Reading Now: The Catastrophic Modernity of Julia de Burgos

Part III puts in practice the non-historicist concept of dangerous historicity and the historical methodology of the dialectical image by offering a historical reading of Julia de Burgos’s first poetry volume, Poema en veinte surcos (1938). This section shows that de Burgos is the yet unrecognized poet of Puerto Rican modernity. De Burgos’s modernism is primarily ontological, taking the form of an attempt to institute a mode of gendered, embodied selfhood immune to the fungibilizing and alienating forces of modern life. To do so, however, de Burgos must reproduce many of the foundational violences of modernity, including the positioning of Blackness as a mode of life that embodies what I call, following Alexander Weheliye, a “fleshly surplus” that, paradoxically, justifies its abjection in order to shore up the mode of self that Poema institutes.