Catastrophic Historicism

Catastrophic Historicism transforms the ongoing theoretical debate about historicism by arguing that the common definition of historicism as a realism is reductive and misleading. Engaging with philosophers and theorists from Aristotle to Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Werner Hamacher, and Frank Ankersmit, the book argues that historicism is at its core a transcendental correlationism that grounds the possibility of historical knowledge in the historian’s intrinsic faculty to produce narratives that, like a Leibnizian plenum, constitute a world without gaps. Based on this redefinition, Catastrophic Historicism elaborates a non-historicist concept of historicity by developing Benjamin’s motif of historical danger as the modal category in which the past is experienced not as a secure possession but in the mode of radical contingency. After redefining historicism, Catastrophic Historicism dismantles the historicism that ensures the afterlife of Julia de Burgos (1914–53), the most iconic Puerto Rican writer, making the case that the poet’s first poetry collection, Poema en 20 surcos (1938), should be read as the poem of Puerto Rican modern life. By foregrounding the ontological violence, and the anti-Blackness that enables the poet to institute an embodied/gendered ipseity able to withstand the fungibilizing forces of modernity, Catastrophic Historicism challenges the tradition that instructs de Burgos’s Puerto Rican audience to treat her poetics of selfhood as the mirroring image of their own potential sovereignty. Beyond putting to test a theoretical concept, this dangerous reading of Poema intervenes in the structures of Puerto Rican historicity for the sake of its transformation.