The Last Generation: Prose and Poetry [Paperback]

Cherrie Moraga (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0896084663 | ISBN-13: 978-0896084667 | Publication Date: July 1, 1999

A classic work by award-winning author Cherríe Moraga, The Last Generation is an electric mix of prose and poetry that continues conversations started in the beloved books This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color and Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios. Highly politicized and intensely personal, Moraga's work dares to imagine the mythic nation Queer Atzlán: a brave vision for gender, sexuality, race, art, nationalism, and the politics of liberation. Moraga crosses literary genres to ruminate on the paradox of being at once inside and outside the myriad struggles and communities—interlocking and often at odds—that spur her art and activism. Speaking from her experience as a queer Chicana activist/artist, Moraga is committed to building a broad politic of solidarity and justice for all dispossessed people.

With fierce honesty and incisive political analysis, Moraga offers more than an inspiring portrait of the struggle of an activist artist—she helps us see the world as it is and dream it up anew.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The product of a white father and a Mexican mother, playwright Moraga describes herself as a "mongrel" and knows "full well that my mestizaje--my breed blood--is the catalyst of my activism and my art." As a radical lesbian feminist, she is alienated from her cousins with their children and pregnant wives. She views the Chicano movement as sexist, stemming from a culture in which rape, incest, battered women and drug abuse are the norm. The dichotomy of her existence is underscored, she believes, by the U.S. role in supporting dictatorships in Latin America. Essays form the bulk of this debut collection, while a few interwoven poems provide a lyrical break from her heavily polemical tone. At its best, her prose contains the same heartfelt revelations that make her poems memorable, as in a sexually explicit account of her first schoolgirl crush. "In love, color blurs but never wholly disappears," she writes in another essay that delineates her lovers by race. Her longing for a day when such a statement will no longer be applicable provides a utopian undercurrent to the collection. Moraga is co-editor of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

A poet, playwright, essayist, and anthologist (she coedited This Bridge Called My Back , Kitchen Table Pr., 1984), Moraga is a Chicana lesbian determinedly resisting assimilation. She longs for the formation of a "Queer Aztlan," an inclusive Chicano tribe in which cooperation is rewarded over competition. "Written as a prayer"--a visionary prayer honoring the author's belief that "every writer is a prophet if she only opens her heart and listens"--the poems and essays here celebrate difference while calling for a solidarity of the disenfranchised. It is much to Moraga's credit that her confessional manifesto largely succeeds. Vulnerable and wise, her work sets us yearning with the author "to be fully known and loved." The liberal mixing of English, Spanish, and Spanglish rings just right; cognates, context, and momentum fold the languages into an intelligible and evocative whole.
- Thomas Tavis, San Francisco P.L.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 196 pages
• Publisher: South End Press (July 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0896084663
• ISBN-13: 978-0896084667
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #324,493 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #91 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States > Hispanic

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Complex and Problematic Exposition, September 4, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Last Generation: Prose and Poetry (Paperback)

Moraga's second anthology of essays, poems, and prose has its moments, especially in the fictional entries, which are humorous, generous, and touching. Ten years have passed between Moraga's groundbreaking (and breathtaking) debut, 1983's Loving in the War Years. During that time, she became arguably the most preeminent Chicana feminist writer outside of the academy. The Last Generation, while eagerly awaited, ultimately disappoints, primarily through Moraga's struggled reconstitution of Chicana/o cultural nationalism with a queer bent. The anthology's most touted essay, "Queer Aztlan," is a dangerously authoritarian return of the repressed. Moraga, who challenged the essential Chicano of the sixties, has dressed up that old bugaboo, the essential subject, in queer cloth and calls it une nouveaute. Mais, c'est pas ca. Moraga's Queer Aztlan, with its calls to blood and land, is chillingly reminiscent of mid-twentieth century fascism, a fact that has been overlooked by her historically myopic acolytes. Last Generation is the sepulchre under which a promising talent lies: the promise of Moraga's early visions of a radically transformed Chicanismo. In this volume, she offers us a different image of the transformed writer/activist. From outsider to insider, Moraga can now make the leap into the essentialism she once criticized. At many points polemic, always self-indulgent, Moraga's collection serves as an interesting barometer of the acceptance and mainstreaming of Chicana feminist discourse within the cultural nationalist frame, with a subsequent loss both of rhetorical power and political progressiveness. In light of this, and above all, this work needs to be read critically.