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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge History of Latin American Women's Literature
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
November 2015
Print publication year:
2015
Online ISBN:
9781316050859
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781316050859
Subjects:
Literature, Area Studies, American Literature, Latin American Literature, Latin American Studies, American Studies
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Literature
Information

Book description

The Cambridge History of Latin American Women's Literature is an essential resource for anyone interested in the development of women's writing in Latin America. Ambitious in scope, it explores women's literature from ancient indigenous cultures to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Organized chronologically and written by a host of leading scholars, this History offers an array of approaches that contribute to current dialogues about translation, literary genres, oral and written cultures, and the complex relationship between literature and the political sphere. Covering subjects from cronistas in Colonial Latin America and nation-building to feminicide and literature of the indigenous elite, this History traces the development of a literary tradition while remaining grounded in contemporary scholarship. The Cambridge History of Latin American Women's Literature will not only engage readers in ongoing debates but also serve as a definitive reference for years to come.

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Contents

Page 2 of 2

Contents
  • 20 - The View from Here
    pp 341-363
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Changes in reading practices, fostered by feminist movements pushing to diversify the canon, have led to the rediscovery and reevaluation of the work of many women writers. The literary tradition and established social norms served to influence readers and their decisions either to accept or to reject certain discursive forms. The tone was set by the most obvious features of social realism, inevitably linked to the armed conflict that began in 1910 and remained very much alive in the memory of artists and their public. This chapter focuses on two cases: Nellie Campobello and Maria Luisa Ocampo Heredia. The tragedy of the removal, disappearance, and subsequent discovery of the remains of Campobello many years after her death attracted a great deal of media attention and led to a renewed interest in the writer and her work. The social inequalities associated with gender are a constant presence in the narrative of Ocampo and with even greater force than in her plays.
  • 21 - Women Writing in the Andes
    pp 364-380
  • A Panoramic View Since Colonial Times
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter compares the development of women's writing in two overlapping but distinct revolutionary contexts. One is the Cuban Revolution from 1959 to the present and the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979-1990, privileging work produced within the process of political and social revolution. The Cuban Revolution is most frequently seen outside Cuba as a failed socialist or communist political experiment, often through applying an equally simplified template of Sovietization. Women's incorporation into the literary establishment was cautious and framed in terms of political, rather than cultural, credentials. The initial periods of both revolutions were not without their acrimonious debates, many of which revolved around how to define revolutionary literature in a context in which the majority of the population was now literate, if only in functional terms. Whether in prose or poetry, the testimonial mode was enormously influential: It allowed women who lacked the symbolic and social capitals associated with the world of letters.
  • 22 - Rebellion, Revision, and Renewal
    pp 381-395
  • Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean Women Writers in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Women linked through literary style or affiliation to Latin America's historical avant-gardes often engaged with certain stereotypes through critical mimicry, particularly in staging their own entrees to cultural life. The stylistic and genre hybridity of literature by women connected to the avant-gardes manifests the nimbleness required to find discursive strategies suited to their expressive needs and self-figuration as intellectuals. But hybridity also defined Latin America's avant-gardes overall, as did the self-conscious attention not only to art itself but also to the formation of the would-be artist. Later scholarship recuperates the complicated relationship of women writers to the avant-gardes, and it was precisely the public facet of vanguard activity that challenged women seeking to locate themselves as writers. The women of Latin America's historical avant-gardes, mediating their artistic identities and practices as individual figures among groups of men, sometimes stand out for their apparent radical solitude within that literary culture.
  • 23 - Central American Women’s Literature
    pp 396-409
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Especially from the latter half of the twentieth century, writings of Latin American women variously reckon with dissident cosmopolitanisms, as they give way to political and aesthetic contestations of liberal and elitist cultural agendas of modernization that are usually associated with cosmopolitanism. The history of feminism abounds with examples of what one might call a planetary imagination. Produced by contests over citizenship and limited participation of women in issues of national politics, feminist struggles have persistently pointed toward transnational, international, or internationalist horizons. This chapter focuses on the ways cosmopolitanism destabilizes gender/sexual normativity, producing alternative imaginaries of community and affect. It describes the extent to which cosmopolitics reconfigures the threshold and the relationship between the human and the nonhuman, through the lenses of Clarice Lispector's writing. Lispector places at the center of her writing project an interrogation of the relationship between gender and belonging, paying special attention to the ways in which spaces are articulated through a gendered grammar.
  • 24 - Writing Violence
    pp 410-417
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The women's boom in Latin American literature, which could be named as such because of the explosion in the number of women novelists who achieved critical recognition and important positions in the publishing market, occurred during the Post-Boom. Parody is one of the Post-Boom's most salient characteristics. The fiction produced by the women's Boom offers different ways to perform the gender divide, different ways to portray reality that highlight the differences between the Boom's desire for cosmopolitism and the fallout from the Boomito's forced global citizenship. The canonical Boom novels are characterized by a radical questioning of reality and the writer's task, as well as by a rejection of traditional realism. The Chilean Diamela Eltit's "Sociedad Anonima", an article published in 1999, discusses the effects of the neoliberal market's invasion on Chile's culture at the turn of the century. Diamela Eltit's fiction, among the most experimental literary projects of her generation, develops an aesthetic of space.
  • 25 - New/Old Indigenous Paradigms in Maya Women’s Literary Production
    pp 418-432
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Musical discourse about poetry, especially when late nineteenth and early twentieth century traditional forms integrate distinctive melodic prosody, seems an appropriate metaphorical frame to understand contemporary Latin American women's verses. This chapter focuses on key periods in Latin America, in which women poets have sought to capture, imitate, or downright reject poetic modes of (self-) representation. It is important to remember that, while many of these poets articulate their own gender discourse in their lyrics, feminin difference is only one of many themes recurring in their work. The 1920s and 1930s are considered to be some of the most active years for the posmodernistas to break rhythm and introduce new tropes and lyrical schemes. For Latin American female poets, the struggle to maintain an aesthetic "feminine" voice encourages them to turn to the quicker, often harsher rhythms and unusual auditory sounds of avant-garde poetry.
  • 26 - Genres of the Real
    pp 433-447
  • Testimonio, Autobiography, and the Subjective Turn
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The Mexican activist and painter Tina Modotti, the subject of one of Elena Poniatowska's most important novels, was born in Italy, migrated to the United States and then to Mexico. Naief Yehya and Fran Ilich, despite their non-Hispanic sounding names, are both Mexican writers and they both live in New York City. This chapter addresses authors like these who confound trajectories of national literary history, pointing toward a more general case by focusing on a few women writers whose gravitational orbits include "Mexican", but whose identities and writings cannot be limited to that national space. They include such established authors as Antonieta Rivas Mercado, Maria Luisa Puga, Carmen Boullosa, Elena Poniatowska, Margo Glantz, Margarita Oropeza, Cecilia Pego, and Cristina Rivera Garza. The chapter describes how intercultural and international mobility underlies Mexican literary historiography from its beginning, by reference to perhaps the most cited woman from the Mexican independence era, Frances Calderon de la Barca.
  • 27 - Performances
    pp 448-464
  • Memory, Monuments
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter examines how displacement has been portrayed in Latin American women's writing in the second half of the twentieth century and, specifically, how it has impacted women as subjects. It focuses on authors from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico, whose narratives cover events in the 1960s and 1970s. The chapter explores fiction from the Southern Cone countries concerning the aftermath of the military coups d'etat of the 1970s and 1980s. Overall, the period addressed in these works coincides with the political and social transformations of the 1960s, which allowed for an increasing presence of women in the public sphere. The three authors discussed in the chapter immigrated to New York City with their families at a young age. Educated in the United States and writing in English, Julia Alvarez, Cristina Garcia, and Esmeralda Santiago show aspects of the acculturation process that exiles and economic migrants experience in a bicultural setting.
  • 28 - Mothers and Children in Biopolitical Networks
    pp 465-480
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The simplest way of defining "Latina literature" would be to say that it comprises the poetry, prose, fiction, drama, journalism, and political manifestos produced by women of Latin American descent residing in the United States. Latina literature has most often been characterized by contemporary literary critics as concerned with questions of identity, with the exploration of the experience of "being Latina" within the United States. Critics draw attention to the poignant representations of minority embodiment offered by Latinas, highlighting their literary explorations of sexual, racial, or gendered identities within their machista minoritarian cultures. The wellspring of Latina literature focused on the embodiment of identity in the 1970s and 1980s was due to the historical conjuncture. Read catachrestically, Latina enables a different critical focus to emerge, one that transfers this frame onto the experience of embodiment recorded in the era of identitarian literature.
  • Part IV - Women Writers in a One–World Global System: Neoliberalism, Sexuality, Subjectivity
    pp 481-574
  • View abstract

    Summary

    By and large texts written by women offer an alternative stance, a diff erentiated locus that places their writing in dialogue with a dominantly patriarchal tradition. Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz in Mexico, Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda in Cuba, and Clorinda Matto de Turner in Peru are among the renowned pioneering women whose writings embodied suppressed claims of their times. Taking this tradition of emancipated women writers in Latin America as the starting point of a rich and dynamic literary trajectory, this chapter aims to provide an overview of women's writing in the Andean area. The Andean region highlighted in the chapter is taken as a physical, as well as a symbolic, territory that has had an impact, in the past and present, on both its peoples and its social and cultural processes. While this panoramic approach takes a historical perspective, it places emphasis on present-day trends and writers.
  • 29 - Market and Nonconsumer Narratives
    pp 486-503
  • From the “Levity of Being” to Abjection
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The origins of Caribbean women's writing are often dated from the mid-nineteenth century and other forms of oral and literary creativity predate the nineteenth century. This chapter focuses on Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean women's writing, primarily, though not exclusively, in Jamaica, Trinidad, Guadeloupe, Haiti, and Martinique. It highlights the key concerns of twentieth and twenty-first century Caribbean women writers. Some of these concerns are contesting stereotypes of docile femininity and rebellious masculinity by representing female rebellion against slave capitalism. Since cultural diversity has been the hallmark of Caribbean societies, sexuality emerges as another aspect of diversity. Given the cultural hybridity of the Caribbean it is unsurprising that many writers of the region speak to and from more than one location. The chapter explores ideas of language, history, and body in Caribbean women's literature. Finally, it provides brief account of how Caribbean women have written about and addressed the world they inhabit.
  • 30 - Per-verse Latin American Women Poets
    pp 504-526
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Women in Central America have long been witnesses and narrators of history. This chapter provides a synthesis of the literary production of women of the isthmus from the nineteenth century to the present. It focuses on repeated themes, key questions raised, and aesthetic choices with regard to textual form and content. By highlighting the work of many admirable women, the chapter demonstrates parallels with other authors of the hemisphere while also drawing attention to the singularities of the region, considering the unique contextual circumstances in which these writers implement their craft. For many who were literate, mid-nineteenth century was spent breaking away from colonial Spain, vying for political and economic position, and adjusting to the changing iterations of what would eventually become the independent republics of Central America. The early twentieth century gives rise to social realism in leftist-leaning prose from Russia to Central America.
  • 31 - Beyond the Book
    pp 527-542
  • New Forms of Women’s Writing
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The silencing of the outstanding Mexican poet and thinker Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz in the seventeenth century and her spirited and angry response illustrate how "violence against women" involves not only physical violence but also mental abuse. The most extreme form of violence against women is rape followed by murder. Feminist thinkers have used the terms "feminicide" and "femicide" to refer to gender based violence that results in the death of women. Feminicide is linked to systematic discrimination and an assault on women's personhood and rights to life, liberty, security and dignity. The degradation of and attack on women as women and as activists reached extreme levels in the countries of the Southern Cone during the civil wars and dictatorships of the eighties and nineties. The wars and repressive regimes of the 1970s and 1980s challenged writers to move beyond the testimonial in order to reimagine the psychology of oppression and how abjection might be transformed into militancy.
  • 32 - Literature about Feminicide in Ciudad Juárez
    pp 543-558
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Contemporary Maya indigenous literature came into existence before one even knew it as Maya, or literature for that matter - long before it was written in a Maya language, certainly before Maya women writers appeared. Guatemalan Mayas contemporary identity can be traced to the Popol Wuj, the heart of the Mesoamerican cultural matrix. The Popol Wuj creates an alternative macronarrative to the Western Bible. It tells the story of creation in a fashion that conflates the origins of all Mesoamerican peoples in one foundational discourse. The Guatemalan thirty-seven-year civil war is dated from November 13, 1960, until peace was signed on December 28, 1996. It was mostly in the latter part of the conflict that a spontaneous insurrection in the Maya highlands took place, from 1979 to 1982. Starting in 1985, the well-known Maya public intellectual Demetrio Cojti Cuxil began to publish articles on the need to expand the use of Maya languages.
  • 33 - Afterword
    pp 559-574
  • Figures, Texts, and Moments
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Testimonio has been an inspiring genre for women who need to delve into the innermost echoes of torture and repression. The feelings anchored in their bodies lie at the heart of women concentration camp survivors' experience, and they seek other voices with whom to enter into a dialogue within this framework. They often focus on the gender-specific repression they suffered, such as sexual abuse and the kidnapping of their children, and present their stories in oral/written patterns or in literary form. The writings could be considered autobiographical because they explore the connections between one's memory and the memory of others. Testimonios are multidimensional. What is important is how the imprecise boundaries between memory and history, document and literature are negotiated. In this context, writing becomes a transformation process that goes from personal experience to public account, and this shift tends to conceal the work of writing.
  • Bibliography
    pp 575-618
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter begins with the female body and "feminine" writing as a locus of rebellion in the 1980s. It discusses the reflections on trauma and defeat the emerged after the dictatorships, the historical revision of the revolutionary endeavor that took place in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The chapter describes the postmemory reflections of the "children of dictatorship", a narrative mode characteristic of memory's turn in the new millennium. In each successive moment, the tenor of memory's performance changes. Particularly in the 1980s, under the rigid surveillance of dictatorship, the body became a metaphorical ground zero from which to decolonize hegemonic discursive constructions. The Latin American dictatorships that spanned the latter half of the twentieth century sought to destroy not only leftist political projects, but also the subjectivities and life-worlds linked to those projects.

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