Narrating Immigration, Gendered Spaces, and Transnational Feminism in Lucía Etxebarria’s "Cosmofobia" (2007) (original) (raw)
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Literary representations of global migration to Spain have augmented in concert with the increase in immigration at the turn of the twenty-first century. While these texts tend to express an empathetic stance toward the hardships that immigrants face, they often fall short in capturing the complexity of the nation's changing ethnic composition and critically engaging with the issue of a Spanish author narrating the stories of subjects who have immigrated to the Iberian nation. This essay proposes that in Cosmofobia (2007), Lucía Etxebarria purposefully addresses the potentially colonizing position of authoring a fictional text about immigrant experiences in Spain, with narrative strategies that highlight her role in creating the work that we read and that attend to an ethical elaboration of a transnational feminist project. The author's representation of gender and place in the context of an intricate social web in global Madrid suggests that concerns common to women of different ethnicities may reshape conceptions of community and create new spaces for interethnic collaboration. Las representaciones literarias de la migración mundial en España han aumentado a la par con el incremento de los flujos globales de inmigrantes hacia el país ibérico en los albores del siglo XXI. Mientras que en estos textos se tiende a mostrar cierta empatía hacia las dificul-tades enfrentadas por los inmigrantes, en ellos no necesariamente se capta la complejidad de la cambiante identidad y composición étnica en la península. Este ensayo postula que en Cos-mofobia (2007), Lucía Etxebarria deliberadamente contempla la potencialidad de la posición colonizadora al escribir una obra ficticia sobre las experiencias de inmigrantes en España con estrategias narrativas que resaltan su rol como creadora de la pieza que leemos y que atienden a la elaboración ética de un proyecto feminista trasnacional. En la obra, la representación de género y lugar dentro de una intrincada red social en un Madrid global sugiere que aquellas preocupaciones comunes entre mujeres de diversas etnias podrían servir para reestructurar las concepciones de comunidad y para crear nuevos espacios para la colaboración interétnica.
Intersections of Race, Class, Gender, and Nation in Fin-de-siècle Spanish Literature and Culture
's edited volume is a timely and necessary addition to the current scholarship in peninsular studies. The nine essays included in the collection explore the intersection of race, class, gender, and nation as the point where many of the processes of identity formation in fin-de-siglo Spain converged. As the editors make clear, the unstable nature of Spanish identity was the result of complex dynamics of social exclusion that affected cultural production at all levels. This intricacy prompts a vast array of subjects of analysis that makes the overarching goals of the compilation at once ambitious and enlightening. To facilitate the dialogue among contributions, Smith and Nalbone grouped the essays around three thematic axes: transatlantic interactions, race, and national identities, an organization that also serves the purpose of highlighting the most urgent preoccupations that surfaced in the country after its demoralizing decline as imperial power at the turn of the twentieth century. Given the richness of topics and problems studied, the editors recognize that "there is no single conclusion to be drawn from the texts" (16); instead, Intersections constitutes a sort of reference volume in which Hispanists will find a collection of innovative and fresh approaches to the study of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Spanish cultural production. All the essays in the compilation acknowledge and draw from the most recent scholarship on race, gender, social class, and national identity in Spain. Authors such as Jesús Cruz, Joshua Goode, Susan Martin-Márquez, Lisa Surwillo, or Akiko Tsuchiya are widely discussed throughout the different contributions. From those analytical perspectives, the studies explore the multiple symbolic mechanisms with which writers, intellectuals, and artists in fin-de-siglo Spain incorporated the racial and social other into their assessments of the country. The inclusion of Hommi Bhabha, Sander Gilman, Judith Butler or Edward Said's ideas in the theoretical framework proposed by the editors thus provides the conceptual guidelines to follow the essays' innovative take on social heterogeneity. These thinkers theorize our problematic fascination with the other from psychoanalytical and postcolonial perspectives, proposing that stereotyping and rejection are some of the social devices we develop to cope with the anxieties of confronting difference. One context where these mechanisms become particularly visible is the sometimes-overlooked relationship between Spain and its late colonies. The first section of the text focuses precisely on these exchanges, offering a gendered vision of colonialism that reframes the issue of purity and ultimately questions Eurocentrism. In chapter one, "Challenging Pasts, Exploring Futures: 'Race,' Gender, and Class in the Fin-de-siècle Essays of Rosario de Acuña, Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer, and Belén Sárraga," Christine Arkinstall contends that for these three authors belonging to the Spanish nation depended on an artificial social scaffold built upon racial and gender categories. To explain and justify this discriminatory structure, in their essays the writers focus on liminal subjects that underline the contrasts between the metropolis and its colonies, between the
This monograph explores a variety of iconic female literary and artistic representations of women identity within the contemporary plural and multicultural peninsular Hispanic context. The collected contributions apply different methodologies to characterise the definition and the evolution of female identity and its representations in literature (drama, poetry, novel, etc.), linguistics, art as well as media and cultural studies. Transgeneric, cross-cultural and transnational analyses, therefore, are used to stress the peculiar ways in which characterisation of women was and is produced in this specific area and time. Gender stereotyping can be considered a constant in the history of human relations, its linguistic expressions and representations of all kinds, and, consequently, also in literary and artistic ones. Women were (are?) often relegated within specific parameters (socio-cultural prejudices?) of subordination, dependence and (induced) vulnerability. These subjective and social perceptions and roles, that (men) have established and imposed from past times to the present day, have paralleled female action and selfrealisation by women writers and artists, their works and/or characters.
Rethinking the Lens of Spanish: Grounding a Chicana Feminist Language
Contemporary U.S. Latinx Literature in Spanish, 2018
This essay examines the significant role Chicana feminist writers play in contesting mainstream perspectives on U.S. Spanish. Through the development of Chicana and U.S. Latina feminist discourse centered on the reclamation and affirmation of one's inherited tongue, women have generated robust methodologies to understand the benefits of embracing the hybridity, intersectionality, and complexity of communication. From Gloria Anzaldúa's "mestiza consciousness" and Cherríe Moraga's "theory in the flesh" and "coming from a long line of vendidas" to Ana Castillo's "Xicanisma" and Emma Pérez "sitio y lengua," a new understanding of identity formation about the languages defining one's cultural reality enabled women the ability to challenge the hegemonic identity politics for women by fostering narratives of "selfhood" that rethink the lens of Spanish in Chicana feminism.
SUNY Press, 2019
UNSETTLING COLONIALISM illuminates the interplay of race and gender in a range of fin-de-siècle Spanish narratives of empire and colonialism, including literary fictions, travel narratives, political treatises, medical discourse, and the visual arts, across the global Hispanic world. By focusing on texts by and about women and foregrounding Spain’s pivotal role in the colonization of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, this book not only breaks new ground in Iberian literary and cultural studies but also significantly broadens the scope of recent debates in postcolonial feminist theory to account for the Spanish empire and its (former) colonies. Organized into three sections: colonialism and women’s migrations; race, performance, and colonial ideologies; and gender and colonialism in literary and political debates, UNSETTLING COLONIALISM brings together the work of nine scholars.Given its interdisciplinary approach and accessible style, the book will appeal to both specialists in nineteenth-century Iberian and Latin American studies and a broader audience of scholars in gender, cultural, transatlantic, transpacific, postcolonial, and empire studies.