Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness

by Roberto Tejada

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Art. Latinx Studies. STILL NOWHERE IN AN EMPTY VASTNESS is a collection of essays and manifestos engaging hemispheric desires and borderland eventualities in the geopolitical imagination of the Americas. The book enlivens a capacious Latinx poetics, spanning to include 16th- and 17th-century imperial accounts, 20th-century images of Mexico pictured by U.S. artists and writers, the neo-baroque pageantry of José Lezama Lima in post-Revolution Havana, as well as contemporary poets Reina María Rodriguez, from Cuba; Mexican fabulist Pablo Helguera; and Chicano multimedia wordsmith Harry Gamboa Jr., from Los Angeles. Explored also are many-sided masculinities, from conquistador castaway Cabeza de Vaca, stripped and disempowered in the New World; Lezama Lima's "prison baroque" of syntactically queer desire; George Oppen's craftsmanship manhood; Jay Wright's Yoruba and Toltec body-doubles, hidden figures of exile and self-foreignness; and the man-child constructed in the media spectacle of modern castaway Elián González. These essays configure a poetics of the Americas, mirror-occasions for reflecting the fear and fantasies prompted by metaphors of occupation, displacement, and counter-conquest.

Genres: Poetry

258 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2019

About the author

An art historian, curator, and editor specializing in Latino and Latin American art, Roberto Tejada earned a BA in comparative literature from New York University and a PhD in interdisciplinary media studies from the State University of New York at Buffalo. From 1987 to 1997 Tejada lived in Mexico City, where he served on the editorial board of the magazine Vuelta and was executive editor of Artes de México. He founded and co-edits the journal Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas. A former professor at the University of California at San Diego, the University of Texas at Austin, and Southern Methodist University, Tejada was appointed the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Houston in 2014.

Reviews

[Erik Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

"If the modernist project and capitalism continue to associate as a shared repertoire of aspirations, certain cheerful inflections of avant-garde practice today appear so untroubled as to largely ape or disregard the symptoms of these deep-seated social transformations--and the role of the United States in that process."

[Dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A love letter to Jose Lezama Lima more than anything else, but also an introduction (for me) to Reina Maria Rodriguez…and some troubling correspondence about Hart Crane…