faculty member María Acosta Cruz (Language, Literature, and Culture) discusses her new book, Disaster Nation: An Ecocritical Study of Puerto Rican Culture. In it, she examines Puerto Rico’s national culture through a complex web of references to the disasters that the nation has suffered and to how the environment has been portrayed. Sometimes Puerto Rican history, literature and arts highlight the drama of hurricanes and earthquakes. But often, the classics read in universities and gazed at in museums depict an Edenic garden of eternal spring. Since cultural depictions of the environment are never innocent and always have socio-political motivations, Acosta Cruz’s ecocritical project explores Puerto Rico through its unique convergences of calamities: cyclonic location and ecological instability, as well as continuous colonialism.
Admission is free and open to the public, and lunch will be provided. Guests are encouraged to arrive at 1:15pm for refreshments.
Sponsored by the Alice Coonley Higgins Institute for Arts and Humanities and the Department of Language, Literature, and Culture at Clark University
About the Speaker
Born and raised in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, María Acosta Cruz received her degrees in Comparative Literature from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez and the State University of New York at Binghamton. She is a Full Professor of Spanish at Clark University. She explores language and culture issues concerning ecocriticism, nationhood, gender constructions, and Caribbean political and cultural history. Among her published works is Dream Nation: Puerto Rican Culture & the Fictions of Independence and the upcoming book Disaster Nation: An Ecocritical Study of Puerto Rican Culture.