María Acosta Cruz – Introducing Disaster Nation: An Ecocritical Study of Puerto Rican Culture
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-9-2025
Abstract
Clark University faculty member María Acosta Cruz (Language, Literature, and Culture) discusses her new book, Disaster Nation: An Ecocritical Study of Puerto Rican Culture. In it, she explores Puerto Rico’s national culture through a complex web of references to the disasters that the nation has suffered and to how the environment has been portrayed. Sometimes Puerto Rican history, literature and arts highlight the drama of hurricanes and earthquakes. But often, the classics read in universities and gazed at in museums depict an Edenic garden of eternal spring. Since cultural depictions of the environment are never innocent and always have socio-political motivations, Acosta Cruz’s ecocritical project explores Puerto Rico through its unique convergences of calamities: cyclonic location and ecological instability, as well as continuous colonialism.
Sponsored by the Alice Coonley Higgins Institute for Arts and Humanities and the Department of Language, Literature, and Culture at Clark University
Recommended Citation
Clark University, "María Acosta Cruz – Introducing Disaster Nation: An Ecocritical Study of Puerto Rican Culture" (2025). Clark University Video Archive. 357.
https://commons.clarku.edu/videoarchive/357
