A Praxis of Parataxis:Epistemology and Dissonance in Lucha Corpi's Detective Fiction

Abstract

Chicana novelist and poet Lucha Corpi has been ignored by much of academic literary establishment. She is rarely included in courses on literatures of United States or even in courses on contemporary women writers. Occasionally Corpi's work might appear in a course on multiethnic writers, although most frequently her texts are read in those rare courses focused specifically on Chicana or Latina writers. It is possible to locate some critical appraisals of her literary production, but, for a broader readership, Corpi has been made invisible. This is a loss to our students, our colleagues, and in what will surely sound like hyperbole to our society. In her novels Eulogy for a Brown Angel (hereafter cited as E)1 and Cactus Blood (CB), Corpi challenges conventional portrayals of the Her protagonist Gloria Damasco is not only a Chicano woman but also a middle-aged mother who, at beginning of this series, is employed as a speech therapist hardly a standard vocation, even for an amateur detective. Corpi also uses detective novel, a genre that purportedly has only entertainment value, to engage in serious social critique and to locate contemporary experiences of Chicanas/Chicanos squarely within U.S. society and history. Tim Libretti points out that Corpi joins other contemporary writers such as Sherman Alexie and Walter Mosley who have appropriated popular genre of detective fiction in order ... to forward