Ecos de un futuro distante: Rebelión (Spanish Edition)

The Editorial Board of Atenea is not responsible for the views expressed by the contributing authors and reserves the right to publication. Right to Literary Property Reserved. Courtesy of the Ancient Coin Forum. Sex, Death, and Memories of Congo Darkness Hence fetishism is not a consequence but the magical precondition for the commod- ity, and hence for mature capitalism, to function. But this negation is fictitious. Writing, in its noblest function, is the attempt to unerase, to unearth, to find the primitive picture again, ours, the one that frightens us.

Waiting at the pier along with a couple of taxi drivers and their beat up cars would be groups of young kids in ragged clothes not shy about encircling a crew member and tugging on his clothing while asking for a dollar, an apple, anything. And a line of old blue school busses always stood just off the pier awaiting shipboard passengers. Hating to drive alone during the long three-hour trip from Puerto Plata, the bus drivers, always practical, filled many of their seats with young women who would make the weekly trip with hopes of earning some money from the crew—mostly Latino and West Indian males at the time—or at least having some fun.

All of the old sailor haunts seemed to have been bulldozed over, homogenized to make way for the new in this oldest of American cities. During a six-year span in the eighties I worked onboard several different cruise ships, primarily in the Caribbean. One of the ships sailed from Old San Juan every Tuesday with approximately a thou- sand passengers on a weekly tour that featured six ports in seven days. Unlike members of the upper crew, the lower crew member—who often worked fourteen hours, every day, for eleven months straight—was permitted to surface only while on the job and in company uniform.

Me Sammy Davis, Jr. Lacking external regulations and having access to cheap, non- union labor, the cruise ship is not unlike an antebellum plantation. Tellingly, an observation by Fredrick Douglass from the mid-nineteenth century seems applicable to the twenty-first century cruise ship, and perhaps to other globalized work spaces that are answerable to no one but the multinational corporation: The laws and institutions of the state, apparently touch it nowhere.

But for now the concept of globalization is too abstract, impen- etrable. One particular image has compelled me to keep thinking about Caribbean cruising. Suddenly, urgent knocking, banging at my door. I need to fly back home tomorrow, soon as we get into port. I need you to help me, Mitchell. Antiguan writer Jamaica Kincaid suggests that touristic servitude is a role for which Caribbean people of African descent have been especially well prepared. They [people who were once slaves and are now servants] are not responsible for what you have. Several other children swarm over, thin hands outreached: I arrive at the bar late today.

Young Dominicanas in New York Islander, Cowboys, Royal Caribbean Cruise Line t-shirts sit on crude goatskin chairs at round makeshift tables with bottles of rum, coke, cerveza, winking, smiling, waiting. The outright purchase and simulation of Caribbean islands seems to be the trend of the future, as several cruise lines now regularly visit islands which they own and regulate.

This is the meaning of the theme park, the place that embodies it all, the ageographia, the surveillance and control, the simulations without end. The theme park presents a happy regulated vision of pleasure —all those artfully hoodwinking forms—as a substitute for the demo- cratic public realm, and it does so appealingly by stripping troubled urbanity of its sting, of the presence of the poor, of crime, of dirt, of work. I smile, guzzle some more beer. Another example of an attempt to cleanse the sting of social conflict from a particular place can be found in the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs which had entrusted Kurtz with the writing of an immensely important report another type of comforting simulation that could help to clear the way for even greater profits in the ivory trade.

Ultimately, however, Kurtz is unable to embrace his life-long work on the treatise. Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. It was as though a veil had been rent. As I sway to the merengue band she pulls out a tattered green card signed and dated by a doctor. Marlow himself acknowledges the strange way in which power- ful memories of the past can subvert chronological time.

Upon see- ing for the first time the Intended, Marlow realizes that she was one of those creatures that are not the play-things of Time. For her he had died only yesterday. I saw them together—I heard them together. Hand in hand, we near the row of unpainted cinderblock rooms behind the smaller bar and a football-player passenger whom I had told about this place the night before suddenly taps me on the shoulder. At the beach an old man from the cruise ship was found floating face down in the ocean.

I pounded his hard white chest during the quiet boat ride back. Confronted with the threshold not of his own death experience, but with that of his young daughter whom he may never see again for a variety of reasons, including his distant job in a globalized economy that offers distressingly low pay and no medical insurance , Larouche—through his fear-stricken words and counte- nance—seems to implicate not only cruise ships and the unfettered free market of gross exploitation, but also the person from whom he requests the money that could pay for the trip back home.

While most tourists ignore or at least attempt to conceal the inherent conflict between the vacationer and the native who serves, Fanon, a Martinican, believes that such tensions remain ultimately unmistakable because of the relentlessly visible racial, economic, and cultural differ- ences that seem to naturalize for tourists the roles of servers poor people of color and served usually white and at least middle class. This market-driven homo- geneity, so central to the globalization process, is also a primary component of consumption, which works most effectively when pro- cess, labor and dirt, the negative, remain carefully concealed so as not to disturb the holiday of the market.

And what better place to examine abundance than on a cruise ship, with its endless meals, snacks, midnight buffets, shopping, and non- stop gambling. Citizens of the society of abundance have lost the experience of the negative in all its forms [ But today the use value of the sea seems to have disappeared. In the mid-nineteenth century Marx perceptively observed that as capitalism advances, exchange value eclipses use value by foregrounding what things are worth monetarily while effacing any signs of the negative, such as the exploited labor which makes the things.

With the magical disappearance of use value, the gleaming, impenetrable surface of the commodity—wiped clean of conflict and tension—dominates, indeed dictates, everyday experience. Actually, Starbucks and cruise ships may have more in common than one would think. So you can enjoy here or at home. In emphasizing that the consumer can enjoy coffee from around the world at home or at Starbucks, all of which are reassuringly the same, Starbucks, like the cruise ship industry and other forces of globalization, sells the exotic yet familiar, homogeneous yet different but not too different within a carefully constructed environment that seems to be all surface.

And from on high I contemplate the globe in its roundness; No longer do I look there for the shelter of a hut. The world has become a pleasantly round sphere to be contemplated in itself, without any connection to the people who inhabit it. The onset of modern capitalism, followed half a century or so later by motorized cruise liners, offers the promise of abundance, thereby numbing the shocks created by gross inequality, unjust la- bor practices, the necessity of finding shelter in a hut.

And this abun- dance continues to hinder us from responding, in ways that are human, to the desperation of others in which we are all complicit. As I lay back on a well-worn mattress, elbows propping me up, she spits out a mouthful of white cum which becomes suspended in the plastic basin of water on the dirt floored, two dollar cinderblock shack with no windows and a curtain door. The North American tourist seeking a pleasurable vacation in the Caribbean finds solace in the globalized, commodified homogeneity of his destination, and in the difference that he feels but refuses to know in the magical, mesmerizing flashes of use value that are concealed by exchange value as rapidly as they appear.

At all costs, of course, the Caribbean tourist must repress the negative. Works Cited Bataille, Georges. Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. The De- velopment of an Aesthetic. Hill and Wang, Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers. Colum- bia UP, My Bondage and My Freedom. Miller, Orton and Mulligan, The Wretched of the Earth. Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Ideologies of Gender and Empire in Heart of Darkness.

Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. University of Chicago Press, Issues related to religion and governance came in for widespread re-examination within national contexts as well. Within a decade, Henry VIII would himself acknowledge the crucial role of plebeian agency in nation building by arranging for wide-scale dissemination of his new creed of political absolutism through commissioned propaganda. I am indebted to Prof. Maureen Bell and Prof. Robert Swanson for their helpful suggestions.

It is also unique in its emphasis on the persuasive power of statistics despite the spurious data provided and in its extremely conscious, almost Ma- chiavellian attempts at manipulating reader-response: New subjects require new models of expression. The lowly style and target audience, the seemingly spontaneous overflow of to the Defence of theyr Countreye London, ; An Inuective ayenste the Great and Detestable Vice, Treason London, The one-point programme of clergy-baiting and the strident note of out- rage that indiscriminately attribute almost all cardinal sins to the churchmen are reminiscent of the generalising tendency of medieval complaints, which frequently targeted the ecclesiasts as the major professional group deviating from its prescribed functions.

Clarendon, , for the distinctive characteristics of the two genres. Shaw, of course, indicts the capitalist society for this state of affairs. Responding to pressures within and without, even the Church showed a willingness and capacity to reform by insisting upon effective ministry through more regular and stringent visitations Swanson However, as Swanson argues, both lay complaints and ecclesiastical reprimands 6 The only heretical utterance in the pamphlet is the denial of purgatory but all the major Protestant positions are incorporated: The existing provision of praemunire and the statute of mortmain, the traditionally endorsed means of checking clerical encroachment, are cited as authentic proofs of the limited sphere of papal jurisdiction Fish 31, Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors; A.

For a more balanced assessment of the Catholic and Protestant influences at work in England on the eve of the Reformation, see Edwards But he is the first to demand full-scale abolition in- stead of piecemeal replacement by highlighting the paradoxical power equation between the priest and the people: These recurrent images of the parasite lording over the temporal and material pos- sessions of the host denote a modern sensibility pragmatic enough to supplement moral exhortation with worldly leverage.

Their collective output Collectanea, completed in September , provided the theoretical framework for the break with Rome including royal supremacy and imperial authority. Fish too, summons precedence as pretext to urge a revolutionary assertion of royal and national autonomy. The vanity of the disgruntled ruler is goaded into commitment by alternate flattery and taunts. The material attractions of wealth and dominion combine with the psychological fear of being proved impotent to elicit an active response from the king.

Substantial changes could not be effected without altering the power equation between the ecclesiastical and the lay courts. The interrelation between legislative and spiritual control and the servile capitulation of law to religious blackmail is highlighted through the issue of excommunication. Although elaborate directives delineated the conditions under which charges of heresy could be brought and a person excommunicated, Fish cites the exceptional case of Rich- ard Hunne to argue that it was subject to personal whims, malice and the instinct of self-preservation.

Lay prosecutors could be pre-empted or find the tables turned against them with clerical offenders playing judge over their spiritual lapses Fish , The issue is one of contending control over national re- sources—both people and money—and can only be resolved by establishing the unchallenged supremacy of a single governor in all spheres. Theoretically the bodies were to remain distinct but in reality, as Ives observes, about the body natural and body politic: Professedly addressing the king, Fish nevertheless has a dual audience in mind: All current anxieties are invoked to impress on the masses the urgency of his proposal.

In an era of apocalyptic social and eco- nomic changes that inevitably intensified the demand for spiritual sustenance, Fish exploits to the hilt the popular feeling of being let down by a thoroughly secularised and materialistic clergy. This is further iterated by a set of spurious statistics that nevertheless con- vince the readers because of their apparent exactness: As with the king, he agitates patriotic sentiments in the public by fostering the fear of foreign invasion and internal betrayal against the backdrop of emerging nationalism and cites historical evidence, how- ever misinterpreted, to strengthen his assertions Fish One predictable site of territorial aggression is the woman in the domestic sphere.

The dilemma of having to establish royal absolutism by extending the rights of the people and the diffi- culty of containing both within the single construct of the common- wealth generated acute tension within the post-Reformation polemical fabric. Fish, supplicating for the beggars, can be viewed as an ultra-radical championing the cause of the extreme periphery.

A self-appointed spokesperson of the former, he presents them as objects of charity and labels the latter group as a highly disruptive force threatening the established order. The growing number of freewheeling poor taking recourse to legitimate and illicit means of subsistence however, included various sub-segments.

Listed as vagabonds in 22 Hen. Public opinion therefore, regarded all paupers as subversive: His redressive measures are more akin to terror tactics. The deeply ingrained terror of the tramp vio- lating the boundaries of personal ownership and trespassing upon sexual, material or monetary property is deliberately whipped up to galvanise people into action: Moreover, order will be restored through the dismantling of and not reversion to an ortho- dox hierarchy.

The prime mover effecting this will be the monarch, the traditional upholder of status quo. The revolutionary, or from a different point of view, the disruptive effect of absolutism is grasped early by this promoter of religious reform. The scurrilous, ranting rhetoric of A Supplication for the Beggars is not only instrumental in persuading the public, it matches the violence embedded in the remedial proposals. Make laws against them? What a number of bishops, abbots, and priors are lords of your parliament? Are not all the learned men in your realm in fee with them [ What law can be made against them that may be available?

Fish 35 Exclamatory sentences are likewise intended to rouse jingoistic sentiments: Then shall these great yearly exactions cease [ Then shall the idle people be set to work. Then shall matrimony be much better kept. Then shall the generation of your people be increased. Then shall your commons increase in riches. Then shall the Gospel be preached. Then shall none beg our alms from us [ The ideological fervour of religious reformers combines with a prag- matic appreciation of material attractions and a calculated highlight- ing of the same in his programme.

Scurrilous vehemence and racy vigour anticipate the style of the Elizabethan pamphleteers. Dispensing social justice by appealing to the greed of the dispenser is indeed novel but the tracing of all evils—social, moral and economic—to clerical hege- mony proves a satisfactory solution for several quarters. Their unpatriotic behaviour is repeatedly empha- sised as power equations shift gears. The tract thus effectively tackles the problem of main- taining social control while seeking popular endorsement for a change in the ruling caucus.

However, the idea of social inversion implicit in the call for dismantling clerical hegemony could and did induce the lower orders to demand a transference of power actually beneficial to themselves, as the and rebellions testify. Even more subversive potential is embedded in the fictional frame- work of the diatribe. Works Cited Copland, Robert. Politics and Society in Reformation Eu- rope: The Select Works of Robert Crowley. The Making of the Modern English State.

The English Reformation Revised. Cambridge University Press, Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors. Prose of the English Renaissance. Appleton- Century Crofts, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. University of Minneapolis, Visitations of the Diocese of Norwich Camden Society new series Routledge and Kegan Paul, Politics, Policy and Piety. Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance. Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature. Powell, Ken, and Chris Cook.

English Historical Facts Visitations in the Diocese of Lincoln, Lincoln Record Society, English Historical Documents vol. Eyre and Spottiswoode, Anything more or less would be unjust: Forcing others to read us as we read ourselves conquest. Fresh combinations of images, words, metaphors, and tonal progressions enable us to construct an imaginative vision that may in turn casually transform or enlarge our range of emotional responses.

Montero comenta que Mme. Montero se identifica con Mme. Al Montero hacerse eco de las palabras de Lafargue, a quien Mme. Esta es la clave de un principio narrativo para los textos de Mayra Montero incluyendo sus novelas: A su paso y encuentro con estas diferentes muje- res de diversas edades, trasfondos culturales, incluyendo a una travesti se da cuenta de que ellas buscan cierto control sobre sus vidas, que es el fundamento de su dignidad.

O pudo haber sido una mujer independiente [ Montero parece apelar a sus lectores en su insistencia en atender la interioridad de sus personajes, para que se reconozca y experimente la existencia de subjetividades alternas. Por ello, de acuerdo a Piper: New York; Original Publications.

Barcelona, Tusquets Editores, A Theory of Latin American Narrative. Before Night Falls Arenas had a tumultu- ous life in Cuba: Besides using writing to testify to life experiences, Before Night Falls also documents how the act of writing created a quality of life amidst horrific persecutions and violations of human rights. Are- nas tells us: Before Night Falls speaks about writing and the creative imagination not only as ways of witnessing but also, as providing ways through poverty, oppression, and persecution.

Writing can do this through its existence as a work of art, and through its function as a mode of communicating ideas for change. Writing enables people to form arguments; provide testimony; break silences; trace histories; expose inequities and injustices; and imagine new ways of relating, loving, and desiring each other. Tensions often emerge when writing finds it difficult to merge or balance the interests between the public and private and the political and the aesthetic.

He comes to the conclusion that: Such work in rethinking AIDS, while it does not stand in for other, more direct political work, is a necessary way of responding to a health crisis still largely understood in homophobic, racist, sexist terms that continue to block an honest and open public discourse on sex and safer sex; a real commitment to the health not just of the uninfected but of those living now with HIV and AIDS; and effective health care and education for all.

Creative work can convey this message of both hope and loss in a way that obliquely political material, such as activist manifestos and HIV-education material cannot. Arenas used writing to document truths and inequities as well as to survive these truths and inequities: Arenas successfully merged activist with aesthetic and personal with political concerns when he wrote about his life in Cuba. Arenas used writing to voice the inequalities and persecutions he experienced in Cuba and as a Cuban exile in the USA.

Arenas wrote in order to enlighten readers in the hopes of reform; this reason for writing is well-documented in his autobiography. For example, in response to his government-ordered enslaved labour on a sugar plantation, Arenas wrote the long poem El Central BNF Poet and critic Francisco Soto rightly observes that: When Arenas describes the horrific conditions of Morro Castle prison, where he was imprisoned for two years, he tells us: Arenas is able to strike a balance between documenting brutality and persecution in Cuba with a hope and pursuit of freedom on both political and personal levels for the Cuban people and culture.

His difficulty in knowing AIDS seems at odds with the critical praise his writing receives for break- ing silences about homosexuality and Latin American masculinities. Arenas details in his introduction that he was diagnosed with AIDS in i. By this time, he had escaped from Cuba and was living as an exile in New York City.

Since the epidemic was only half-a-decade old, information about both the epidemiological nature of HIV and the politics of AIDS increased exponentially from the s into the s. One of these accounts reads as follows: Sakuntala, he was a writer of the s generation, justly forgotten in our century. AIDS treatment op- tions remained few throughout the s, and those that were avail- able focused on curing opportunistic infections as opposed to the virus itself.

Arenas battled his AIDS-related illnesses in a dynamic of urgency and unknowability that has changed over the past decade—especially since the advent of new HIV-treatment op- tions in David Ho, discovered that a combination of certain drugs inhibited the reproduction of HIV and had the power to dramatically lower the presence of HIV in the bloodstream of some patients.

These new antiretroviral drugs, also referred to as protease inhibitors, improved the quality of life and health of many people suffering from clinically defined HIV and AIDS- related illnesses. However, unlike people living in the West, and indeed, in New York City today, who have a higher chance of having access to life-prolonging pro- tease inhibitors and multiple antiretroviral treatments for HIV, at the time he decided to take his own life, Arenas was definitely dying rather than living with AIDS.

Throughout the body of his autobiogra- phy, Arenas directly mentions AIDS once and refers to it indi- rectly as a plague, as a curse, and as destruction three times , , Time and history work different shifts in both the life and the fiction; in the former Arenas marks the transformation of his literary output by the day of his diagnosis In and , there were 37, and 21, recorded AIDS-related deaths, respectively.

We connect our readings of desire, sexuality, oppression, per- secution, and struggle in the body of the book to our knowledge of AIDS: In the concluding pages of his Introduction Arenas writes: AIDS is a perfect illness because it is so alien to human nature and has as its function to destroy life in the most cruel and systematic way. Never before has such a formidable calamity affected mankind Moreover, all the rulers of the world, that reactionary class always in power, and the powerful within any system, must feel grateful to AIDS because a good part of the marginal population, whose only aspiration is to live and who therefore oppose all dogma and political hypocrisy, will be wiped out.

Persons near me are in no way responsible for my decision [to end my life]. There is only one person I hold accountable: The sufferings of exile, the pain of being banished from my country, the loneliness, and the diseases contracted in exile would probably never have happened if I had been able to enjoy freedom in my country.

Arenas began his memoirs during the four months he hid in Lenin Park after his initial arrest and before his two-year imprisonment in Morro Castle The emigration from Port Mariel began with an incident at the Peruvian embassy: The people sought political asy- lum and the right to leave Cuba. In a tactical error, Castro ordered the Cuban guards at the Peruvian embassy to leave, which enabled over 10, people to crowd inside the embassy and, Arenas says, over , to surround the outside of the embassy in hopes of claiming asylum on Peruvian territory Cuba is the only nation in the world to have publicly implemented an institutional containment policy for people testing positive for HIV-antibodies.

Cuba attributes its low rates 0. Its policies toward HIV have been consis- tent with its policies toward other diseases and epidemics. In short, Cuba treated the introduction of HIV into the country as a public health emer- gency, instituting traditional public health control measures to contain the spread of the disease. They have been rewarded with one of the lowest prevalence rates of HIV-infection in the world approximately 0. This estimate is well below the low and high estimated rates for the Carib- bean region, at an HIV-prevalence rate between 1.

Cuba is also well below the rates for Latin America, the average low rate being 0. In his book, Sexual Politics in Cuba: According to Minne- sota-based journalists Tasya Rosenfeld and reporter Kira Herbrand, who went to Cuba in January , stays at the sidatorios have been ambulatory since See the website http: The reasons for this shift in policy are complicated. This shift may be good for human rights as we see them in the West, but it also means that HIV-positive patients receive less medi- cal attention now then they did in the first decade and a half of the epidemic.

In the last thirty pages of Before Night Falls, Arenas tells us that the life of an exile brought new chal- lenges and struggles on socio-economic, artistic, and personal lev- els. Despite his career achievements, Arenas says his status as an exiled writer haunted him. The Bush administration for the first time has enforced a new regulation denying foreign ships entry to U.

Customs agents alerted the Treasury Department, the officials said. The ship, which had sought servicing at the port, was ordered away under a 5-month-old U. Arenas maintains that he not only suffered philosophically, but economically as an exiled writer. Even though he was a prolific and celebrated writer, Arenas died in poverty in New York City, turned away from hospitals because he could not pay for medical insurance BNF x.

For Arenas, exile is a socio-economic and artistic condition. In the frame of Be- fore Night Falls, Arenas connects the multiple losses of his life—loss of freedom, loss of friends and family, loss of his homeland, loss of his health—with the longing and hope for different future experi- ences for both himself and fellow Cubans. Due to the nature of his AIDS-related opportunistic infections, Arenas had diffi- culty putting pen to paper or hand to typewriter because he was encumbered by invasive hospital tubes and he was besieged with pain and fatigue.

He recounts that even while in intensive care, he wrote lyrics for songs and worked on the French translation of The Doorman xi. Arenas indi- cates that he decided to commit suicide because he could no longer write. Arenas tried to commit suicide at least three times before his death in and it is a recurring theme in both his autobiographical and fictional writing.

In Before Night Falls, he tells us that he tried to end his life very soon after his initial arrest under parametraje while he was a fugitive , upon arrival at Morro Castle Prison , and while awaiting sentencing at Morro Castle Prison In his novel The Brightest Star , Arenas presents suicide as a way to attain freedom from oppression and persecution when one is no longer able to write. Writing is a form of definitive, if pathetic liberation for Arturo. He cannot redeem or even explain his condi- tion in the same way that he can write and contextualize collective homophobia, forced labour, imprisonment, and exile.

When he writes about these adversities, he not only breaks silences about persecu- tion and injustice but, I believe, Arenas also tried to redeem or make something out the losses of freedom, home, and nation that he has survived. However, he finds that there is nothing redeemable from the AIDS-related loss of his quality of life and the loss of his ability to write. Current patent laws and pharmaceutical legal battles demonstrate that many Western governments are still more concerned about producing money, the business of capitalism, as opposed to using money to improve social conditions.

This short essay asks many more questions than it answers. While Before Night Falls is a text of a particular history, I also believe it is a text that can illuminate our present and our futures. We must continue to pursue new ways of reading, writing, desiring, and relat- ing to one another in our struggle to survive and change the HIV pandemic. We will not redeem the losses of the past and present, but we may be able to prevent the losses of the future.

Hallucinations translation of El mundo aluciante. Harper and Row, Farewell to the Sea translation of Otra vez el mar. The World and I July Andrew Hurley and Ann Tashi Slater. The Doorman translation of El portero. Before Night Falls translation of Antes que anochezca. Mona and Other Tales. Vintage Random House, Centers for Disease Control, Atlanta. University of Texas Press, Garrett, Laurie and Alec Wilkinson.

A medical, political, and media history of AIDS. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, Gender and Sexuality, Fiction and Science. Maintained by Jonathan Tennenbaum. Sexual Politics in Cuba: Boulder, San Francisco, and Oxford, The Guardian, Weekend, December 2nd, Elazar Barkan and Marie-Denise Shelton.

Stanford University Press, And The Band Played On: Lessons From The Damned: Close To The Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration. Lees y relees el aviso Voy a vivir con ustedes. Fuentes places great emphasis on the striking green eyes and the habitual green clothing of Aura and the young Consuelo. Aura tiene ojos verdes, se viste de verde y hasta las cortinas que se ven desde la calle son verdes. Recorres con la mirada el cuarto: Sin embargo, la presencia felina alrededor de la casona, a la que aluden tanto Aura como Felipe, es puesta en duda por la anciana: No puedes verla en la oscuridad Tienes que renacer Aura.

Obras citadas Bejel, Emilio y Elizabethan Beaudin. How I Wrote Aura. A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma. The Sense of the Past. Although these descriptions are disturbing, they are not surprising when one considers the wide-spread acceptance of imperialistic attitudes at the time. Yet the aim of this paper is not simply to point out that these reviewers are wrong in their word choices or to defend Naidu and Roy. The Politics of Lan- guage in African Literature, written in Thus, the patriarchal and imperialistic attitudes I mention here largely refer to the British colonial mind-set.

The degrading nature of these reviews should already be apparent. Before delving into the reviews of Naidu and Roy, a brief biogra- phy of each is needed to justify the comparison of the authors. Sarojini Naidu was born in to a fairly upper-class family. Because of her privileged economic standing, Naidu was educated and taught En- glish from an early age.

Despite her childhood aversion to the lan- guage, she later published numerous volumes of poetry in English: Further, the similarities between the two have not escaped the notice of at least one critic. While the other similarities are important, these two authors were chosen specifically because they each write in English. Although English is now one of the official languages of India, it is also a language that was brought into the country by the colonizing British. The British presence created a bilingual elite.

It should be recognized that both Naidu and Roy are members of this bilingual elite class. This bilingualism gives the authors access to both British and Indian peoples, but it also serves as a barrier to complete accep- tance in either group. Naidu and Roy both experience the difficulties involved in being an Indian author writing in English. It is the non- acceptance of these Indian authors by the popular British press that will be dealt with in this paper. Sarojini Naidu Colonizers frequently positioned the colonized female as an ex- otic other. This phenomenon has been examined by many theo- rists.

Within this tradition the colonized female is a site on which the colonizing male places sexual desire McClintock Although the focus of book reviews is usu- ally the literature in question, reviews of Naidu instead often center around her body and physical appearance. The objectification then arises jointly from her identity as an exotic other and from her gender.

This description immediately sets Naidu apart from the reader and positions her as different; she is from a strange land and a different culture. This positioning of Naidu as exotic is found in other reviews as well. Nearly the entire review revolves around physical descriptions of Naidu, and it only briefly touches on her poetry.

It is interesting to point out that this reviewer is female as well. Whether one argues that Thomas describes Naidu in this manner because she has been taught to write in a patriarchal fashion with a patriarchal language, or that this exoticized description occurs because Naidu is of a different nation- ality than Thomas and that gender is not so much the issue, the fact remains that these types of physical descriptions of Naidu existed and were prevalent.

In fact, the majority of the praise given to her poetry focuses on what the reviewers see as its exotic subject matter. She is praised not so much for her talent as a writer, but for her willingness to reveal the secrets of a strange land to the western eye. Finally, Bronner excitedly explains, there is an Indian writer who can tell us about Indian life in our language. Edmund Gosse, a British writer, tells us that he instructed her to write this way. He admits, in the very introduction to her book of poetry, that he explained to Naidu that what he, and other British readers, wished to receive was: His greatest praise for her poetry, like the above mentioned reviewers, is that it allows the west- ern reader a peek into the eastern world and is able to give them understanding.

This, Gosse tells us, is because she has been trained by them to write in their fashion Gosse 6. The infantilization of Naidu In addition to positioning the colonized writer as exotic, the dis- course of infantilization is also prevalent amongst colonizers. This discourse entails viewing the colonized as child-like and simple, as someone in need of proper education and discipline.

The colonizer then becomes the one who bestows knowledge and judge- ment onto a child-like people. Ashis Nandy, in The Intimate Enemy, also explores the issue of infantilization as being tied to the practice of locking the colonized into an essentialized past. That is, the colonizers were positioned as the parent-like educators who enlightened a child-like people who might have been great in the past, but who were now in need of instruction. Here, he explicitly compares Naidu to a child and positions himself as a pa- tronizing parent who graciously reads her attempts at adult litera- ture.

Again, both of these appellations relegate Naidu to the position of a child who needs parental guid- ance. Other reviews continue in the same fashion. One should also here remember the parent-like relationship Edmund Gosse clearly felt he had with Naidu. Gosse, in his own opinion, is the one who taught Naidu as one would teach a child how to be a true poet.

It is important to point out here that in positioning Naidu and her poetry as infantile, these reviewers are attempting to revise Naidu into someone who is non-threatening. These descriptions por- tray Naidu as unimposing, obedient, and harmless. They create a very different picture of the Naidu than that of at least one later reviewer who perhaps sees her more accurately. This anonymous reviewer argues that Naidu betrays: The picture offered by this reviewer is so vastly different from that of Bronner or Thomas that one must either believe Naidu went through a complete change of personality, or that these beliefs were at least partially present and were altered or ignored by those who portrayed her as an infantile, exotic other.

Naik feels that Indian-English writing constitutes a literature of its own and should not be seen as simply imitating the British tradition. That is, not only does Indian-English literature not follow in the British tradition, it helps to re-create a separate India apart from one defined by colonialism. What is good about her writing, in their opinion, is that she has learned the British mode of writing well.

Credit is only partially given to Naidu as an Indian or as a writer. These re- viewers do not acknowledge the possibility that Naidu, and other Indian authors writing in English, make the language their own. Or, if they do recognize that Indian authors are creating something uniquely their own although in the English language , they choose to empha- size instead how the literature fits into the British tradition, perhaps to undermine any agency they see arising from the literature.

Have the descriptions changed? The answer, as found in contemporary, British reviews of Arundhati Roy, is that these stereotypes are still widely propagated. There are two differences, however. Yet, although much of the language has changed, the stereotypes are still readily apparent. Second, the whole body of reviews on Roy is much more balanced. Every review one finds about Naidu stereo- types her, or her writing, in some way. For my purposes in this paper, though, I will be concentrating on the equally vast number of reviews that perpetuate the above mentioned stereo- types.

In fact, they still find their way into such unlikely places as reviews of literature where one would expect to hear about, well—literature. Barker delights in the novel chiefly because she sees it as a window to a strange, exotic land—much like earlier reviewers of Naidu. Has the female, Indian author reached adulthood over the last years? As with the issue of exoticism, the infantilization of Roy is much less frequent than that of Naidu.

Yet, this practice is also still alive and should be acknowledged. This reviewer seems set on infantilizing Roy. Cowley is not the only reviewer to do so, however. Again, we see the lack of respect for a female, Indian author materialize through the comparison of an adult woman to a child or teenager. Praise for the novel as a well- written and Indian piece of writing is scarce. She does not capitalize prop- erly, she creates one- or two-word sentences, they complain. Having thought these thoughts, Estha Alone was happy with his bit of wisdom. Roy The capitalization in this passage does not seem to be random at all; it is used here to emphasize certain important words.

She was the first non-expatriate Indian author, and the first Indian woman to have won. Although this manner of writing may not be ap- pealing to some, there does at least seem to be method behind it. In her book, Talking Back: Boehmer argues just this: Thus, the re- viewers are then not simply responding to bad grammar, they are also—whether consciously or not—rejecting a new Indian-English language found in the novel.

While many reviewers rejected the novel because of its per- ceived grammatical flaws, other critics embraced it for the inverse reason: Green weed and river grime was woven into her beautiful red-brown hair. Her sunken eyelids were raw, nibbled at by fish. O yes they do, the deepswimming fish. Not only does she praise the novel for being written in the British fashion, she praises it and claims it as British literature. The broader reception of Roy While the reception of Naidu and Roy in British periodicals has been the focus of this paper, the wider reception of Roy should also be addressed in order to gauge how pervasive these colonial stereo- types are.

Do Indian or Japanese or Canadian reviewers perpetuate the same images of female, Indian authors that have been discussed? The answer is complicated. Further, it avoids referring to Roy as either exotic or infantile. Yet, other Indian reviewers do seem to occasionally participate in the same stereotyping that British reviews use. These comments problematize the issue of colonial stereotypes. It seems that stereotypes which were created by colo- nizers are also absorbed into the cultures of the colonized. It is said Holiday! A spongy mermaid who had forgotten how to swim.

A silver thimble clenched, for luck, in her little fist. Roy Sire Thopas wax a doghty swayn; Whit was his face as payndemayn, His lippes rede as rose; His rode is lyk scarlet in grayn, And I yow telle in good certayn He hadde a semely nose. Chaucer Chaucer and Roy differ in subject matter, style, tone and, I would even argue, lan- guage. Further, it is also possible that these comments result from gender stereotypes just as much as they do from colonial ones. Infantilizing a woman or focusing on her physical appearance are not practices confined only to the discourse of colonialism.

These are also subtle ways of discriminating against all women. While we see that some of the same types of comments that were prevalent in British periodicals do occur in newspapers of other countries, it seems they are much less frequent. It seems that many of the ways theorists argue that colonizers viewed those whom they colonized still exist in the minds of numerous individuals not all British.

This paper does not attempt such an ambitious project. I refer to these reviews here simply to broaden the discussion of how Roy has been received by pointing out what has been said of her in non-British periodicals. We must also be careful to realize that gender and colo- nial stereotypes are tied up together in these reviews.

Naidu and Roy are not only discussed and described in terms of their Indian iden- tity, they are also commented upon as women authors. Nonetheless, it is clear that the effects of colonialism are present in reviews of British reviews of Indian literature. Many reviewers today continue to revive colonial tropes in order to suppress the writings of other cul- tures. Works Cited Barker, Christine.

Women, Culture, and Politics in Latin America

A Cultural Review Brijnath, Rohit and Binoo K. Flowering Of A Rebel. The Times 12 Dec. Sunday Telegraph 1 June The Bird of Time: Mail On Sunday 8 June Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. The Daily Telegraph 3 September Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. The Colonizer and the Colonized. A History of Indian English Literature. Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. The Inviolable Law of Love. The Times 29 Dec.

The God Of Small Things. A Maga- zine of Verse 10 Tharu, Susie and K. Women Writing in India B. A Magazine of Verse 35 La escriben, primero, los que pueden escribir, y segundo, los vencedo- res. Creo que eso es bastante claro. El problema no se mitiga escribiendo una novela en la cual la protagonista sea una heroica y maravillosa mujer.

No tiene nada que ver con eso. La Historia de la que estoy hablando no es la de las batallas, ni de las independencias y revoluciones, a las que tan aficionados somos los latinoamericanos. Al hablar de tiempo suelen incluirse tres tipos: Estos cinco seres celestiales tienen la potestad de disponer y controlar el deve- nir de los seres humanos.

Linealidad, simultaneidad y circularidad: En los cinco seres celestiales se enlonga indefinidamente la vida ya que el tiempo para ellos es perenne: Esta perspectiva encierra el deseo de combatir la praxis del poder como eje de la Historia hecha por los hombres. Este planteamiento desconcierta al referido tribunal y para apaciguarla deciden concederle otra vida.

Como se puede apreciar uno de los artifi- cios utilizados en la novela consiste en el entrelazamiento de la instantaneidad ficticia y subjetiva a un nivel vital objetivo. La primera existencia de Malena de la era cristiana fue la de Giulia Metela. Otro detalle significati- vo que resalta la oblicuidad de los hechos es que ella va a parar a una celda al igual que la cortesana del siglo XIII. El nombre del amante, Alonso Riera, resulta muy revelador ya que sus iniciales A.

Si la mujer tiene hijos, demuestra su placer sensual, y por ende, su pecado. A ella se le ha negado su valor y se han minimizado sus logros aun cuando se destaque por cualidades especiales como el caso de Isabella. Luego de la muerte de su progenitor logra contraer nupcias con su amado pero enviuda prontamente. Por este motivo, la mujer no ha podido o no le han permitido desarrollarse. Para presentar sus denuncias Torres se vale, entre otras cosas, de estructuras temporales particulares.

Ediciones del Norte, Revista de litera- tura y artes venezolanas 1. Narradoras venezolanas del Siglo XX. Power and Know- ledge. The Harvester Press, Figures of Literary discourse. Columbia University Press, Radical Historicism from Hegel to Foucault. La novela moderna en Venezuela. On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life. Northwestern University Press, La historia en la mirada.

Fondo Editorial del Centro de Estudios Literarios, Gender and the Politics of History. Malena de cinco mundos. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Colonial efforts to educate and convert Native Americans are found as early as the seventeenth century, but by the mid-nineteenth century, ad- ministrators and educators were becoming increasingly frustrated with their endeavors in on-reservation day and boarding schools.

We are not speaking of all women—some were patriotic, and most were indifferent. The s were a period of powerful nationalist movements in Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil. The iconography of those movements was overwhelmingly masculine, the ideal national figure being a male head of state, who, if not himself a general, a hero of the revolution, or a gaucho, was certainly surrounded by military power.

Although women worked for reform and change at home, they had few effective channels for garnering support, and their programs were often dismissed as irrelevant by both government and opposition leaders. Alienation from the political process within the national community should not be construed as obviating love of homeland, of place, of one's historical family; rather, it should be understood as part of the meaning that the transnational arena held for Latin American feminists in this era. The convention stated, "There shall be no distinction based on sex as regards nationality.

It served as the model for the Convention on the Nationality of Women that was subsequently adopted by the League of Nations. The women's work for gender equity did not diminish their commitment to the cause of international peace. Of central concern in the Southern Cone in this period was the conflagration in the Gran Chaco.

The dispute between Bolivia and Paraguay over the vast territory of the Chaco, which stretches from the eastern slopes of the Andes to the Paraguay River, began with isolated armed skirmishes in the late s. The conflict flared into a bloody war that ultimately took nearly , lives and bankrupted the treasuries of the participants before a truce was reached in During the war, nationalist passions were high.

The petition called for arbitration and denounced the participants in the war as tools of international capitalist interests; but most telling of the sentiments of the publication and its audience was the dedication of the July—August issue to the women of Boliva and Peru, "reviving the spirit of the glorious days of Independence" when the two nations were one. Yes, women of Bolivia, my friends, we are one.

We are working with faith, with love, for the time where we will be one great country, a "patria" without frontiers; a country founded on spiritual betterment. The idea of a "patria" without boundaries is a specifically nonnational vision. The idea of sisterhood, of an imagined community of interests based on gender, of the women's insistence on the commonality of the human experience, undermines the idea of nation.

This is well illustrated in the subsequent history of the women's platform. The Eighth International Conference of American States met in Lima in ; the main business of the conference was the effort, led by the United States, to unite the hemisphere in the event of war. In the Declaration of Lima, the American republics reaffirmed their continental solidarity and "determination to defend themselves against all foreign intervention. The Inter-American Commission of Women had never enjoyed the support of the United States diplomatic corps, and under the Roosevelt regime, it became a particular target of Eleanor Roosevelt.

The feminist leaders were advised to turn their efforts to the defense of democracy, not to raise divisive issues. Over the protests of the members of the commission itself, the opposition, which came principally from the United States delegation, succeeded in recasting the Inter-American Commission of Women from an independent women's commission to a subsidiary unit of the inter-American apparatus.

Despite its diminished status, the IACW continued its work, and its legacy is readily apparent in the next decade. At the Chapultepec Conference on the Problems of War and Peace in Mexico on March 8, , the wording of the Lima resolution was directly incorporated into the plans for the United Nations; in October, , in San Francisco, Inter-American Commission of Women representatives Bertha Lutz of Brazil, Minerva Bernadino of the Dominican Republic, and Amalia Caballero de Castillo Ledon of Mexico used the precedent inter-American resolutions on the status of women to insist that the opening paragraph of the Charter of the United Nations include the phrase "the equal rights of men and women.

Legal rights and the appointment of women to the diplomatic tables were only a part of the Latin American and North American feminists' agenda in the pre-World War II period. The women's concerns and those of their like-minded male colleagues on issues of social welfare, education, and the need for economic change were incorporated in the Chapultepec Charter, the Charter of the United Nations, and the newly organized Organization of American States.

Women themselves were now part of governmental delegations, and much of their agenda was incorporated into the international agenda. A number of questions arise.

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Did women as the counter-voice at the international conferences vanish after , only to reemerge during the United Nations International Year of the Woman in ? Did women, once they were the official representatives of their governments, cease to function as a pressure group for change? Did the historical antinationalist position of the first generation of Latin American feminists disappear in the s? Or is there evidence of the continuation of a separatist, explicitly feminist, political strategy within the context of inter-American relations?

By the attention of the inter-American diplomatic community had shifted from social and economic reform to a focus on opposition to communism, a position embraced by governments throughout the hemisphere. An extraordinary meeting of American foreign ministers and heads of state was convened at the Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Continental Peace and Security, in Petropolis, near Rio de Janeiro, from August 15 to September 2, , at the instigation of the Latin American states. The emphasis on arming the nation-states of the Western Hemisphere, which has formed the bulk of inter-American assistance in postwar history, dates from this agreement.

They came not as representatives of their governments but as delegates from women's clubs throughout the hemisphere: These women were not politically radical within their national communities, but they believed strongly in the need for women to speak out on issues of social and political equality, human welfare, and peace. Their first press release stated:. The First Inter-American Congress of Women meeting in Guatemala, representing mothers, wives, daughters of our Continent, has resolved in plenary session to denounce the hemispheric armament plan under discussion at the Rio Conference, asking that the cost of the arms program be used to support industry, agriculture, health and education for our people.

The women declared their right to speak on international issues: We resolve to ask the Pan American Union and all Pan American associations to enact the following resolutions in the inter-American conferences. In those weeks of August , the proceedings of the Rio conference were headlined in the world press; The New York Times carried daily page-one coverage.

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The Primer Congreso Interamericano de Mujeres was also noted in the press. In a number of Latin American papers, including the opposition press in Guatemala, it was accused of communist sympathies. The women were not successful in staying the arming of the Americas, but it is apparent that in the immediate postwar period the women of the Americas continued to look beyond the nation-state to the transnational arena for community, for empowerment, for the opportunity to articulate their ideas and to be heard. The women who met at Guatemala City in to counter the Rio Pact came together not to buttress the position of their respective nation-states but to protest the aggrandizement of national power through arms at the expense of the citizenry, an issue they saw as within their traditional purview.

Nor was their petition based upon an imagined equation. The women were acting within the historical context of a half century of a feminist, pacifist tradition, established by the women of the Americas from the Latin American Scientific Congresses of the s to the Primer Congreso Femenino in to the creation of the IACW in In the immediate postwar period, when the formal inter-American community refused to respond to the women's historical commitment to peace and disarmament, the women again looked to a separatist transnational strategy.

Latin America in the s faced a menacing crisis of modernization. Beset with the problems of nation building and rapid urbanization, its leading critics and intellectuals sought to rationalize these dramatic changes occurring in society by generating a theoretical construct to explain new American ideas. Conservatives and liberals alike studied the merits of progress and the price the more established social classes would have to pay for the growth of the modern city.

Creative writers also participated in the quest for self-definition, responding to the modernization program in three different registers. In the first instance, a highly patriotic literature defended state ideology. Faced with the question of representing Latin America to its readers, or better, of creating a social subject resistant to modern realities, conservative authors of the s tried to preserve the authority of tradition.

Writing of this kind was informed by a desire to protect the status quo and reiterated the symbols and ideas that enforced the rights of those in power. These authors strove to create a myth of an organically unified America, in which the civilizing leadership of the elders might bring order and harmony to the nation. In the second instance, a more skeptical band of writers challenged the validity of the emerging state, but far from looking to the past as a model of successful nation building, they emphasized fragmentation and disruption as key features of modern times.

Doubt was cast on the possibility of forming any enduring project of state organization. While some responded to this perception of disorder with nihilism and despair, others reveled in what was seen as the chaos of modernity. From this latter group, a host of new writers emerged to carry the banner of avant-garde aestheticism. Not to be confused with members of the European cultural movements of the time, writers of the Latin American avant-garde incorporated selected elements of their national or regional conditions in their works while looking to contemporary Spain or.

France for novelty of literary form. Modernity, with all of its force, was celebrated by these youthful authors, who rushed to the innovation of form and ideas as a way to break from the elders; thus, they staged a generational rebellion against audience, tradition, and institutions. Finally, a highly politicized, left-wing political program emerged in the s to provide an alternative to bourgeois politics and literatures.

Rooted in the new social movements that emerged with urban growth, social realist literature took as its focus of study the plight of marginals in society. Writers demonstrated a range of interests extending from political reformism of both left- and right-wing tendencies to a fervent defense of the autonomy of the work of art. Among these possibilities, a feminine literary discourse emerged, assessing both aesthetic and nationalist projects to forge a different system of writing. As such, women's literature of the s provided a new framework for the reception and interpretation of masculine symbols of identity.

It also offered terms for rereading the deployment of power. For this realization it depended upon the strategies of disruption produced by the avant-garde, but it also came into obvious debate with the nationalist tendencies of Latin American literature as if to reevaluate the programs of the modern state from a distinctively female perspective. The status of women in the early twentieth century may be analyzed in the context of political programs for national reform and modernization.

Rapid economic growth was matched by a vast migration to the capital cities; at the same time, the unionization of labor created suspicion and fear among Latin America's ruling classes. Through this period of massive social upheaval, when anarchism threatened the state and democratic impulses shook the foundations of the oligarchy, women became at once subjects and pawns of the emerging texts of resistance. Indeed, in cities such as Buenos Aires, whose population was radically transformed by these events, working women—and foreigners especially—were suspected of destroying the basis of modern society.

In particular, these working women of the early twentieth century were singled out for their affiliations with anarchist movements and were accused of subversive activity. Not only did women in Buenos Aires establish their own anarchist newspapers but they also spoke freely against the repressive struc-.

Women's sexuality and free control over their bodies were of deep concern to these anarchists as they sought to protect females from public and domestic abuse. Aside from the declarations found in pamphlets of the time, women were quite active in organized strikes and acts of sabotage. One historian notes that women in lower-class neighborhoods of Buenos Aires organized the largest strike in Argentina before the decade of the s.

Meanwhile, in a less strident tone and usually at variance with anarchist platforms, socialist parties argued for equal rights for women, universal suffrage, reform of the civic codes, and better education for all. Because of feminist activities in turn-of-the-century Latin America, women were often perceived as straying from the family unit.

In a society where the family was equated with the national good, women who left the private sphere and moved into the public domain were often considered saboteurs of the unified household, promoting activities that undermined larger state interests. As such, their presence in the modern nation-state posed some contradiction. After all, women were necessary for the pronatalist policies of the state; their work outside the home was often necessary for the economic survival of the working-class family; and their public engagements as teachers or supervisors of beneficent groups generally received official support.

In the early years of the twentieth century, there was considerable popular and scientific concern for the monitoring of women's bodies. This concern is evident in the contents of the penny dreadfuls and the women's weekly magazines, in the hygiene manuals designed for women, and in the almost xenophobic emphasis on keeping immigrant women from the nationalist domain.

The hygiene movement, for example, which was generated by a con-. The woman's body became embarrassingly public, less through her own volition than through the schemes of those in authority. These popular lessons for women were accompanied by pseudoscientific discourses; even the weekly magazines published clinical diagnoses of love or positivistic analyses of erotic relationships.

Caras y Caretas, Plus Ultra , and the Almanaque Hispanoamericano in this period provided many such explorations of eros. At the same time, certain intellectuals of the Centennial period in Latin American history attempted to organize a theory of the feminine in order to preserve the integrity of the nation. He denounced the restraints that marriage imposes upon individual freedom and sensuality; indeed, he asserted, insofar as it generates a concern for legal order, propriety, and convenience, marriage appears to threaten the very possibility of romantic love.

Love and marriage were to be regarded as separate matters; the first was a question of instinct, the second a matter of household management and ultimately of the continued efficiency of the state apparatus. Restraint in love was thereby advised for those preoccupied with matters of organization and progress; in the interest of moral affirmation and domestic peace, love and marriage were to be kept apart. A concern for the efficiency of the family also informed the pedagogical programs of the Argentine school system.

Thus, in the introduction to his multivolumed La literatura argentina , Ricardo Rojas denounced the impoverished values of the modern nuclear family and its failure to meet the needs of children. The real paterfamilias was to be found in the academy. Rojas had in mind a retraining of Argentine children born to immigrant families, but his message pointed to the shortcomings of mothers in general.

Unable to adapt to a symbolic mode of thinking, women, Rojas argued, should at least be given a. These efforts were part of a state program to enforce homogeneity on the various social projects upon which modern women had embarked. At a time of ebullient multiplicity in mass cultural practices, the state tried to impose and retain hierarchical order over its subjects; in a period when the feminine was equated with the unmanageable, women became the specific target of such disciplinary action.

This programmatic endeavor to exercise control over women is seen in creative literary endeavors as well, where it was largely held that the advancement of nationalist interests constituted a moral mission. Referring in particular to the impact of this ideology on creative production of the period, he explained:. He hablado del nacionalismo. Esta tendencia va a dominarlo todo. I'm speaking about nationalism. This tendency will dominate everything.

It will be the motor that keeps us in perpetual action, the generator and transformer of our poetry, the creator of our ideals. Soon Argentine writers will be read in all Spanish-speaking nations; this will happen when our predominance is recognized and consolidated in Spanish America and when our moral governance looms gigantically over the continent. In addition, this discourse on nationalism was clearly marked by considerations of gender, prompting some curious disquisitions by men of both left- and right-wing persuasions.

Men of fiercely nationalistic convictions and even those who argued for a democratic alternative used the image of the feminine to defend their respective programs of action. In the s, two prominent literary journals in Spanish America offered noteworthy cases of left- and right-wing discourses that exploited the image of women. Promoting a specifically nationalist discourse, Inicial — , an Argentine periodical supported by intellectuals of literary culture, defended a return to traditional values and an unambiguous defense of the state.

In the prefatory statement of this review, the editors of Inicial declared war on subversives, advocating serious reprisals. As part of this denunciation, Inicial specifically protested. Here, the editors draw unabashed comparisons between acts of national perfidy and feminine behavior; the traitors of the nation are clearly aligned with women. Thus, in this highly gendered text, a masculinist discourse upholds virtue and patriotism while the vile elements of society are singularly debased to the sphere of the feminine. It follows then that the feminine is a threat to the stability of the state; universal suffrage, modernization, and revolutionary ideals form part of a program of subversion.

The identification of the feminine with an oppositional consciousness in Latin America is broadly suggested in the decade of the s and is evident even in the texts of progressive advocates. For example, the Revista de Avance — , a Cuban literary magazine whose editors included some members of the newly founded Cuban Communist Party, represents the most radical avant-garde achievement in Latin America in the period and offers a paradigmatic evaluation of feminist practice within a nationalist context.

Praising the work of the Alianza Nacional Feminista, a suffragist group active in Cuba in the s, the Revista de Avance links feminism with democratic process, as the following citation reveals:. Esta falange de mujeres puede significar una oportuna reserva de fuerzas para nuestra diezmada democracia. This phalanx of women can represent an opportune reserve of strength for our weakened democracy. When as men, usurpers of a democratic exclusionary practice that is essentially antidemocratic, and even more, antihuman, we feel beaten by disillusion and we cry somewhat foolishly over principles that we did not know how to defend, women—less skeptical, less apprehensive in the face of common politics, more filled with faith in the destiny of their people—run to the vanguard position and emphatically affirm their faith in democratic ideals.

Following a course of resistance to state authoritarianism, the Revista de Avance relied upon the image of the feminine to organize a program of opposition. Here feminine practice is perceived as a behavior available to all progressive individuals to compensate for the abusive political projects traditionally embraced by Cuban men. Less cynical and less corrupt, women, in the eyes of the editors of Revista de Avance , have the potential to introduce a genuinely democratic reform in society. It is interesting, at the same time, to contemplate the uses of women in Cuban projects of modernization.

In this period, women lobbied actively for divorce legislation and claimed a voice in congressional proceedings to demand suffrage and equal compensation. Thus, if in the parlance of the right women were situated among the adversaries who threatened the stability of official institutions, in the rhetoric of the left the feminine was equated with democracy and the possibility of reform. Undoubtedly, women played an important symbolic and active role in civil society of the s and s. Like the texts of political movements, with their heated polemic about the merits of nationalist programs, positioning the feminine within a discourse of opposition, literary texts of the s aligned women in counterpoint to the state; concomitantly, the family was perceived as a unit in hopeless disarray.

This is consonant with a long history in Latin American letters, where traditionally the role of women and the family had been cast in debate with nationalist interests. Elizabeth Kuznesof and Robert Oppenheimer have noted that alliances between family and state power were characteristic of nineteenth-century nationalism in Latin America. In this condition, the woman saves her family by taking charge of the household; in the process, she becomes a figure of opposition to the state.

One can observe, beginning in the post-Independence period, a clear interest in the feminine figure in this kind of adversarial role; this occurred especially at moments when the dissolution of the family in literature was read as a challenge to political regimes. Argentine literary history is especially rich in examples of this image of the feminine, particularly in the nineteenth century, when liberal men of letters voiced their opposition to the tyrant Juan Manuel de Rosas and used his daughter, Manuela, to show the fragmentation of the family qua state see Mary Louise Pratt's essay, this volume.

This example takes us beyond Christopher Lasch's definition of the family as a "haven in a heartless world," for in nineteenth-century representations we see that the repressive family, as a microcosm for the state, often exhausts itself due to the efforts of women. The creative literature of the s and s confirms this perception of women as adversaries of nationalist interests. In this period, however, female characters lack the heroic fortitude to challenge the injustice of tyranny; clearly, they are not recommended for public service, nor do they serve the interests of democratic reform.

Rather, they are revealed as sinister agents of subversion. Their behavior is informed by irrationality and misguided eros, so that the only solution for them is found in a controlled domesticity. Thus, in the conservative texts of the early twentieth century, women are cautioned against excess and eliminated from the public realm; they are then returned to the domestic sphere, where they are supervised by a benevolent spouse. The naturalist novel, which survived in Latin America well into the decade of the s, reinforced these paradigms of domesticity.

In this kind of fiction, women were representative of the forces of disruption, or often were identified with the uncivilized land insofar as both are objects of masculine conquest and domination. Had she been under the tutelage of her parents with appropriate discipline and guidance, she would not have fallen prey to corruption or lost her sense of virtue. In this scheme of things, women bear no responsibility for the larger questions of ideology and institutions, nor should they be allowed access to untested ideas. Accordingly, women like Raselda had no business in the education of youth.

Furthermore, in this novel, with its abundant erotic passages and explicitly detailed abortion, all images converge on a single objective: The body of woman is to be controlled at any cost in a period of social decadence, for unattended she succumbs to the barbarous extremes of undisciplined sensuality. In the literatures of nationalist and avant-garde tendencies, women are often presented as subverting family harmony.

Since domestic peace is a goal lust and desire must be contained. Raselda, the heroine, suffers in love and work because she cannot properly separate these antagonistic realms, and she lacks sufficient clarity to separate work and passion. Finally, she is expelled from civil society and condemned to solitude. Far from consolidating a nationalist project, the woman was used in Centennial texts to show disruption and chaos, while she indicated the cause for the failure of any program of social reform.

In short, in an age when women were considered antagonistic to national interests, it was common to exercise control over them, suppressing their passions unsparingly. Control was then reasserted in literature by the representation of a unified household. Within this context, men were to fulfill the role of paterfamilias, imparting wisdom and rule to their flock, while women were destined to serve as housekeepers, devoted to domestic labor and motherhood; but this plan always met with resistance.

In the organization of family roles in fiction of the realist, mundonovista mode, the feminine was thus identified as the center of contradiction. Accordingly, in the great sagas of the South American frontier, the theme of civilization versus barbarism—the dichotomy that sums up the thinking of writers and statesmen who tried to understand Latin America from the time of the mid-nineteenth century—women were equated with barbarism, which had to be curbed by men of reason.

It is also important to observe the absence of any great matriarch or woman of intuitive magic in these novels: Instead, the women in the novels written by men of the s were depicted as uncontrollable and often evil, inclined to wanton aggression or irrational, perilous endeavors. The women in these novels had two courses available to them: Finally, the avant-garde literatures, as an independent activity of the s, also broached the debate on women with overt hostility.

In general, practitioners of the avant-garde insisted on a culture of masculinity; forceful, isolating, arrogant, the search for power that informed this movement was abusive of women. This is true of the Argentine Oliverio Girondo, who describes women's bodies as fragmented limbs or objects to be contemplated by the tourist-poet, and of the Chilean Vicente Huidobro, whose ironic prose poems express an extravagant violence against women.

Clearly, in this lively confraternity of men of the s there was little space for women. Artistic and intellectual production by women of this period repudiates these perceptions and gives evidence of transforming the tradition of nationalist literature. In the prose fiction of the s and s, a new social body was produced in which women refused their status as "other" and challenged their domestic assignments. As such, this literature initiated a reevaluation of traditionally perceived gender roles while it situated women's activity in opposition to authority.

Its goal, then, was to produce an autonomous female subject, one that escapes the deadening effects of a repressive nationalist discourse, and one in which woman resists her status as an object within the. Literature of this kind provided a clear alternative to avant-garde movements in Latin America and to the masculinist discourse they produced; it challenged the dominant voices of experimental authors such as Girondo and Huidobro. It also answered the nationalist program contained in the mundonovista novels, in which heroes of near-epic stature laid claim to the vast American terrain.

Intrinsic to their project, lived experience guides the premises of their narrative fiction. As itinerant intellectuals who embarked upon the traditional grand tour and traveled frequently between Europe and America in search of a better life, these women participated in the life common to Latin American vanguardistas. De la Parra, for example, left her native Venezuela to study and travel in Europe and sustained active transcontinental communication with writers such as Gabriela Mistral. Lange, the "damisela" of the Argentine avant-garde, wife of Oliverio Girondo, friend of the cosmopolitan circle known as the "Florida Street poets," was born into special privilege in Europe before moving to Latin America.

Throughout her lifetime, she engaged in dialogue with international elites. Also a writer uprooted, Bombal was, like Lange, privileged. She left her native Chile and spent many of the vanguard years in Argentina and in Europe, where she became an intimate friend of Lange and other women writers. Together, the fiction of these women reflects the constant displacement or homelessness of the female intellectual, as much as it voices an opposition to the masculinist avant-garde programs.

What we see, then, are women who used their status as exiles to resist the containment of an encroaching nationalist rhetoric. They refused the unifying discourse that maintains the female body in place, limiting woman to reproductive functions or domestic labor. Indeed, almost as a correlative of the anarchist activities described earlier, women writers engaged in a series of deconstructive challenges in which discourses were multiplied and the sites of meaning released from their compartmentalized frames, no longer anchored by male prerogatives in the literary or social domain.

Accordingly, in the writings of these women, narrative situation, structure, and the position of character disregard the masculine attention to birthright, inheritance, and linear order and clearly repudiate the nationalist program. Multiple voices participate in the structuring of fiction, until finally characters find themselves dismissing any identity as unified subjects. In order to sustain this rebellion, feminine heroines, first of all, repudiate any fixed point of origin.

Female migration, travel, and orphanhood or abandonment thus provide the motivation for women's fiction of the s. Alone or on the road in search of adventure, the new heroine renounces family and. Like their authors, who traveled extensively between Europe and America, the female protagonists of Latin American avant-garde fiction use homelessness to their advantage and finally unleash themselves from domestic constraints by refusing any heterosexual commitments.

The novel of orphanhood is particularly interesting in the feminist context. It has been suggested frequently that family relationships and particularly the role of the father stand at the center of all activity in fiction. To put it more directly, the dead father initiates society in the novel; his true status is revealed in the trace of his absence. As such, the novel seeks to piece together fragments of reality in order to strive toward a coherent whole, a unified vision of reality in which the hero finds his destiny by reconstructing his past.

The mundonovista narrative that I have described in earlier pages indeed attempts to replicate that quest for a coherent text. The feminine example, however, is designed to repudiate all models of authority, to unleash the heroine from the bondage of rules and the constraints of romance. Moreover, the feminist model for fiction decidedly strays from the paternal search.

No longer is the father a model who asserts his symbolic authority in fiction; in fact, the daughters in these novels of orphan-hood repudiate his influence. Accordingly, the family replacements and surrogates who are sought are drawn not from hierarchical or vertical relationships but from the peers of the protagonist. In this respect, the demise of a father-child relationship calls an end to a certain kind of entrapment registered in the signifying experience; as a discursive act, it ends a clearly repressive gesture and disperses stable meanings or associations throughout the text.

Thus, a new symbolizing mode was inaugurated in fiction. Endowed with fewer stable meanings and now replete with contradictions and echoes, the texts produced in the feminized mode announce their own ambiguity. They register plural narrative voices that challenge all linearity, they insist on a self-referential vagueness, which consumes all marks of difference.

As if to challenge the authority invested in a single, hierarchical bond between father and child, the feminine mode in narrative disperses all centralized power.

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In the modernist texts under consideration, this project has consequential importance, observable in the reformulation of female identity, in the recon-. In the novels of Bombal, Lange, and de la Parra, nameless heroines wander about bereft of parental protection while also lacking the burden of children who might inhibit their freedom of activity.

Disinherited from any family properties, they encounter a new freedom that permits them to restructure their social world along with their worlds of discourse. Their frequently described anonymity, moreover, allows them to escape the burden of official sanctions or formal institutions that might constrain their activities. But orphanhood also supplies a vantage point outside of history from which one may evaluate questions of genealogy and the laws that govern the family. Thus, if the history of the traditional family is unilinear and without disruption, in these feminist novels the heroines elect disorder.

They reject the discipline of the family along with its structures of repression and choose, instead, a less clearly defined course of action. This new space, along with a revised definition of the traditional family, allows them to challenge the rule of the paterfamilias and to initiate an independent path as literary creators or artists. The "portrait of the artist" novel, so important to the modernist tradition, acquires an interesting twist in the hands of women writers, as they situate all artistic work of their heroines beyond the economic circuits of exchange.

Neither compensated financially nor publicly recognized for their achievements as artists or writers, the protagonists of these feminist texts withdraw their artistic production from the exchange system controlled by men. This is especially evident in de la Parra's novel Ifigenia , where the protagonist, orphaned in the world, attempts to make sense of her rights of inheritance. Her contacts with other women intellectuals from Latin America, among them Gabriela Mistral and Lydia Cabrera, created a secure world of letters, nurtured by thoughtful debate and dialogue.

In Ifigenia , for example, the heroine, fresh from Europe, joins with other women characters in the novel to test the dominant rules that qualify male privilege. The protagonist thus abandons Paris after the death of her father and takes up a new life in America in the custody of her grandmother and other female relatives. Yet the independent spirit of these women, all left without an inheritance, elevates the spirit of the novel and provides the nucleus of narrative development.

It allows her to come to terms with herself and to challenge symbolic authority in art and life; equally important, this challenge is realized through her experiments in writing, observable in her journals and acts of her imagination. These artistic impulses are made possible through her female alliances, especially in the case of the journal annotations, which are first prompted by an intimate friend. But what, in fact, is the social status of this artistic production? The election of the epistolary tradition creates a curious effect upon the modern reader, who realizes that the letters presented are not organized for public distribution or for a market of exchanges.

They are meant only for a single reading, as intimate confidences shared with another friend. Consequently, as a privatized text, a minor expression in the field of print culture, the journal survives as a document that will refuse to engage in society. In addition, this diary, which stands as a testimonial to self, provides a curious contrast to the ironically omniscient narration that introduces each chapter of the book, thus inserting hybrid readings into the novel as a whole. A halfway house between fiction and reality, the journal invites us to investigate the boundaries that separate fantasy and lived experience within the space of narration.

In that way, the story stands in defiance of the common expectations of the life stories of women. Indeed, as a novel that inserts irreparable conflicts in the strategy of the bildungsroman. Ifigenia announces a resistance. In the first place, the bildungsroman is never completely realized: Ifigenia' s heroines abandon romance to pursue their own identity interests; they upset both the linear structure of narrative and the constancy of accumulation. Problems in the early sections of the novel never find resolution in the end. In addition, de la Parra's work represents an overlapping of genres.

It is hardly a quest novel, for its objectives are never fully achieved. Nor is it clearly within the structure of romance, for Ifigenia collapses the programs of differing genres by refusing to supply a neat conclusion. There is a conflict between dominant discourse and the feminized discourse of the novel.

Feminized novels like de la Parra's fiction are imbued with a language of refusal. Prolonged, nondiscursive pauses permeate the text; madness, silence, and nonverbal spaces offer a challenge to linearity. Similarly, other fiction works by Spanish American women of the period intersperse discursive narration with musically oriented texts; white noise permeates conversation, while gossip and banal exchanges undermine authoritative narration; a constant, irreducible mist occludes the space of narration.

This kind of activity in fiction creates a timeless zone in which. It also serves as a specific challenge to the reigning logic of bourgeois perception. In this way, feminist modernism undermines the social ideology of the s without falling into the gratuitous challenges that so often mark the avant-garde experiment. In novels of this kind, the domestic sphere is never left intact; in fact, the space of the home is subject to constant erosion.

Fantasy, then, assists her in her flight from the domestic sphere. Seen in this way, Bombal's novel suggests that liberation may exist for those who can step outside the constraints of the real. Other writers have shared this view: The heroine who successfully escapes from the home finds fulfillment in female bonding, a camaraderie established among women to the exclusion of the masculine sphere. Even more than the novels of de la Parra, those of Bombal emphasize this same-sex bonding as a form of freedom for women.

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In the novels where Bombal emphasizes marriage and heterosexual fantasy, she still insists that the only plausible relationship is the bonding between female friends. Because of its strength as a secondary text, this clandestine relationship manages to undermine the heterosexual dynamic of the novel. It provides the heroine a source of identity, encoded by reference to musical notation or the visual fantasy of dreamlike experiences. Moreover, this gesture toward a symbolic system that escapes linearity provides an alternative to the historically determined relations of submission and domination which the women have sustained with their husbands.

Female friendship of this kind is often the subtext of women's modernist fiction. This is noted in the prose of British and North American writers—Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf principal among them—for whom an authentically feminist version of modernism is constructed by doing away with the presence of men. Rarely celebrated by critics of literature, this feature of modernism nonetheless offers the real possibility of structural subversion in the modern novel by destroying the stability of the family unit, which often passes as a metaphor for the novel itself.

In addition, a pact is established among these two women which draws connections between teller and listener, between the logic of an imagined discourse and the authority of narrative fiction in general. It has been noted often that in Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse the real relation of value is not that of Mrs. Ramsey and her husband but that of the protagonist and Lily Briscoe, the artist, in their secret dialogue.

The shift in emphasis from verbal to visual discourse is similarly enacted in Latin American feminist texts, which often represent the bonding among women as part of a revolt against the logic of language. The Argentine writer Lange in her novel Los dos retratos offers a useful example of this kind of narrative problem. Not having lived through these experiences, she is obliged to reconstruct family traditions through the hearsay of older relatives, who provide an element of distortion and misrepresentation to the narrative.

These women guide her through a series of family portraits, so that the visual element in narrative provides an alternative to family lore. The paintings insert the possibility of a double reading in fiction and multiply the temporal markers with which we come to terms with any narrative history. Drawing a comparison between interior and exterior spaces, between framed and unlimited visions, the paintings create a double vision of reality that cannot be reduced to a single image. By extension, the heroine becomes freed from her traditional view of self as a coherent subject within history.

Thus, the search for a "room of one's own"—indeed, for a space in the family—begins with a reconstitution of the domestic scenario that emphasizes the feminine impulses toward community. Lange's literary experiments against stable forms of authority also have a peculiar structural correlative. As I argued earlier, Los dos retratos is about the reproduction of portraiture and the questioned stability of the past. The author tests the static limitations of any form of representation by invoking a hallucinatory realm, or a descriptive sphere without recourse to linear order.

By this act of disruption, the portraits call a halt to the family romance in progress; paradoxically, they cancel the search for the father that might have. In this manner, the novel simultaneously questions the symbolizing process and breaks open the cluster of meanings and images previously fixed in a unified manner. The family, the home, and the logos of patrimonial authority are all suspect in the avant-garde fictions of Latin American women.

Because these structures served to hamper their freedom rather than offer them solace, women writers used these themes and images to question traditional restrictions imposed by society. At the same time, this challenge to the legal status of the female self involved a reevaluation of conventional definitions of the body.

Thus, the female body described in feminine avant-garde fiction is not a vehicle of reproduction or an object of masculine desire. Rather than representing the female body as victim of the destructive effects of patriarchy, these writers celebrated the woman's body for its independence. In fact, their protagonists are usually childless and without male companions.

Their bodies, moreover, bespeak fragmentation and exuberant disorder. In short, they refuse to collaborate with the demands of the masculine imagination.

Consequently, the body of woman is often presented with an attention to minute detail, such that the composite form is all but lost to the reader. Far from corroborating the mythical schema in which women reproduce nature, de la Parra's novel offers the feminine as an alteration of nature, a forceful transformation of the presumably untainted realm of women's beauty. In other cases, the female figures described in the fictions of the s are presented as ill and lymphatic, and at physical odds with their environment.

The only way in which their bodies are restored to salubrious integrity is through a successful liberation from their conventional roles with men. The pluralized body thereby comes to represent an act of creative resistance; in its fractures or mirror reflections, it eludes a single source of identity. Consequently, in the avant-garde novels of Bombal, Lange, and Parra the female body is reclaimed as an independent presence.

Women's fiction of the s is marked by these countless acts of narrative resistance as if to offer a challenge to the symbolic traditions within literary history. The domestic sphere is exploded with new possibilities for representation; symbols of the feminine are inverted, and the discursive-arrangements in narrative are restructured. And while Bombal strives to break the.

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Alternately described by critics as an invitation to a surrealist dream state and a withdrawal by the heroine from her milieu, the mist nevertheless stands as an ambiguous, undecipherable blind spot in Latin American narrative; it breaks all attempts at linearity and refuses to accommodate itself to any binary logic.

Like the music, dream states, and visual discourses of the fictions mentioned earlier in this essay, the mist described by Bombal refuses a single interpretation; it inserts heterogeneity into the novel, as if to unravel the neatened fabric of any single pattern of meaning. As such, it creates a new locus for the activities of the imagination. This ambiguity and multiplicity in fiction by women carries rich suggestions for writing.

Women, Culture, and Politics in Latin America

Literature by women of the s provides a new definition of gender within the structure of the family; and, insofar as equivalents had been drawn previously between the family and the national good, women's literature challenges nationalist discourse as well. Put another way, the feminine in literary discourse now stands in opposition to conventional treatments of the domestic sphere and the patriotic mandate. In addition, as these writers propose new definitions of the feminine—seeking an autonomous subject relieved of the weight of tradition—they invite serious speculation about the possibility of a feminist version of modernism.

Insofar as writers like Bombal, Lange, and Parra question the process of representation in fiction, they also engage in the major challenges of the avant-garde. But the feminist response goes further by responding to the assumptions of writing in the masculine tradition. Their writing opens narrative space for radically new discursive practices; by identifying alternative forms of disruption that modify the symbolic tradition in letters, women's writing thus brings into question the problematic status of gender hidden in the texts of the canonical avant-garde.

My colleagues in the UC-Stanford Seminar have been an ongoing source of guidance and inspiration. I am also indebted to many graduate students in the Department of Spanish and Portugese at Stanford, who have been vital interlocutors on issues of gender and literary history over the past several years.

In this impressive panorama, a lone woman makes her appearance: For the most part they have been simply absent.