Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Aoife Connolly. Performing The Pied-Noir Family: Constructing Narratives Of Settler Memory And Identity In Literature And On-Screen. Lexington Books, 2020., Tessa Nunn

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Aoife Connolly. Performing the Pied-Noir Family: Constructing Narratives of Settler Memory and Identity in Literature and On-Screen. Lexington Books, 2020. ix, 223 pp.

The Disembodied Subject: Resistance To Norms Of Hegemonic Identity Construction In Carmen Naranjo’S Diario De Una Multitud, Regan Boxwell

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Costa Rica, whose civil war ended in 1948, represents a distinct literary space in which problematics of subjectivity were debated long before such dialectics appeared overtly in the rest of the isthmus. Carmen Naranjo’s novel Diario de una multitud (1974) is situated in this context, and her novel demonstrates a preoccupation with the heterogeneity of tico identity.

Naranjo favors a collective representation of the urban citizenry. Through the perceptual liminality of the individual subject, the friction generated by its absence, the constant blurring that resets the boundaries of specific identities, and the disappearance of the private realm, Naranjo avoids inscribing …

Maurice Echeverría’S Labios: A Disenchanted Story About Lesbians In Guatemala’S Postwar Reality, Yajaira M. Padilla

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In the last two decades, lesbian, gay, and queer literary studies have gained significant ground in the broader field of Latin American cultural studies. Within this growing body of critical work, however, the Central American region and its literature have been largely ignored. This article, which focuses on the representation of lesbians and queer desire in the Guatemalan novel Labios (2004) ‘Lips’ by Maurice Echeverría, seeks to contribute to such a lack in Central American perspective. This essay contends, Echeverría’s text, one of a growing number of recent Central American narratives to call attention to and portray gay, lesbian, and/or …

Migration And The Foreign In Contemporary Spanish Poetry: El Sueño De Dakhla (Poemas De Umar Abass) By Manuel Moya, Debra Faszer-Mcmahon

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Many critical studies have addressed the issue of immigration in contemporary Spanish narrative and film, but far fewer have analyzed this topic within the context of poetry. The representation of immigrant experience in poetic texts is significant not only because poetic works have received less attention, but also because of the significance of poetry within North African and Islamic culture. Manuel Moya’s recent award-winning collection places the question of North African immigration as a central concern. The text purports to offer a compilation of poetry produced by the Western Saharan immigrant Umar Abass, who currently resides in Madrid. The work …

Moving Forward With The Past: History And Identity In Marie-Célie Agnant’S La Dot De Sara, Kennedy M. Schultz

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Francophone writers and theorists have long worked to establish a cultural identity true to their collective past and free of Western authority and influence. They reflect in their works the need to find their own voice and validate their own perspective in the face of a history fraught with colonial influence and domination. Marie-Célie Agnant, a Francophone writer of Haitian descent living in Montreal, addresses this search for history and identity through the lens of Haitian immigrant characters in her works, namely La Dot de Sara (1995), Le Livre d’Emma (2001), and Un alligator nommé Rosa (2007). Agnant’s works treat …

The Basque Country: The Heart Of Spain, A Part Of Spain, Or Somewhere Else Altogether, Paddy Woodworth

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The Basque Country exhibits contradictory symptoms of good health and chronic internal rupture. A flexible and robust economy and a vibrant cultural life are undermined by opposed senses of identity, which make almost any statement about the region deeply contentious. The verifiability—or otherwise—of Basque nationalist and Spanish nationalist readings of Basque history and culture matter less today than the fact that they are held with genuine conviction by big sectors of Basque society. Both traditions have their own legitimacy, but neither has been capable of fully acknowledging or including the other. Paradoxically, Francoism reinforced Basque nationalist identity, and anxieties about …

Wartime Writings, Or The Imaginary Lover Of Marguerite Duras, Bethany Ladimer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The publication in 2006 of Marguerite Duras’s Cahiers de la guerre, ‘Wartime Writings,’ written between 1943 and 1949, made accessible to the reader the first known versions of the family drama that was to become the material of much of her fiction. As this work now takes its place as chronologically first in the intertext of Duras’s autofictional writings, it sheds considerable light on our understanding of the transformations in these texts that occurred over her lifetime. Whereas L’Amant had been presented and accepted as the disclosure of a real occurrence and the origin of the other works, it …

Texts Of Light And Shadow: Dickens And Lautréamont In Alejandra Pizarnik's Sombra Poems , Beth Zeiss

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In her poetry, the Argentinean Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-72) persistently explores the transformations that the poetic subject undergoes in language. She articulates a cycle wherein the subject's desire to (re)create herself as a presence in language is followed by the desire for death, the absence of the self, when her desire becomes frustrated by language's inadequacies. As yet, the importance of the theme of the fluctuating self in language as developed by Pizarnik in a series of poems protagonized by Sombra, has not been analyzed. The character Sombra appears in six fragment-like poems published posthumously in Textos de Sombra (1982) and …

Reconfiguring Boundaries In Maryse Condé'S Crossing The Mangrove , Deborah B. Gaensbauer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Maryse Condé's 1989 novel, Crossing the Mangrove, presents a compelling performance of the complicated patterns of place and space inherent in the social masquerade of a small, isolated, Guadeloupean village. Because the novel corresponds to Condé's return to a Caribbean "stage" to continue a long process of questioning mapped configurations of identity, critical attention has focused on the character of Francis Sancher, the returning "stranger," whose wake serves as both frame and catalyst for the action. Insufficient attention has been paid to the role of Mira Lameaulnes, Sancher's rejected mistress and the mother of his child, whose story the …

The Integration Of A Fragmented Self In The Works Of Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, Malva E. Filer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Literary creation is always a transposition of individual and collective experiences…

Crossing Francophone Boundaries: Beckett's Fictions, Beryl Schlossman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Although Samuel Beckett's œuvre is bilingual in French and English, his writing is generally considered to be the product of a single national identity…

Interview With Ghada Amer, Estelle Taraud

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Interview with Ghada Amer

From War Films To Films On War: Gendered Scenarios Of National Identity—The Case Of The Last Metro, Leah D. Hewitt

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

If France's ongoing struggle for self-definition in the late twentieth century involved new conceptions of citizenship and nationality, in short what it means to be French, this struggle also entailed the search for an accurate portrayal of a past in which France could recognize itself...

(Ef)Facing The Face Of Nationalism: Wrestling Masks In Chicano And Mexican Performance Art , Robert Neustadt

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Masks serve as particularly effective props in contemporary Mexican and Chicano performance art because of a number of deeply rooted traditions in Mexican culture. This essay explores the mask as code of honor in Mexican culture, and foregrounds the manner in which a number of contemporary Mexican and Chicano artists and performers strategically employ wrestling masks to (ef)face the mask-like image of Mexican or U.S. nationalism. I apply the label "performance artist" broadly, to include musicians and political figures that integrate an exaggerated sense of theatricality into their performances. Following the early work of Roland Barthes, I read performances as …

Crossing Laterally Into Solidarity In Montserrat Fontes's Dreams Of The Centaur , J. Douglas Canfield

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Fontes's novel begins with a corrido announcing typical themes of murder and revenge. But the novel has from the outset been interimplicated in a history of the persecution of the Yoeme (Yaquis) at the turn into the twentieth century. Its three main protagonists become mavericks on the border, as they cross ultimately not only into safety in Arizona but into solidarity with the oppressed. Such crossings are existential, resulting in new identities that eschew racial or ethnic purity but instead embrace mixed ethnicity, or mestizaje (to borrow key concepts from Anzaldúa). Such crossings are lateral, non-hierarchic. But Fontes does not …

"Pesadillas De La Noche, Amanecer De Silencio": Miguel Méndez And Margarita Oropeza, Debra A. Castillo

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In many border-related discussions—whether philosophical, anthropological, critical, or fictional—there are typical themes or narrative tics: allusions to the flexible geography that makes the border region both an isolated territory and an analogue for the postmodern condition, the puzzlement over how to understand the role of the "maquiladoras" 'assembly plants' and the area's industrial boom, the awareness of a vast movement of people both north and south, a persistent and nagging phobia about feminization, and about female sexuality. In this paper I will explore these concerns with reference to two novels: Arizonan Miguel Méndez's well-known 1974 novel Peregrinos de Aztlán (Pilgrims …

Crossing The Great Divide: Rewritings Of The U.S.-Mexican Encounter In Walter Abish And Richard Rodríguez , Maarten Van Delden

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In a 1978 essay on the relationship between Mexico and the United States, Octavio Paz suggested that the two countries were separated by a "perhaps insuperable" divide. Yet two recent works—Richard Rodríguez's collection of essays Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (1992) and Walter Abish's novel Eclipse Fever (1993)—offer evidence of a changing outlook on the U.S.-Mexican encounter. Abish and Rodríguez build upon the storehouse of images of the irreconcilable differences between the two nations. However, insofar as they play with and question these images, they draw attention to the unstable, fluctuating nature of the U.S.-Mexican encounter …

To Arrive Is To Begin: Benjamin Sáenz's Carry Me Like Water And The Pilgrimage Of Origin In The Borderlands , Alberto López Pulido

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay examines the "pilgrimage of origin" as presented in Benjamin Sáenz's novel Carry Me Like Water. As is the case with other ethnic literature, Carry Me Like Water teaches us that we must first go back before we can move forward and transform our lives. By pilgrimage of origin I make reference to a journey where participants are required to return to the past and the familiar. Unlike the more commonly described linear pilgrimage experience where participants are required to travel beyond the range of their familiar space, the pilgrimage of origin obligates participants to return to their …

Reading The Other Side Of The Story: Ominous Voice And The Sociocultural And Political Implications Of Luis Spota's Murieron A Mitad Del Río , Francisco Manzo-Robledo

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

It is always contoversial to proclaim a literary work, at face value, as a sociocultural study of a particular society. It is even more controversial when one deals with a hybrid work, combining factors from two completely distinct societies. Yet, there are some literary works that seem to call for exactly this type of analysis, presenting a range of ideas which in retrospect reveal origins of significant sociocultural trends. Such is the case of Luis Spota's Murieron a mitad del río (1948). This novel presents a panorama of ancestral problems in the life of thousands of immigrants and inhabitants of …

Hybridity And The Space Of The Border In The Writing Of Norma Elia Cantú, Ellen Mccracken

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The creative and scholarly writing of Norma Elia Cantú focuses centrally on the tensions of borders that are eroding yet firmly in place. Cantú's border pivots on the geographic space in which Mexico and the United States physically intersect, yet she probes at the same time several of the other tenuous cultural borders that postmodernity has brought into focus. Transcending distinctions between genres, languages, and cultures, Cantú undertakes innovative genre hybridity, visual-verbal hybridity, and the recombination of distinct cultural codes. Whether writing cultural criticism, autobioethnography, creative fiction, or poetry, Cantú locates herself at the intersection of the geographical and epistemological …

Hegemony And Identity: The Chicano Hybrid In Francisco X. Alarcón's Snake Poems , George Hartley

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Snake Poems renegotiates power relations between the discourse of Spanish imperialism and Aztec poetic practice. Alarcón's extended poem enacts a process of ethnic, cultural, and spiritual identification through a confrontation between texts—Alarcón's original poems, passages of commentary from the Spanish Inquisitor Hernando Ruíz de Alarcón's treatise on Aztec spells and invocations, and the Aztec spells themselves in the original Náhuatl, the Aztec language. Each of these three layers of text represents a unique and competing people, ideology, and culture, and it is the clash and the hybrid fusion of these distinct discourses that Alarcón the poet stages in Snake Poems …

Victoria Ocampo And Alfonso Reyes: Ulysses's Malady , Doris Meyer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Ocampo (Argentina, 1890-1979) and Reyes (Mexico, 1889-1959) were arguably Latin America's most influential writers and cultural catalysts in the first half of the twentieth century. They met in Argentina in 1927 and their friendship and correspondence lasted until Reyes's death. Over three decades of private and public discourse, they articulated a similar vision of Latin American identity and its future potential. Because they were both internationally known—Ocampo as founder and director of the literary review SUR, and Reyes as a diplomat and intellectual leader—their ideas found resonance in the Americas and Europe. Two dramatic works they wrote before meeting, Ifigenia …

Dismantling Romantic Utopias: María Beneyto's Poetry Between Tradition And Protest , Candelas S. Gala

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Despite the fact that Vicente Aleixandre considered her one of the best young authors of the generation of social poets of the 1950s, María Beneyto's writings have been disregarded by critics. While sharing the social concerns of the other poets of her generation, Beneyto's poetry also reveals the dilemma of the woman author facing a cultural tradition that espouses pre-established models for her conduct and identity patterned mostly in accordance with tenets of Romanticism. Beneyto resorts to those models as projections of herself as she seeks to articulate her own identity as woman and author. The objective of this essay …

Between L'Irréparable And L'Irrepérable: Subject To The Past, Downing Thomas, Steven Ungar

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This issue of STCL grew from papers presented at a conference, "Memory in Context: Occupation and Empire in France and the Francophone World," held at the University of Iowa in April, 1996...

Identifying Jews: The Legacy Of The 1941 Exhibition, "Le Juif Et La France" , Raymond Bach

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

During the Occupation there was a two-pronged effort to separate the Jews from the rest of the French population...

Augusto Roa Bastos's Trilogy As Postmodern Practice, Helene C. Weldt-Basson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Augusto Roa Bastos's most recent novel, El fiscal (1993), completes the author's trilogy on the "monotheism of power," which the novel constitutes in conjunction with the prior works Hijo de hombre (1960) and Yo el Supremo (1974). These novels form a larger whole by virtue of the way in which they attempt to define Paraguay's identity through the nation's history. Hijo de hombre focuses on both the Chaco War and a series of Paraguayan civil wars; Yo el Supremo concentrates on the nineteenth-century dictatorship of Dr. José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia; and El fiscal presents both Alfredo Stroessner's dictatorship (1954-1989) …

The Stone And Its Images: The Poetry Of Nancy Morejón, Alan West

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The essay explores the roots of Nancy Morejón's poetry within the context of a transculturated afro-Cuban identity. Beginning by an examination of the poems that directly deal with the orishas of santería, the essay moves on to some of her more lyric poetry. Morejón's relationship to Dulce María Loynaz provides particular interest in how both writers treat the metaphor of the house in two important poems. This is followed by a discussion of some of Morejón's overtly feminist poetry, placed both within a Cuban context of the history of its revolution, and the displacement of exile (in dialogue with Cuban …

The Subject, Feminist Theory And Latin American Texts, Sara Castro-Klaren

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

From a feminist perspective, this essay reviews and analyzes the interaction between metropolitan feminist theories and their interphase with the academic criticism of texts written by Latin American women. Discussion focuses on the question of the subject, which the author believes to be paramount in feminist theory, in as much as the construction of gender and the historical subordination of women devolve on the play of difference and identity. This paper examines how the problematic assumption by feminist theorists in the North American academy of Freudian and Lacanian theories of the subject pose unresolved problems and unanticipated complications to subsequent …

Geography, (M)Other Tongues And The Role Of Translation In Giannina Braschi's El Imperio De Los Sueños, María M. Carrión

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The Big Apple seems to be the central axis for the readerly and writerly "I" in El imperio de los sueños (Empire of Dreams), by Giannina Braschi. Readers can easily realize that the text is not just about New York, but that it actually journeys through praise and blame, drinking and dancing, talking and perversing many other cities and landscapes. El imperio is a space of bohemia with streaks from the Latin American Quarter in Paris, the barrio chino barcelonés, the zaguanes of Borges's Buenos Aires, from colonial houses in Old San Juan; it evokes dandy places, …

Spanish American Women Writers: Simmering Identity Over A Low Fire, Ksenija Bilbija

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

After establishing the parallel between the kitchen and the alchemist's laboratory, this article shows that traditionally, the kitchen has come to symbolize the space associated with the marginalization of women. However, the recent explosion of the novels dedicated to the resemantization and reevaluation of the realm of the kitchen is the best evidence that it is also a space from which much creativity emanates. A close reading of two such cookbook/novels, Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel and Like Potatoes for Varenike by Sylvia Plager, points toward a quite parodic and critical gender perspective. Furthermore, it calls for a …