Bi-Musical Moves In Luis Humberto Crosthwaite and Little Joe Hernández

Abstract

Meditating on works of fiction such as Crosthwaite’s El gran preténder (1992) and Laviera’s AmeRican (1985), this article proposes bi-musicality (Hood 1960) as both a link between sociolinguistics and literary aesthetics and as a corrective challenge to the positivism of ethnic, demographic, and geographic labeling. From Dell Hymes to Norma Mendoza-Denton in applied linguistics and from Friedrich Schiller to Emmanuel Levinas in aesthetics, Sommer and Wald consider what they call the “pride of interstitial place” in multilingual, crossborder writing and music. The article takes cues from sociolinguistics, dance, and musicology, as it advances a wager about the embodied movements of multilingual poetics.