El performance de genero en la produccion cultural fronteriza de Rosina Conde explora tanto la obra narrativa como la produccion arti­stica de la escritora mexicana Rosina Conde bajo la perspectiva del performance. Conde desautoriza el discurso acerca de la mujer como un sujeto autonomo con una identidad propia y nos muestra que la identidad es el reflejo de todo aquello que nos ha construido social, cultural, economicamente e inclusive sentimentalmente. El corpus teorico que se utiliza en este estudio son las teorias feministas, postestructuralistas y posmodernas. Utilizo la teori­a del performance para analizar la produccion cultural de esta escritora mexicana, enfocandome especi­ficamente en el concepto de genero como una construccion socio cultural. Utilizo la teoria del construccionismo social para explorar el genero y la sexualidad, ya que la dicha teori­a nos ofrece la posibilidad de desconstruir las normas esencialistas en las que ambos conceptos han sido fundados.El estado auto-reflexivo y contradictorio que distingue a los personajes de Conde contextualiza el genero como un performance cultural y social. La concientizacion de la posicion subalterna en que se encuentran como mujeres contemporaneas dentro de una sociedad tradicional con valores que no corresponden a su epoca nos muestra que el genero no se define por construcciones biologicas sino sociales y culturales. Esta investigacion apunta a la idea de que uno de los aspectos poco estudiados dentro del campo de esta practica arti­stica radica especialmente con su funcion teorica. El performance arti­stico ofrece la posibilidad de crear un corpus teorico como producto del analisis de la misma obra.

This dissertation analyzes testimonial accounts by female survivors of the last dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983) in the form of cultural productions that started to appear from the 1990s to the first decade of the 2000s. In my dissertation, I examine how representations of traumatic memories change over time, and are affected by the gender of the witness. Furthermore, I study the way in which women survivors move from the position of the victim to that of the witness, constructing new subjectivities that strive to incorporate the traumatic past. My analyses show that womens testimonial accounts do not hide the silences and gaps that are present in all testimonies to the horror of traumatic experiences, but instead they put them to work so that these silences are transformed from merely mute to eloquent. Thus, calling the listener to hear these eloquent silences, and to respond to them ethically. By exploring this social and symbolic field, my dissertation affirms the transformative value of testimonial narratives both for the listener and the narrator, while contributes to the literary field of cultural studies by analyzing the testimonial accounts through the category of gender.

The Whitening Project in Venezuela, ca. 1810-1950 Alana Alvarez Dissertation under the direction of Professor Ruth Hill Simon Bolívarâs (1783-1830) still-popular and demagogical notion of the Venezuelan as a mixed-race individual whose supposedly unique racial fusion benefits the construction of the nation, has been a pivotal part of how the Venezuelan´s describe themselves racially through out the 19th and 20th centuries. I begin my investigation with Bolívarâs political speeches in which he depicts the prototypical Venezuelan as a mixture of European, Indian, and African bloodlines. By erasing ethnic, racial, and class distinctions that were still intact from the colonial period, Bolívar intentionally inaugurated a complex system of double discourses and codes to ultimately whiten the hidden colonial heritage of mestizaje. I then trace Bolívarâs supposedly pro-mestizaje discourse through post independence writers Juan Vicente González and Eduardo Blanco. Adopting a material-culture perspective I turn to manifestations of whitening-through-mestizaje in the Venezuelan magazine El cojo ilustrado (1892â1915). Subsequently, I analyze the counter mestizaje discourse of Venezuelan elites Rufino Blanco Fombona and José Rafael Pocaterra. Separating themselves from Bolívarâs use of double discourses, they display their positivist racial ideologies in their literary representations of the lower economic strata and colored majorities. Moving further into the twentieth century, my study exhaustively analyzes the continuing negative connotations of mestizaje and the presence of Bolívarâs double discourse in authors like Rómulo Gallegos (1884-1969) and Teresa de la Parra (1889-1936). I further dwell into Venezuelaâs mixed racial reality and how it opposes any attempt of successful whitening. Gallegoâs raza autóctona (âautochthonous raceâ) in Los inmigrantes (1922) and Doña Bárbara (1929) suggests a trope of an uncouth and physically inferior mixed race rooted in Venezuelan soil. Consequently, Gallegos forges a necessity and commodity of Whiteness. Finally, I examine Teresa de la Parraâs Ifigenia (1924) in order to debunk the critical portrait of this novelist as a protofeminist. Parraâs narrative renderings of Venezuelan women are racially, and economically, constrained. Using the scopic concept of the White Gaze, as the critical race theorist George Yancy frames it, my analysis illuminates whitening-through- mestizaje in its class and race dimensions in the 1920s and 1930s.

Female cross-dressing was an extremely popular phenomenon of the Golden Age comedia, appearing in every major playwrights repertoire. This dissertation argues that Spanish theaters treatment of the female cross-dresser in the seventeenth century offers a paradigm for understanding the creative self-consciousness that made both early modern society theatrical and early modern art unique. I combine analysis of purely fictional cross-dressing protagonists with an examination of the theatrical discourse surrounding real-life gender-benders such as Eleno/a de Céspdes, Catalina de Erauso, Francisca Baltasara, and Queen Christina of Sweden. While Diego Velazquezs Las meninas and Miguel de Cervantess Don Quijote serve as the prominent examples of seventeenth-century Spanish artistic self-reference in the areas of painting and narrative, respectively, I propose the female cross-dresser as symptomatic of a specifically theatrical self-consciousness that captivated public attention within and outside the theater.

This dissertation uses theoretical models of cultural studies to examine social factors that contribute to the development of the novel in early modern Spain and beyond. Documents from the conquest of the Americas provide a historical frame for understanding how authors found ways to subvert hegemony in an age of rigorous censorship and inquisitorial restrictions. Analysis of the picaresque genre focuses on strategies through which the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes and Mateo Alemáns Guzmán de Alfarache present the reappropriation of conventional discourse as a means of justifying social mobility. A study of Don Quixote punctuates the thesis that Sancho Panzas combination of a proto-capitalist outlook with the language of knight errantry affects the novels ideology and highlights its metafictional nature. As memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas by the Brazilian author Machado de Assis and Mala onda by Alberto Fuguet of Chile show that similar socio-political issues contribute to contemporary trends in narrative fiction.

This study examines the comic vision of Miguel de Cervantes as manifested in his masterpiece, Don Quixote de la Mancha. Employing theories stemming principally from Mikhail Bakhtin and Michel Foucault, I look at how Cervantes creates humor in his novel and how, in turn, his novel fits into the long tradition of comic literature. The heart of this study is Cervantess use of carnivalesque laughter and how it showcases the various cultural identities related to the Spanish Baroque. I focus on reading Don Quixote as forming part of the history of Menippean satire and likewise its relationship to carnivalesque humor. This type of humor intimates the defense of a different type of world that is not dominated by one particular identity or power (whether political, philosophical, religious, or even literary) and as a result is destabilizing in nature. Journey is an essential characteristic to both carnivalesque laughter and Menippean satire, because it necessitates displacement as well as creates spaces for the mixing and clashing of identities. Because it is also a central motif throughout Don Quixote, I examine its effect on the text and how it functions to create different types of humor. The Avellaneda-Cervantes dynamic is another important aspect in understanding the direction of comicality in Don Quixote, in that Cervantess humor was multi-directional whereas Avellanedas tended to accentuate laughter emanating from the top down. Avellaneda represents the type of humor associated with hierarchy and power whereas Cervantess has leveled the playing field. I not only analyze the authors differences with regard to comic strategies, but emphasize the importance of reading both works in order to better understand how Cervantess comic vision incorporates carnivalesque laughter and therefore enriches his text. The relationship between madness and laughter is another avenue of discussion in this study and I investigate the historical and ethical dimensions of laughter, especially with regard to madness from the vantage point of Erasmus and Humanism.

This study explores the criollo voice present in four of Juan Ruiz de Alarcóns plays. Informed by the most recent studies on criollo literature, particularly of 17th-century writers born in New Spain, as José Antonio Mazottis and Mabel Morañas, I look into the strategies that Ruiz de Alarcón uses to introduce a criollo perspective in his plays. One relevant consideration in this study is the fact that the playwright was writing a product to be consumed by peninsular audiences unaware in some instances, indifferent and unconcerned in others about the issues that preoccupied the Spanish population of the American colonies. I focus on Ruiz de Alarcóns use of the space of the popular comedia and common tropes of the baroque to reivindicate the colonial white population, argue in their favor, and articulate their concerns.

In my dissertation I analyze the discursive construction of cultural identities during the first century of European colonial occupation in the Americas. In order to do so, I explore a broad variety of colonial discourses using a conceptual reading tool I designate ethnographic writing. This concept describes representational devices such as stereotypes, tropes, and analogies whose primary function is the religious, political, and ideological creation of cultural differences. Given the variety of the written material covered in the studytravel logs, juridical documents, religious chronicles, literary textsI use an interdisciplinary approach which combines the theoretical tools of historiography, anthropology, cultural and literary theory, and discourse analysis. It is my contention that ethnographic writing creates a discursive matrix that articulates: 1) knowledge about the savage; and 2) the invention of new social and racial subjectivities. I assert that ethnographic writing has political effects of power and knowledge that affected, in a direct way, the culture and lives of the American Others. Therefore, to read ethnographic writing is also to read the strategies of colonial domination and the violence embodied in Eurocentric representations. My dissertation, through the analysis and interpretation of conceptual procedures such as social classifications, erection of cultural similarities and differences, and the invention of moral and religious dichotomies, contributes to the existing theorization of racism, colonialism, and ethnocentrism in Latin American literature. It is through the deconstruction of these ethnographic discourses that I propose a cultural critique and a re-evaluation of colonialism.

After the groundbreaking invention of the printing press, which led to the creation of a burgeoning literary market, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw an exceptional increase in the production of literature about criminals and the underworld across Europe. This was particularly intense in the cases of England, with the appearance of popular genres such as the jest-book and the rogue pamphlet, and Spain, where picaresque literature, a genre that is instrumental to the study of the history of the novel, first came to fruition. This dissertation explores the intertextual dialogue in which English and Spanish authors of rogue texts engaged in the early modern period. The study attempts to integrate the English and Spanish traditions under the all-inclusive umbrella term of rogue literature, which will facilitate a more comprehensive understanding of two traditions that would prove highly influential even into the present day. In all the texts considered here, the authors create diverse and often antithetical images of the literary figure of the rogue that are decisively influenced by considerations such as each authors ideology, literary conception, and political agenda. Moreover, this study analyzes the different ways in which Spanish writers of rogue literature introduced elements akin to those found in English rogue pamphlets into their works, reworking and modifying them in order to suit their own purposes. By taking two disparate Spanish picaresque textsMiguel de Cervantess exemplary novella Rinconete y Cortadillo (1613) and Dr. Carlos Garcías lesser-known La desordenada codicia de los bienes ajenos (1619)as cases in point, the dissertation integrates two literary traditions that can be more thoroughly understood when viewed in the light of one another.

This project focuses on how the novels of the so called Literatura de la Onda and Chicano narratives of the sixties and seventies challenged the legacy of Mexican revolutionary nationalist discourse through the voice of young rebels and misfits. I argue that the rather contentious attitude of Onda novels on the one hand, and of Chicano fiction on the other bring to the fore a search for identity that is articulated as an opposition between post-revolutionary values typically held by father figures, and the revolt of the young protagonists. The novels by Mexican Onda writers, such as José Agustín and Parménides García Saldaña, raise identity issues that have been a constant source of anxiety in the nationalist discourse of Latin America since the nineteenth century. Among these, one of the most important is the impact of US culture in Mexican cultural identity. At the same time, Chicano narratives portray the struggle of adolescents who live between traditional Mexican values and North American ones as seen in works such as Alejandro Morales Barrio on the Edge, and José Antonio Villarreals Pocho. Drawing on Julia Kristevas theory of the abject, I show how the abject position of adolescents towards their origins undermines a sense of total rebelliousness that creates its own space within the narration. It is in this place where tradition and rebellion collide. Such collision gives way to the anguished quest of identity, and this quest is one that transgresses both cultural and national boundaries.