Oliver -Rotger, María Antonia (2003). Battlegrounds and Crossroads.   Social and Imaginary Space in Writing by Chicanas .   Amsterdam/New York, NY. 408 pages. (Portada Hispánica 15). ISBN: 90-420-1196-3                                                     

Of interest to informed readers responsive to combined textual and cultural   approaches to Chicano/a literature and literature in general, Battlegrounds and   Crossroads weaves in various critical and theoretical threads to inquire into the relationship between intimate and public spaces in Chicana literature.

Without claiming the borderlands as exclusive of the Chicana/o imagination, this book acknowledges the importance of this metaphor for bringing to view a   more intercultural United States, allowing it to become inflected with the   particularity of each text. The analyses of Chicana fiction, drama, and   autobiography explore the construction of identity through the representation of social space and the transformation of literary space. For discussion of a   diacritical territory this volume draws on a interdisciplinary practice that   facilitates the journey from the most intimate spaces to the most public spaces of modernity, so that the aesthetic text yields its knowledge of the contingent   historical circumstances of its production in material and existential terms. The apparent regionalism and localism of this literature is nothing but a   reflection of the relationship between the local and the global, the private   and the public, the personal and the political, the aesthetic and the   ideological, the subversive and the mainstream.

Each text stands by itself   while it also reaches out to the sociopolitical imaginary for interpretation   through an interdisciplinary methodology that is indispensable to do justice to a politicized aesthetics.

 

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