The Double Vision at the Heart of Luis Correa-Díaz's Americana-Lcd

Abstract

Luis Correa-Díaz's Americana-lcd examines US popular culture and contemporary politics. The book's engagement with popular culture goes beyond references to movies or rock and roll and incorporates comics by pairing most of the poems with comic strips drawn by the Mexican cartoonist Pavel Ortega. For Hillary Chute, the double narrative of word and image in comics demands a double vision, a back-and-forth between reading and looking. English translations accompany most of the poems, as well. Though translated poems are not trans-medial, translations also demand a back-and-forth between the original and the translation. Both comics and translation, then, are texts with double vision. The book, thus, embeds the poems within a set of mirrors, an intertextual play that is both trans-medial and trans-lingual. Correa-Díaz exploits this double vision throughout the book in other ways as well: among these, he uses irony, puns, and other forms of doubling. The formal and structural double vision of comics, translation, puns, and etc. reinforce the thematic double vision at the heart of Americana-lcd, namely that of the yes/no, or yes/but of the immigrant experience. In this way, Correa-Díaz is able to express love for two countries. In fact, this double vision lets him both praise and blame his adopted country.