In and out of Home: Rereading as Practice

Abstract

"When I began conceptualizing a project on the representations of home in Esmeralda Santiago’s three memoirs When I Was Puerto Rican, Almost a Woman, and The Turkish Lover, I thought that I was solely studying the roles of domestic spaces in diasporic, autobiographical narratives... The dramatic changes happening in Puerto Rico, and the human suffering that comes with them, were making it impossible for me to write about Santiago and her narratives in the ways that I had planned to study them. How I thought about these three memoirs prior to the inception of the US fiscal oversight board created by the PROMESA Act is different from how I read her books while surrounded by the austerity measures being implemented by this board.... Recognizing
the interconnectivity of serial autobiographies, and that an author who writes multiple autobiographical narratives cannot be located in a single text, can allow the patterns of slippage between national identity/ies to become more visible."