Catastrophic Traditions: Reading the Image of Julia de Burgos, Dangerously

Part I provides a critical reception history of Julia de Burgos, Puerto Rico’s most iconic poet. With the help of Walter Benjamin’s concept of catastrophic tradition and Edmund Husserl’s notion of sedimentation, this section reconstructs the specific mode of catastrophe that has guaranteed de Burgos’s afterlife by turning her into the privileged totem of Puertoricanness at the price of reducing her historical legibility. Part I also lays the foundations for countering this catastrophe by developing a literary-historical methodology informed by Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image and his call for a sui generis Copernican turn in historical intuition.