ABSTRACT
In his latest collection of essays, Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography (2013), Richard Rodríguez delves into a number of contemporary issues—religion and terrorism, gender inequalities, dislocations, etc.—in an attempt to figure out how they are shaping our lives in an increasingly secular and globalized world. As was the case in his earlier collections, Rodríguez takes up the role of the “cosmopolitan subaltern” who, adopting a bottom-up perspective, tries to give voice to the anxieties experienced by those living on the margins of culture and society—be it on account of their religious, sexual, or ethnic affiliations. However, rather than showing the attitudes and using the strategies commonly found in other minority writers, he chooses “a more circuitous route” that often resonates with some of the tenets advanced by the supporters of the “Transmodern paradigm” (Ghisi, Rifkin, Dussel, Rodríguez Magda, Sardar, Eisler, etc.). Rodríguez’s reflections on and critiques of monotheistic religions, the role assigned to women (and homosexuals) in them or the constant distractions of the new media are deeply coloured by signs of humanism, scepticism, interdependency, dialectical thinking, pluriversality, solidarity, spirituality, feminine values, and so on, that have become the characteristic ingredients of this new (Transmodern) world view.
