Organic Home Spaces: the Chambered Nautilus in Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Silent Dancing; a Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood

Year 2015, Issue: 42, 61 - 79, 01.10.2015

Lorna Perez

Abstract

Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood — a coming of age narrative played out against the backdrop of diasporic locations—is most often read in light of a series of clearly articulated dichotomies that present culture, identity, and home as dialectically opposed conditions that require cultural synthesis. In what follows, I argue that Ortiz Cofer’s text, while full of clashing dichotomies, does not actually propose a synthesis in the form of hybridization. Rather, Silent Dancing presents a complicated and nuanced consideration of home — here in terms of both the gendered, domestic space of the home, as well as the larger political and cultural space of the nation — that is informed by feminist practice on the one hand, and diasporic locations on the other

Keywords

Diaspora, Puerto Rico, identity, home, feminist

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