Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney by Jahan Ramazani (review)

Abstract

political transformation, social dispossession, cultural rupture, and linguistic alienation. His provocative project invigorates the Chicano agenda of recovering the American Hispanic literary and cultural heritage; it complements the works by scholars such as Erlinda Gonzáles-Berry, José David Saldívar, Héctor Calderón, Norma Alarcón, Rosaura Sánchez, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, Francisco Lomelí, María Herrera Sobek, Juan Bruce-Novoa, Nicholas Kanellos, Tey Diana Rebolledo, Luis Torres, Charles Tatum, Clara Lomas, Raymund Paredes, Gabriel Meléndez, and Enrique Lamadrid. In his serious effort to examine the origins of the Mexican American literary and cultural autobiographical production, Genaro Padilla searches for the cultural genre and critical autobiographical practice under multilayered documents unpublished or unread, untranslated or mistranslated. His critical interpretation of Mexican American autobiography not only charts a new theoretical model for autobiography scholars, but it proposes an invaluable cultural model to approach the concept of "new subjectivity" at the core of defeat and rupture. Genaro Padilla skillfully articulates Mexican American autobiographical writing as a cultural discourse, not of assimilation, but of resistance. This body of cultural autobiography, he suggests, registers the "cultural schizophrenia" during a crucial socio-cultural, political, and historical moment as Mexican Americans struggled to reposition themselves in a world of loss. My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography is an indispensable reading in the fields of cultural analysis, ethnic studies, autobiography, and Chicano studies.