Making the decolonized visible: Puerto Rican poetry of the last four decades

This essay is a comprehensive synthesis of ideas regarding the aporistic relationship between subalternity and cultural visibility in the context of Puerto Rican literary production. In offering both a panorama and a critique of the decolonized poetic tradition of Puerto Rican authors, I first point out the obstacles faced by such authors and the strategies that they have employed to make themselves visible. The essay also glimpses at the contradictions between poetic visibility and the horizon of expectations of the reader of poetry. Other issues branching out of the discussion are: the problem posed by the dichotomy of oral and written poetry and the need for a pan-theoretical approach that would not homogenize the particularist texts available. Complementing this synthesis is the critical overview given of each decade′s major poetic environments and representative poets: from the essentialist cultural nationalism of 1960s poetics to the more fluid, transnationalist, and, in some cases, postmodern sensibilities of `70s, `80s, and `90s poetics