^aUniversity of Connecticut, Storrs, CT

Abstract

This study discusses the literary and theatrical portrayal of corpses in Cuban-American Roberto G. Fernández's Raining Backwards, Puerto Rican Esmeralda Santiago's When I Was Puerto Rican, and Miguel Piñero's Short Eyes. In dialogue with various critics of communitarian and nationalistic thinking (Nancy, Balibar, Joseph, and Anderson), the author reflects upon the problematics of community, its sense of project and destiny, its vehement impulse toward domesticating difference, and its program for hegemonizing subalternity. From this perspective, the cadaver is discussed as an ontological void in Latino/a communitarian articulation and as a recurrent topos in this group's cultural production. This study proposes that the dead body needs to be considered critically in order to disrupt meta-narratives of hybridization that guide Latino communitarian thinking and the production–consumption dynamics within the US multicultural nation. "Cadavers encountered" advances a model for critically un-reading more commercial/hegemonic Latino products and for underscoring counter-pedagogic thinking in less commercial/alternative ones. In the process it suggests a variety of cultural commodities that could be studied in fashions similar to the work of Fernández, Santiago, and Piñero.