Content area
Abstract
During the 1980s and 1990s one witnesses, I argue, a new wave of Chicana/o fiction that shifts from a model of resistance to one of contestation. Whereas resistance literature is embroiled in issues of governance and territorial reclamation, a contestatory literature opposes acts of social domination that are not necessarily part of governance or territorial struggles. Within this theoretical and historical framework, "Chicana and Chicano Fiction into the Nineties: Genre and Contestation" examines three genres of Chicana/o fiction: the national romance, the detective novel, and the short story. These genres provide an exciting opportunity to situate Chicana/o fiction within and against a tradition of American literature, for each of these genres has unique roots in the nineteenth-century literature of the United States. Concentrating on the history of these genres and their formal characteristics, I illustrate by example what a literature of contestation is and how it contests social domination. The introductory chapter sketches out the historical shift from the Chicana/o resistance literature of the 1960s and 1970s to a literature of contestation. Chapter 1 charts the contestatory practices in Ana Castillo's romance, So Far From God, and in her anti-romance, Sapogonia, discussing issues of creation, land tenure, immigration, the nuclear age, and the state of the nation. Rolando Hinojosa's Partners in Crime and Lucha Corpi's Eulogy for a Brown Angel comprise the two sub-genres of the mystery novel, the police procedural and the hard-boiled novel, examined in Chapter 2. The detective genre's emphasis on the collection, analysis, and dissemination of information coincides neatly with the textual concerns of a contestatory literature to produce narratives that oppose oppression. Chapter 3 focuses on gender struggles and female coming-of-age stories in Helena Maria Viramontes' The Moths and Other Stories and Sandra Cisneros' Woman Hollering Creek. The argument of this chapter draws on Mary Louise Pratt's analysis of the short story as a countergenre, focusing on how Cisneros and Viramontes use their stories to contest limiting gender roles and male privilege. The brief Afterword comments on the further progression of Chicana/o fiction and contestation, as the twenty first century moves ever closer.
