Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Literatura / Escuela de Postgrado / Esta investigación tiene como fin estudiar la construcción del cuerpo marginal en tres textos narrativos escritos durante la dictadura y postdictadura chilena: Lumpérica (1983) de Diamela Eltit. Óxido de Carmen (1986) de Ana María del Río y La esquina es mi corazón (1995) de Pedro Lemebel. Desde mi punto de vista, estas configuraciones del cuerpo se articulan, principalmente, desde las voces narrativas, las que definen a los cuerpos como espacios de resistencia político-identitaria. En la tesis sostengo que la representación del cuerpo marginal del corpus de estudio entra en debate con el proyecto ideológico refundacional al Estado chileno que se inicia con el Golpe de Estado en Chile (1973). Dicho proyecto se sostiene en, al menos, tres tipos de discursos: el nacionalista, el católico y el neoliberal. Los tres actúan sobre la matriz heteronormativa para reproducir un determinado orden de relaciones que evoluciona hacia un modelo neoliberal. Los textos seleccionados desafían el contexto ideológico en el que fueron escritos, generando concepciones contrahegemónicas de sujeto y de comunidad, así como recursos literarios que problematizan las bases de los discursos antes mencionados.

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La situación que atravesaba Puerto Rico a finales del siglo XIX y principios del XX alteraba la rutina de los puertorriqueños. La isla pasó de ser colonia de España a ser territorio de los Estados Unidos. Entonces la identidad del puertorriqueño se convirtió en un proyecto nacional. Los cambios económicos surgidos bajo el gobierno estadounidense, dieron pie para que la mujer comenzara a reflexionar sobre su papel social y se organizaran. Se creó una división entre la mujer obrera quien se enfocaba en las luchas laborales y la burguesa quien aspiraba a tener un lugar de igualdad al lado del hombre basándose principalmente en su intelecto. En las luchas de la mujer burguesa se destacó una figura: Ana Roqué de Duprey. Roqué se destacaba principalmente por su desempeño como educadora. Incursionó en la política, la ciencia, la literatura y el feminismo. Luchó por el sufragio de la mujer y se esforzó por proveer para ésta una plataforma de entrenamiento, fuente de ingreso e intercambio de ideas y proyectos. Se le recuerda como la primera feminista de la isla y por haber conseguido el voto para la mujer. Este trabajo propone resumir el contexto histórico en el que se desenvolvía Ana Roqué, develar los recursos utilizados por la mujer burguesa para conquistar sus metas, descubrir el mensaje de emancipación femenina escondido en su literatura y abundar sobre el legado de Ana Roqué por medio de sus manuscritos y el análisis de su obra más conocida Luz y sombra (1903).

Many scholars have considered Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta to be a translator of Afro-Cuban culture. In her 2019 monograph on the artist, for example, Genevieve Hyacinthe writes: “brownness made Mendieta a powerful translator of Black Atlantic forms into contemporary art language because she was not, and could never be, part of the dominant white culture.” Mendieta also announced herself as a translator (and inheritor) of Siboney and Taino cultures. Her gallery notes that to celebrate her return to Cuba’s “maternal breast” as an adult, the artist titled the rock carvings she made there with “names of zemis, or Taíno spirits, such as Bacayu for ‘Light of Day.’” I argue that alongside her claims on Taino cultural heritage we might consider her actual ancestry and claims on Indigenous women in the art of Cuban settlers before her. My dissertation considers Mendieta as a translator not of Taino myths or Black cultural practices but of ethnological texts and nationalistic folklore which catalogued and caricatured Black and Indigenous cultures. “Bacayu,” for example, is not a Taino “zemi” but rather a word she culled from a glossary of Black and Indigenous terms: a performance of knowledge over Indigenous cultures rather than a Taino cultural product. It hails from a lecherous story written by a Havana dentist about the death of an “Indian doncella.” Each chapter considers her translations of such pieces, focusing in particular on her translation choices which I suggest are motivated by her feminist and anti-imperial politics. My first chapter considers the influence of ethnographic studies on Abakuá and particularly the writings of Fernando Ortiz in her Iowa campus performances which reference crime scenes and “sacrificial” initiation ceremonies. Rather than offering unmediated access to Black religious practices, I suggest she is performing an abased view of Abakuá as seen through the (exterminationist) lens of Ortiz’s scholarship from his criminological ethnography, Los negros brujos (1906), to his less punitive but still highly fetishizing account of Abakuá in “La ‘tragedia’ de los ñáñigos” (1950). I don’t believe Mendieta translates this work to oppress Black people. Rather as a bodywork artist composing a militant, corporal language of feminist critique, she aims the violence of cultural translation toward her chauvinistic art school cohort. The second chapter considers her literary translation of “La Venus Negra, based on a Cuban legend,” which was composed by Adrián del Valle, Ortiz’s secretary at La Sociedad Económica de los Amigos del País for which he collated Cuba’s first public library among other projects. The original legend can be contextualized by del Valle’s broader stewardship of Cuban letters: he penned “La Venus Negra” for a collection celebrating the Centenary of Cienfuegos from the family notes of a prominent cienfueguero, Pedro Modesto. Examining the tacky national showcase in which the legend originally appears, I consider the ways Mendieta repositions la Venus Negra as a display of her own “will to continue being Other.” In particular, her translation imposes a “Siboney” ancestry on la Venus Negra and dispenses with the conditions which determine the protagonist’s muteness (in the original, la Venus Negra is a nude Black woman who is captured and displaced from her island hideout by criollo enslavers). In Mendieta’s translation la Venus is not muted Black protest incarnate but becomes an anti-colonial symbol. Mendieta publishes the piece in the feminist magazine Heresies, illustrating the legend with a silhouette of her own body from her Silueta Series. Again, I don’t think Mendieta poses as a Ciboney woman or absents Black women in a gesture of ill will toward Black and Indigenous people. Rather, she does so as an anti-imperial strategy consistent with Fidel Castro’s cadre, as her unavowed translation of Roberto Fernández Retamar’s “Calibán” into her “Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States” curatorial statement indicates. In the essay, Retamar, a white Cuban scholar, aligns the revolution with Black and Indigenous Cuba by “reclaiming” the caricature Caliban, which, as Coco Fusco writes, Shakespeare himself had based on an “Indian” exhibited in London. In the third chapter, I consider Mendieta’s Esculturas Rupestres, not as tributes to Taino spirits but as monuments of settler longing for mutilated Indigenous women. The legend I mentioned in the introductory paragraph, “Bacayu,” for example, is settler fanfiction about a daughter of a “cacique” whose death portends the coming of the white man and includes a lengthy description of the dead woman’s body. I also point toward the misnamings of Black women which appear within this rock series (Black Venus, Mother) which are often overlooked by scholars who ask us to read the work as Taino myth. Finally, building on these themes, I suggest a comparison to the work of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica: emphasizing the similarities in their “cannibalistic” approaches to translation. Although differently aligned politically (leftist, anarchist), Oiticica’s family, like Mendieta’s, were culturally and politically prominent settlers; and, like Mendieta, Oiticica is often read as a translator of Black Atlantic culture. Further both artists engaged in the caricaturing of Indigenous “American” cultures. In New York, Oiticica translated Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto Antropófago” (1928) to contextualize his work and the work of his friends. Artists in Brazil had adapted de Andrade’s manifesto into a translation program “cannibalizing” European and North American cultures, a practice they misidentified as Tupi as de Andrade had. Comparing Mendieta and Oiticica as translators reveals shared patterns of Latin American vanguards employing caricatures of Black and Indigenous cultures in anti-imperial performances. These caricatures and their resemblance to caricatures in the U.S. also point to older (and enduring) transnational networks of white nationalism in the Americas.

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No description available.

“A Howling in the Paperwork” explores the relationship between ethnography, archival practice, and experimentalism in the work of twentieth century women artists whose syncretic ambitions lead them on a geographical itinerary to and through the greater Caribbean. This dissertation proposes a special synergy between artists with “scattered” bodies of work, in perpetual search of the right form for their creative energy, and the space of the Caribbean with its history of genocides, migrations, and displacements. I focus on women artists, in particular, to foreground the relationship between social precarity and aesthetic innovation. The flight from one technique to another has a push as well as a pull, as women artists have been excluded or expelled from institutional homes for their work, including the university. In the absence of reliable support, the artists I consider come to rely on and refine rigorously subjective methods that prefigure the necessary crisis of objectivity, especially in the social sciences, that would enter mainstream discourse decades later. But even as the artists I consider foreground their own bodies, lives, and communities in their work, they engage diasporic theories of spirit possession, inheritance, and collective creativity that amount to implicit—and sometimes explicit—critiques of the artist as self-contained auteur. Whether or not “there is something strongly feminine” in Caribbean culture, as Antonio Benítez Rojo suggests in The Repeating Island, the idea that there is places women in particularly charged relation to their own creative production in a Caribbean context. My project pays particular attention to the ways these artists attend to one another, taking up the detritus of those who came before as the raw material for new projects. For example, the Cuban-American émigré Ana Mendieta turns to the amateur anthropology of Lydia Cabrera as inspiration for the stone sculptures she carves in the caves of Jaruco, north of Havana, on a return trip to her home island. This relational consciousness does not establish a linear narrative of descent so much as it imagines a transhistorical collaboration in which I, too, participate. Alongside traditional methodologies of close-reading and archival research, I engage their work in more personal ways: I’ve traveled to the caves of Jaruco to visit the almost-ruined remains of Mendieta’s sculptures, I’ve translated Marigloria Palma’s poetry into English, and I’ve interviewed Julie Dash for a literary magazine. Much of the meaning of their work resides in its unmistakable invitation to collaborate in its development and dissemination: the second half of this dissertation considers my own inheritance of feminist practice in the context of Puerto Rican culture.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

[pt] Como me tornei Clarice divide-se em três partes. A primeira parte se intitulada Cansaço e se constitui de contos que reconstituem o final da vida de seis autores de literatura brasileira. A saber: Clarice Lispector, Ana Cristina Cesar, Paulo Leminski, Torquato Neto, Caio Fernando Abreu e Hilda Hilst. Misturando elementos ficcionais com biográficos, os contos almejam elaborar um jogo narrativo em que os fatos possam ser tomados pela ficção. A segunda parte se constitui do par de contos Latejos e Enxame. Neles, a voz que narra revela um escritor que passava seus dias se sentindo só em meio ao caos urbano (Latejos) que decide, então, promover fisicamente a imagem do isolamento ao se mudar para um sítio rural a fim de cultivar abelhas (Enxame). A terceira e última parte, que dá título à dissertação, é o ensaio autobiográfico Como me tornei Clarice, que dá sequência às partes ficcionais I e II explicita o processo de composição dos contos de Cansaço bem como busca demonstrar o estado de perturbação necessário para a escrita do homem de trinta anos resistindo à ânsia de seu próprio fim elaborado em Latejos e aprofundado em Enxame. / [en] How I Became Clarice is divided in three sections. The first, Tiredness, is made up of six short stories that re-create the last moments of the lives of six Brazilian authors: Clarice Lispector, Ana Cristina Cesar, Paulo Leminski, Torquato Neto, Caio Fernando Abreu, and Hilda Hilst. These stories combine biographical information and fictional elements in a narrative game where the reader cannot tell fact from fiction. The second section includes two stories, Throb and Swarm, narrated by a writer who spends his lonely days immersed in urban chaos (Throb) and decides to physically promote the image of isolation by leaving the city to live in the country, working as a beekeeper (Swarm). The third and last section, which has the same title as the thesis, How I Became Clarice, is an autobiographical essay; sections I and II deal with the process of creating the short stories of Tiredness and also show the state of mental disorder that allows the thirty-year-old author depicted in Throb and Swarm to write even as he resists his own death drive.