One of the most recent books indexed by Southwest Humanities is Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús’s highly anticipated Catastrophic Historicism: Reading Julia de Burgos Dangerously (Fordham University Press, 2023). A tour-de-force of close reading of literature, philosophy, and criticism, as well as a compelling work of autotheory, Catastrophic Historicism assiduously studies the work of Puerto Rican poet de Burgos while intervening in and perhaps redefining contemporary debates about historicism. “While critiques of historicism as a realism leave untouched the sovereignty of the historian, [Mendoza-de Jesús’s] book insists that reading the text of history requires an attunement to danger—a modality that interrupts historicism by infusing the past with a contingency that evades total appropriation.” Drawing on the thought of figures including Jacques Derrida, Aristotle, Werner Hamacher, Walter Benjamin, and others, Catastrophic Historicism will be essential reading for scholars of contemporary literary theory, Latin American literature, and continental philosophy. For more information about this title, which will be published in October 2023, please see the publisher’s website here.
SOUTHWEST HUMANITIES 