ABSTRACT
This chapter develops a conceptual linkage between Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of nepantla and Hannah Arendt’s cosmopolitan conception of critical thinking through a reading of Jennine Capó Crucet’s novel Make Your Home Among Strangers (2015) and her collection of personal essays My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education (2019). Capó Crucet narrates in both these texts the cosmopolitan Latinx becoming of a second-generation Cuban American, as she moves back-and-forth between her Miami Cuban enclave and Latinx positions outside of Miami. In Hannah Arendt’s formulation, subjects who undergo processes of critical thinking adopt the position of Kant’s world citizen, someone who thinks and acts in an imaginative space that is potentially public, which corresponds with Gloria Anzaldúa’s imaginative space of nepantla, where subjects undergo the anguish of changing perspectives and creating new relations with the world. The chapter concludes by further developing the relationship between cosmopolitanism and estrangement in Anzaldúa’s and Arendt’s concepts to the notion of Latinangst (a term borrowed from Eliana Rivero’s Cubangst) that Capó Crucet implicitly envisions as necessary in the process of creating new cosmopolitan Latinx subjectivities.
