"Catastrophic Historicism unsettles the historicist constitution of Julia de Burgos (1914-53), Puerto Ricos most iconic writer - a critical task that necessitates redefining the concept of historicism. Through readings of Aristotle, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Werner Hamacher, and Frank Ankersmit, Mendoza-de Jesús shows that historicism grounds historical objectivity in the historians capacity to compose totalizing narratives that domesticate the contingency of the past. While critiques of historicism as a realism leave untouched the sovereignty of the historian, the book insists that reading the text of history requires an attunement to danger - a modality that interrupts historicism by infusing the past with a contingency that evades total appropriation. After desedimenting the monumental tradition that has reduced de Burgos to a totemic figure, Catastrophic Historicism reads the poets first collection, Poema en 20 surcos (1938). Mendoza-de Jesús argues that the historicity of Poema crystallizes in the lyrical speakers self-institution as an embodied ipseity, which requires producing racialized/gendered allegorical figures - the bearers of an abject flesh - that lack any ontological resistance to modern alienation. Rather than treating de Burgoss poetics of selfhood as the ideal image of Puerto Rican sovereignty, Mendoza-de Jesús endangers this idealization by drawing attention to the abjection that sustains our attachments to ipseity as the form of a truly sovereign life. In this way, Catastrophic Historicism not only resets the terms of ongoing critiques of historicism in the humanities - it also intervenes in Puerto Rican historicity for the sake of its transformation"--.