UC Berkeley

“Waves in Time: Erosion and the Puerto Rican Subject Beyond Place 1863-Present” explores the recurrence of the ocean as trope, as material, and as object of thought in Puerto Rican literature and art between the 19th and the 21th centuries. I investigate how the maritime mediates an aesthetic and political concern for the archipelago and beyond: the symbolic and material place of a Puerto Rican subject in space and time. Through an initial reading of Eugenio María de Hostos’s La peregrinación de Bayoán (1863), a foundational text for Puerto Rican literature and Caribbean political thought, I begin by identifying a cross-historical impetus to fix the subject and the place of Puerto Rico––a will to construct a terminal politics oriented towards a national future. Then, as the counterpoint to Hostos, I revisit key episodes in the development of Puerto Rican poetry to culminate in a study of Manuel Ramos Otero’s queer migrant poetics. The argument underpinning this arc is that, against an anxious craving for permanence beginning around the time of Hostos’s reformist discourse, we can read for a “poetics of erosion” that considers place as an ephemeral temporal and spatial practice. Erosion describes an aesthetic and political position that reanimates debates concerning the legibility of a Puerto Rican national subject by exploring negative affects, gestures, and forms that articulate an affinity for disintegration, transience, and decay. The broader theoretical intervention at stake in this project is a recasting of our given vocabulary for the critique of colonial forms of inhabiting the world as they are mediated by the expropriation of land, our increasingly-precarious relationship to ocean water, and the emerging subjectivities that attend to the dissolution of both symbolic and material infrastructures of the state and the nation.