Postcolonial and Feminist (original) (raw)
Related papers
2012
Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia took her doctoral degree in English Studies at the University of Aveiro, Portugal, in 2005. Her areas of expertise are Postcolonial Literatures and Contemporary Fiction in English. Here she presents a comparative analysis of two interrelated literary fieldspostcolonial and feminist theorythrough the prism of the grotesque. The author is interested in the deconstruction of postcolonial and gender politics. Postcolonial and Feminist Grotesque: Texts of Contemporary Excess is a comprehensive study, drawing in a complex weave of theories and contemporary fictions. Postcolonial and Feminist Grotesque divides into two sections: the first third of the text is devoted to cultural and literary criticism and the location of the Grotesque; the remaining section is given over to dialogical readings and practices of the postcolonial and feminist grotesque. Pimentel Biscaia systematically accounts for the canon, a pantheon of names whose usefulness as references might be enhanced with a handy index. She presents an historical overview, discusses dialogism as methodology and links the research to the poetics of the carnivalesque-grotesque. She also introduces various theorists-René Girard, Mary Russo, Julia Kristeva, Marthe Reineke and otherswho provide the wall for a series of dialogical readings; these gender-informed perspectives are used to critique the iconic images of female grotesqueness, the abject and versions of a sacrificial economy. The author then focuses upon the contemporary novel as an extension of the hyperbolic carnival tradition. She envisages the carnivalesque-grotesque as a resurgent mode in postmodern literature and engages with a selection of 'texts of contemporary excess' by Githa Hariharan, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel García Márquez, Ben Okri and Robert Coover. The grotesque implies a curiostrange, fantastic, ugly or bizarre. The cover illustration of Postcolonial and Feminist Grotesque shows a half-human half-plant figure, sculpted in stone as one of the supports to the balustrade of the convent of San Martin Pinario in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, photographed by the author. Pimentel Biscaia suggests that the grotesque axiom came into critical being in the early sixteenth century with the excavation of a hidden cave in Nero's Domus Aurea (Golden Villa), revealing 'ornamented grottoes of intertwining plants, flowers topped with figures and animalised humans' (12). The astonishing discovery caught the imaginations of the artists of the time who were lowered into the cave to gawk. The hybrid forms strained the limits of credibility and imagination, engendering feelings of both fascination and revulsion because of their deviation from classical standards of beauty, restraint and order. Pimentel Biscaia quotes Rushdie: 'If I seem a little bizarre, remember the wild profusion of my inheritance … perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teaming multitude, one must make oneself grotesque.' 1 Imagine! In Rushdie's Satanic Verses (1988), an Indian man experiences metamorphosis into a goat after he treads on English ground. What a metaphor! In a sanatorium this man encounters a great many other hybrid freaks, every one unique in appearance but in the same existential condition as himself. Pimentel Biscaia suggests that their strange stigmata and sense of estrangement from the world is the mark of their foreign
"The Return of the Poetess and Other Gynocritical Anachronisms: the Portuguese Context"
Feministas Unidas, 2003
The gynocritical paradigm in feminist theory and criticism, as defined by Elaine Showalter in her influential essay, "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness" (1978), and fleshed out in what can be described as its founding texts, Showalter's A Literature of Their Own (1977) and Sandra M. Gilbert's and Susan Gubar's Madwoman in the Attic (1979), has become over the last two decades an empowering framework for a considerable number of critical studies aiming to trace a specifically female literary tradition in various national and transnational contexts. To give but one among many possible examples, monographs published in the series Women in Context (Athlone Press) are historical investigations (dating back to mid-nineteenth century) of women's writing in, respectively, Norway, Italy, France, Sweden, and so on. Showalter herself had projected that feminist studies proceeding from gynocritical postulates would aim to investigate and theorize such subjects as "the psychodynamics of female creativity; linguistics and the problem of the female language; the trajectory of the individual or collective female literary career; literary history; and, of course, studies of particular writers and works" (1992, 382). Some of these pathways of inquiry-especially those dependent on the potentially essentializing and homogenizing notions of "female creativity" and "female language"-were soon to be accused, on the one hand, of relying on a naively tautological assumption "that a 'feminine' identity is one which signs itself with a feminine name" (Kamuf 285) and, on the other, of ignoring or diminishing the constitutive importance of racial, ethnic and geopolitical differences among women writers. By contrast, socially and historically contextualized investigations focusing on the politics of canonicity and the symbolic and ideological constructs shaping national literary histories were energized by the gynocritical call to arms, while at the same time remaining relatively immune to the charges of theoretical and political nearsightedness. In her own recent (1998) contribution to the series Women in Context, Spanish Women's Writing 1849-1996, Catherine Davies recognizes that the last two decades of the twentieth century witnessed "a surge of books on the culture and history of Spanish women" and of "excellent critical studies" on the literary production by women in Spain (1). While it is debatable to what extent this dynamic publishing activity (rooted largely, although not exclusively, in Anglo-American academic environments) has affected canonical constructs of critical and literary-historical writing in Spain itself, it appears that the gynocritical model (as represented, among others, by Susan Kirkpatrick's pioneering study Las Románticas: Women Writers and Subjectivity in Spain, 1835-1850 [1989] or John C. Wilcox's more recent Women Poets of Spain, 1860-1990. Toward a Gynocentric Vision [1997]), has interfaced well with the Spanish literary and cultural contexts, especially of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is through an examination, however cursory, of this contrastive Iberian setting that we can perceive with greater clarity the unique challenges that arise when the gynocritical paradigm of historical-literary investigation is tentatively deployed in the Portuguese context and the urgent need for a wide-reaching, theoretically grounded debate on actual and potential directions that feminist criticism of Portuguese literature has taken and/or may be hoped to take. As a theoretical and pragmatic viewpoint, gynocriticism is dependent on historical depth; it is only against the background of longues (or at least medium-sized) durées that explicit or implicit genealogical plotting of patterns of intertextual or metaliterary connectedness among individual women writers or literary generations can occur. In formal terms, such studies rely on relational and developmental modes of inquiry; they emphasize patterns of historical (dis)continuity and foreground such key concepts as trajectory, evolution, recovery, reinterpretation, or rewriting. Yet, the archaeological excavation that provides the foundation for Isabel Allegro de Magalhães's O tempo das mulheres (1987)-the first (and to date only) book-length essay published in Portugal Klobucka Fall 2003 Volume 23.2 35
1998
This thesis offers a thematic comparison of the ways in which fallen women are depicted by two writers: D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) and Jorge Amado (1912- ). The comparison highlights the contrasts and similarities between two cultures and how they are reflected in literature. The focus of the thesis is on an examination of unconventional female characters and it illuminates more generally the ways in which literary creativity is shaped by the interaction between writers and their social milieus. The theme of the fallen woman provokes discussion of changing patterns of sexuality in two different societies, in two different periods of their historical development. It also involves the question of the social, political and cultural background of both England and Brazil, where these images of the fallen women were fabricated. The thesis argues that both Lawrence and Amado share tremendous sympathy for these women. The thesis is divided into eight chapters. Chapters Two through Six are d...
Revista brasileira de literatura comparada, 2017
This article examines the place of female authorship in late modernity extending from the late 50's in the 20 th century through the first two decades of the 21 st century. Double marks of gender and color in the writings of Carolina Maria de Jesus and Conceição Evaristo's, radically translate literary experience as symbolic resistance to the diasporic processes undergone by afro descendant peoples as well as question notions of belongness under the concept of 'nation'. In Jesus's case, the documentary genre of her diaries masks off the undeniable literary and solitary nature of her writings. In the case of Evaristo's, literary writing is wrought by memorialistic demands which found authorship in solidary subaltern voices.
in order to highlight their shared preoccupations with breaching national myths, countering stereotypes, and historical redress. In other words, the aim of my project is to show how these texts contest Eurocentric national representations and propose new ways of belonging, insisting on the plurilingual and multifaceted realities of a world increasingly shaped by migration and diaspora. I use a postcolonial lens in my commitment to dismantling imperial narratives but I also shed light on it by drawing attention to the 'minority' status of these less canonical literatures and the silenced voices they bring to light. I follow the 'minor' transnational model of Lionnet and Shih to illustrate the productivity and creativity of horizontal transcolonial perspectives. My first approach to demonstrating the common dissident nature of these texts focuses on language. I outline how the writers use particular language-related strategies to resist and decolonize different regimes of authority and carve out rebellious forms of agency and subjectivity. Beyond language, I move on to explain how texts negotiate cultural difference through the category of the 'racialized' body marked by gender, race, and social status, specifically analyzing how signifiers of 'otherness' such as hair and skin colour both inform and disrupt lingering imperial narratives. Thirdly, by drawing on social history's attention to common people's voices, I look at these texts as repositories of national and transnational memory and present their contribution to rewriting historical representations of the South, which refers both to Africa and to the peripheral position of Southern Europe in the West.
The question at the root of this study is why the political formation of state power in Latin America always seems to be accompanied by violence against women. Two threads run throughout: an analysis of the relation between image, violence, and subject formation; and the application of this theory to the political violence exerted upon feminine subjectivity in relation to state formation in Latin America. I trace the marginalization of women through experimental dictatorial fiction of the Southern Cone up to the crisis of femicide that has emerged alongside the so-called narco-state in Mexico in the wake of NAFTA. I argue that Latin American feminist thought has sought to articulate itself as a post-hegemonic force of interruption from within the dominant order, a project that is problematized in the face of the perverse seriality of the femicide crimes and the intolerable yet enigmatic power of which they become a forced representation. The first chapter stages a close reading of Salvador Elizondo’s Farabeuf (1965), locating in the novel’s engagement with a photograph of the Chinese Leng Tch’é execution a theory of the relation between cut, image, and the female body that understands the subtraction of the feminine as the foundation of the political. The second chapter turns to the structure of dictatorial violence in Argentina, looking at Alejandra Pizarnik’s La condesa sangrienta (1965) and Luisa Valenzuela’s “Cambio de armas” (1982) alongside the Argentine Revolution and the Dirty War, respectively. Pizarnik’s meditation on Elizabeth Bathory’s crimes highlights both the fetishization of the subversive body and the inevitable failure of sovereign power to designate itself. Valenzuela’s fragmentary story deconstructs the notion of erasure at the heart of the regime’s use of forced disappearance by staging a perverse sexual relation within an environment of domestic confinement. The third chapter examines Diamela Eltit’s critique of neoliberalism during the Pinochet regime in Chile through her cinematographic novel Lumpérica (1983) before following this economic trail northward to the femicide crisis that has ravaged the Mexican-U.S. border since 1993. I demonstrate that both oppressive power structures—official and unofficial—are founded on the fusion of economic and gender violence. A reading of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 through the notion of the exquisite corpse situates this urgent crisis in relation to globalization and the postmodern world of images, technology, efficiency, and instantaneity for which it becomes a disturbing emblem.
2013
This dissertation analyzes the representation of the erotic and sexuality in works of Mexican and Brazilian fiction in the twentieth century. I examine how the erotic motif influences the construction of gender and sexuality. Erotic representations apart from the surface function of displaying what is aesthetically pleasing also have the possibility to transform or, at a minimum, disturb gender norms. By analyzing gender, my objective is to show how fluid gender identities are, and how the erotic motif can also have political implications by surfacing feminist and activist ideologies. Most importantly, however, by closely analyzing how the erotic has been mobilized in political terms, I am able to observe how radical authors have become in rewriting the female body and erotic desires. Some of the texts under analysis are Gabriela Cravo e Canela by Jorge Amado, Entre Villa y una mujer desnuda by Sabina Berman, Eu Tu Eles directed by Andrucha Waddington, among others. Chapter 1: Rethinking Foundations and Expanding the Boundaries: Theorizing Eroticism, Sex, Gender, Sexuality and the Body Not only is erotic desire and sensuous feeling removed from the dominant philosophical tradition with which Kant is associated-and (by extension) from aesthetic pleasure-but sexuality, sexual desire, and the body are all proposed as a threat to rational, civilized society. Eroticism, because it is linked to the emotions (from sexual arousal to fear and anger), has the power to agitate the mind, the soul, and to disrupt order.
Disability and the Global South Vol.6, No. 1, 1677-1694, 2019
The present article fosters a dialogue among multiple currents of literary research. Disability scholars such as Garland-Thomson, Davis, and Mitchell and Snyder, have famously explored the literary conventions of normativity. Their queries on normates and statistical averages, form a parallel line of thought with Moretti’s (2007) ‘distant reading’ of the novel. These two distinct pathways- distant reading and disability- lead to the same questioning of the accepted aesthetics of rationality, which of course interests scholars of Anthropocene. An environmental thinker of the stature of Ghosh has already taken up Moretti’s observations, and the present article places that engagement into a still richer context, with decolonial thinkers such as Grech, Maldonado-Torres, and Mignolo. This broad juxtaposition of thinkers, indicates that disability thought already prepares the environmentally conscious imagination to reach for alternatives to ableist and colonial readings. The principles of this wideranging theoretical dialogue are then put to the test with examples drawn from three Mexican writers’ fiction. The novels Formol (2014) by Carla Faesler (b. 1967) and Despúes del invierno (2014) by Guadalupe Nettel (b. 1973), along with the short story ‘La pierna era nuestro altar’ from El esquinista (2014) by Laia Jufresa (1983), review colonial habits using the aesthetic of realism and end up in familiar disenchantment that forestalls the possibility of an alternative. Nevertheless, these texts manage to interrupt their conventional fictions in the realist mode for moments of mindfulness. These pauses from accepted reasoning suggest an alternative style of cogitation, against the assumptions of the ‘normate,’ that may support Felski’s and Latour’s calls for a turn away from disenchantment. The article concludes that literary fiction might begin to listen to its own science and contemplate environmental disaster through a more mindful mode of poetic thought, a perceptive thinking that does not automatically accept the conventions established for the rational as the only ‘realistic’ aesthetic. The breaks or ‘breathers’ from the conventions of rationality included in these three contemporary fictions point the way toward a permissible mode of wellbeing in accordance with decolonial goals. Even if such mindful writing does not ultimately take hold in literary fiction, it may still aid critics in reassessing the tendency of the normate to cast itself as a superior kind of victim
Mother or monster: A postcolonial study of two pathological women in postcolonial literature
International Journal of English and Literature, 2013
The loveliness and selflessness of the relation between a mother and a child do not need any explanation to be proved as it is universally known and established. Motherhood is a universal concept, but in Ngugi's Petals of Blood and in Morrison's Beloved this concept has been damaged. Both of these novels have shown motherhood with monstrosity. Monstrosity is a concept like beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder and can therefore be interpreted differently. In these two novels mothers have been presented with excessive violence. Both of the novels dealt with an unnatural thing that the mother killed her own child which really does not sound usual and lacks credibility. But these two women did that impossible thing and this paper will try to find out the reasons why these mothers did that work. It will analyze these two women on one hand as child-killing ugly monsters and on the other hand, only as desperate but caring mothers.