House/Garden/Nation: Space, Gender, and Ethnicity in Post-Colonial Latin American Literatures by Women (Post-Contemporary Interventions) - Softcover

Rodriguez, Ileana

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822314657 ISBN 13: 9780822314653

Verlag: Duke University Press, 1994

Inhaltsangabe

How ironic, the author thought on learning of the Sandinista's electoral defeat, that at its death the Revolutionary State left Woman, Violeta Chamorro, located at the center. The election signaled the end of one transition and the beginning of another, with Woman somewhere on the border between the neo-liberal and marxist projects. It is such transitions that Ileana Rodríguez takes up here, unraveling their weave of gender, ethnicity, and nation as it is revealed in literature written by women.
In House/Garden/Nation the narratives of five Centro-Caribbean writers illustrate these times of transition: Dulce María Loynáz, from colonial rule to independence in Cuba; Jean Rhys, from colony to commonwealth in Dominica; Simone Schwarz-Bart, from slave to free labor in Guadeloupe; Gioconda Belli, from oligarchic capitalism to social democratic socialism in Nicaragua; and Teresa de la Parra, from independence to modernity in Venezuela. Focusing on the nation as garden, hacienda, or plantation, Rodríguez shows us these writers debating the predicament of women under nation formation from within the confines of marriage and home.
In reading these post-colonial literatures by women facing the crisis of transition, this study highlights urgent questions of destitution, migration, exile, and inexperience, but also networks of value allotted to women: beauty, clothing, love. As a counterpoint on issues of legality, policy, and marriage, Rodriguez includes a chapter on male writers: José Eustacio Rivera, Omar Cabezas, and Romulo Gallegos. Her work presents a sobering picture of women at a crossroads, continually circumscribed by history and culture, writing their way.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ileana Rodríguez is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Ohio State University. She is a specialist in the centro-Caribbean area and has written extensively on the literature and culture of the island and mainland nations.

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"This is a superb book. One of the foremost Latin American literary critics writing today, Rodriguez offers in this study an important new perspective on the 'foundational' novels of early Latin-American nation-building and their relation to the modern and contemporary narratives of social transition in Central America and the Caribbean."--Ellen McCracken, University of California, Santa Barbara

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House/Garden/Nation

Space, Gender, and Ethnicity in Postcolonial Latin American Literatures by Women

By Ileana Rodríguez, Stanley Fish, Fredric Jameson, Robert Carr

Duke University Press

Copyright © 1994 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-1465-3

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
PART I Gender/Genre/Nation/Ethnicity The Masculine, 
Modernism/ Modernity, 
PART II Nation/Ethnicity/Gender/Genre The Feminine, 
Hacienda/Nation—Quid Pro Quo, 
Garden/Nation—Parva Domus: Magna Quies, 
Island/Nation—Hortus Conclusus, 
Provision Grounds/Nation—Et in Arcadia Ego, 
Urban House/Nation—Domi Nostre, 
Notes, 
Selected Bibliography, 

CHAPTER 1

Transitions

Modernism/ Modernity

The texts of Rómulo Gallegos and José Eustasio Rivera, as well as the texts of Ricardo Güiraldes, speak of a geography without limits. Across vast and ill-charted plains, at high altitudes where the lines of the horizon can barely be discerned, in regions populated by cunning natives, disturbed only by the thunder of enormous herds and limited at their borders by the human frontier of ethnicity, the nation-states are postulated at the beginning of the century. The lights of Modernism begin to flicker. If in Rivera the signs of a modernist aesthetics first scintillate, in Gallegos only the final gleamings can be discerned. This shift in semantic planes we call transition.

The feminine boudoir of Mercedes Galindo and its Oriental flavor in Teresa de la Parra; the Parisian taste her wardrobe displays; the languid, sensual posture she adopts on a divan; and her well-appointed dinners and her Baccarat glassware all recall a modernist aesthetics. But the after-dinner conversations on oil extraction, marriages of convenience, and alliances between professionals, hacendatarios, and founding fathers already belong to the horizon of Modernity. This shift is also an index of transition.

Transition is thus a generous concept. For when the impoverished daughters of the original plantocracy, without a name or recourse to the law, are taken hostage to the metropolis; when they languish in solitude in gardens reverting to jungle; when women of porcelain and women of ebony occupy the same discursive plane, and the daughters of the "commercial bourgeoisie" are shot by the army, we are also facing a transition.

The Spirit of the Law

Transition is the limit and the threshold: it is a border, a deep divide between two alternative modes of thinking, affecting one's self, the world, conversations, kinship and labor relations, table manners, peasant behavior, and the words appropriate to addressing subalterns. But it can also be a wound, a deep wound, an amputation, bloodshed.

Insofar as it postulates change, transition is related to Utopia. It articulates desire and hope. This century has developed around utopian ideas of social health, "progress," and/or social justice, ideas of revolution. In the horizon of literary modernity at the beginning of the century, in Gallegos for instance, to progress is to civilize. Progress and civilization constitute a copula. The history plotted in Doña Bárbara is the history of an obsession: to civilize is to tame, to vanquish, to coordinate, to kill—in short, to constitute the masculine agencies that support rational production, progress. The Neo-Positivist spirit of Santos Luzardo, the hero of Doña Bárbara, pronounces itself against all barriers to progress and civilization: idleness, barbarianism, the misuse of time (capital), the stagnating and unproductive accumulation of money, the mismanagement of land and its wealth, and the poor habits of the labor sector—in short, all that comes to impede the primitive accumulation of capital.

The concepts of progress and civilization also imply the displacements of hierarchies and hegemonies (men/women, master/peon, white/mestizo, mestizo/indigenous peoples). Doña Bárbara diagnoses the problem, and the prognosis for recovery invokes the spirit of the law as mediation. To rewrite and to recodify the law is the only way to regulate the exchange between the unequal terms of the social equation. In Gallegos, the judicial argument is the vehicle for administering progress and civilization, the dominant discourse in the constitution of the productive nation. The plains of Arauca are the geography on which matters of property are proven; and the plains' extension, government, yields.

Here, two problems of Neo-Positivistic, liberal desire will be addressed: to make civil law valid over custom, and, consequently, to reconceptualize legal prose—sales, litigations, territorial extensions, accounting—as an interaction between master and peon. The concepts of "custom" and "law and order" are thus recast. As Hobsbawm has argued, customs, the mundanities organizing everyday life among the subject-peoples (women, peons, mestizos, indigenous peoples), the residual cultural norms of ethnic groups vanquished in the constitution of nation-states, are recast as folklore; and law and order, the means to transition, are incorporated into the newly modified structures of government. The method of personally exercising authority and exacting punishment on the flesh of the subaltern by administrators in societies of extraction (plantations and mines) is replaced by the depersonalized forces of the army, the custodians of frontiers (borders and limits as geographic and legal concepts) for the nation-state.

Governing and government are politico-economic concepts. Politically, they rest in the army; economically, they are understood through the paradigms of development and underdevelopment. In terms of the conceptualization of spaces and institutions of organization and control, "transition" could then also be understood as a euphemism for development. The non-negotiable term in the transition to modernity is thus progress constituted as civilization. To advance. To move forward. To reach. In Daniel Lerner's paraphrase of Marx's thought, it is the fact that "more and more developed societies present to less developed ones the image of their own future" (Schiller, 140).

Productivity is progress. It is politically legislated civilization, the constituted state or the state about to be constituted, that which regulates the social behavior of productive beings. Santos proposes to fence, to shoe, to order and educate as conditions of progress. Reading Santos against the grain, it can be argued that progress is the institutionalization of society through a series of dualities: men's hegemony over women, the master over the peon, whites over other ethnic groups. The metaphor signifying transition is inscribed in woman in masculine terms: in the heroine doña Bárbara as repression/dictatorship, and in Marisela as affection/democracy. On the bodies of women, class, ethnicity, and gender converge.

The transition to modernity is, then, not only the articulation of desire, the constitution of national projects, the proposing of programs; it is also a method. A close reading of Santos' strategic activities reveals Gallegos' reliance on the culture of the oligarchy as the paradigm of civilizing culture, on elegant speech as a method of progress. In his grammar, phrasing, and vocabulary, in his knowing how to speak well, and in the "respect toward others" latent in his words rest his superiority over the whole peonry. His impeccable culture is a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1994
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822314657
• ISBN 13: 9780822314653
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar