A1 Vertaisarvioitu alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä lehdessä
The smell of an impossible dream: Dallas, migration, and creative failure in Angie Cruz's Let It Rain Coffee
Tekijät: Valovirta E, Kokkola L, Korkka J
Kustantaja: SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD
Julkaisuvuosi: 2014
Journal: Journal of Commonwealth Literature
Tietokannassa oleva lehden nimi: JOURNAL OF COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE
Lehden akronyymi: J COMMONW LIT
Vuosikerta: 49
Numero: 2
Aloitussivu: 229
Lopetussivu: 242
Sivujen määrä: 14
ISSN: 0021-9894
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989414525616
Tiivistelmä
A Latin Caribbean (forced) migration experience is at the centre of Angie Cruz's 2005 novel, Let It Rain Coffee, which depicts the life and history of the Colon family in three different time periods (the early 1920s, the 1960s, and the 1990s) in the Dominican Republic as well as in New York City. This article focuses on the early 1990s immigrant experience of Esperanza Colon, whose addiction to the television show Dallas becomes illustrative of a cultural identity formed by the ideal of the American Dream and mass culture. Although Esperanza fails to live up to the impossible standards she has set herself, the novel's presentation of failure as a creative activity (as envisioned by Halberstam, 2011) challenges the hegemony of capitalism and globalization. Instead of reading the novel in terms of the two extremes of success or failure which typically characterize migrant narratives (Pearce, 2010), we focus on Esperanza's "middle ranges of agency" (Sedgwick, 2003: 13) to show how the commonplace terms in which migration is often presented fail to capture the nuances of immigrant experience at odds with the promise of the metropolis as negotiated by Cruz in the novel.
A Latin Caribbean (forced) migration experience is at the centre of Angie Cruz's 2005 novel, Let It Rain Coffee, which depicts the life and history of the Colon family in three different time periods (the early 1920s, the 1960s, and the 1990s) in the Dominican Republic as well as in New York City. This article focuses on the early 1990s immigrant experience of Esperanza Colon, whose addiction to the television show Dallas becomes illustrative of a cultural identity formed by the ideal of the American Dream and mass culture. Although Esperanza fails to live up to the impossible standards she has set herself, the novel's presentation of failure as a creative activity (as envisioned by Halberstam, 2011) challenges the hegemony of capitalism and globalization. Instead of reading the novel in terms of the two extremes of success or failure which typically characterize migrant narratives (Pearce, 2010), we focus on Esperanza's "middle ranges of agency" (Sedgwick, 2003: 13) to show how the commonplace terms in which migration is often presented fail to capture the nuances of immigrant experience at odds with the promise of the metropolis as negotiated by Cruz in the novel.
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