QUEERING AMERICAN SPACE IN PIRI THOMAS’ DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS: A GLISSANTIAN APPROACH TO KINSHIP

Resumen

Starting with a theoretical and historical introduction explaining the assessment of ethnic American literature as part of the postcolonial corpus, this article considers said postcolonial aspects in Piri Thomas’ autobiographical novel Down these Mean Streets through a close reading of the Caribbean essays of Édouard Glissant. The relationships its protagonist establishes throughout the novel, as well as the spaces which he inhabits, serve to unveil the coloniality of power theorized by Aníbal Quijano as still present in the Unites States in the shape a force determining the lives of black youths in this country. However, these spaces – the Barrio, the segregation South, and the prison – also recall the plantation’s potential, as Glissant saw it, for subverting the state’s racist ideologies because they allow for forms of relation which differ from the ones institutionalized in the course of Western colonial history.