For centuries literary critics, theorists, and analysts have traced the roots of popular themes and aesthetics back to surprising historical periods and works of literature.
Last Friday, at Scholars at Hallwalls, Ramon Soto-Crespo, associate professor of American Studies and author of Mainland Passage: The Cultural Anomaly of Puerto Rico, gave a lecture on his experience in this realm of literary exploration and how it will impact the last chapter of his upcoming book, Biotropics.
"In my research for that project I became captivated by the emergence of 'white trash' subjectivity as a byproduct of slave emancipation in the Caribbean," Soto-Crespo said.
This discovery inspired Soto-Crespo to start reading long-forgotten pulp fiction - cheap writings focused on sensationalist topics. His exploration of this genre included plantation family sagas like the Kaywana Family Saga by Edgar Mittelholzer and Mondo Mandingo by Paul Talbot.
What he found was that old "trashy" novels held much greater significance than scholars and critics realize, delivering some of the first literary sightings of "white trash" remarks, which more popular texts eventually borrowed.
"They are important not just for the representations of the historical moment after slavery, but also for their role in enabling literary masterpieces, such as Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's widely-acclaimed One Hundred Years of Solitude," Soto-Crespo said. "They have something to contribute to the way that we move from one author to another in the literary tradition."
The term "white trash" that Soto-Crespo is tracing and analyzing is one of the contributions that has affected the literary world, and it appears to have its roots in Mittelholzer's fictionalized depiction of the downfall of plantation life in the Kaywana Family Saga.
The in-depth genealogy of literary forms that Soto-Crespo is working on brings up many of the ways these so-called "trash" novels inspired famous works of literature.
"It brings out the best of what the humanities do," said Carrie Tirado Bramen, executive director of UB's Humanities Institute and associate professor of English. "I had no idea Harriet Beecher Stowe had used the term 'white trash' in 1854. The scholarship going on in the humanities is consistently strong and today's presentation shows that."
Soto-Crespo's book won't only focus on the term "white trash" that stemmed from these pulp fiction novels, but will also address the morphology of and cultural aversion to the graphic homoeroticism and non-normative sexual subjects that existed in many of these works.
Ultimately, his chapter project, Caribbean Trash: Despised Forms in the Cultural History of the Americas, will study narratives that contain despised forms and compare them to social and political differences that exist in the contemporary world.
"Caribbean Trash analyzes these despised aesthetic forms as a way of considering the emergence of sexual forms, such as the 21st-century neo bugarron - a type of man who engages in bisexual practices due to neo-liberal dislocation in the global economy, yet who somehow manages to retain his heterosexual identity," Soto-Crespo said.
The complexity of Soto-Crespo's unfinished work is already exciting his readers.
"His last book about politics and Puerto Rico's anomalous state was very interesting," said David Squires, a graduate student in the English department. "[But this one seems] much more accessible to people interested in popular culture."
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