LOCATING WOMEN'S WRITING AND TRANSLATION IN THE AMERICAS IN THE AGE OF LATINAMERICANISMO AND GLOBALIZATION

NORMA KLAHN

A bridge (made of stories, ideas, theories) is knowledge. It is public; it is communal: it is where our paths converge.

—GLORIA ANZALDÚA, This Bridge Called My Back

Women's writing in Latin/Latina America—that of major figures who emerged after the 1970s, many of whom consolidated their work in the 1980s and 1990s, and who were joined by a younger generation at the turn of the century—has been a site actively marked by gender, but where questions of class, ethnicity, sexuality, nation, and generation have been inexorably present. Latin/Latina American women's writings, I suggest, represented a major shift that defined them as both products and producers of what has been called the cultural turn, a defining critical moment that deconstructed the centrality of modernist epistemologies and the binary and hierarchical categories that sustained them. Center–periphery, elite–popular, male–female opposites were critiqued in the postmodernist turn as constructed antinomies that upheld hegemonic power relations privileging Anglo-Euro-centrism, patriarchal structures, and an aestheticist view of the literary (read: nonpolitical). These writings (testimonios, autobiographical fictions, poetry, essays, novels) linked to political mobilizations and social movements have been fundamental in the theorizing and construction of a sui generis practice. Latin American and Latina feminists readapted feminist liberation discourses from the West, resignifying them in relation to self-generated practices and theorizations of gender empowerment that have emerged from their lived experiences, particular histories and contestatory politics. Their interventions range from denouncing sexist practices, exclusionary nation-state structures, and xenophobic ideologies to state-sponsored violence and authoritarian regimes. From these loci, women writers can be seen as actively participating in the larger global project of an inclusive democratization process demanding full equality and dignity for women and other excluded minorities.

Whether as storytelling (fiction) or life writing, in its multiple forms, Latin American and Latina feminist work constitute poetic and politicized interventions that have opened a discursive space for self-awareness, for self-inclusion in nation-state projects, and for their role in an increasingly globalized world. In their desire to redefine and reinvent the nation-state, their writing opened a symbolic space in the 1970s, forging new political identities and subjectivities. As interventions/inventions, the prolific writings of Latin American/ Latina women of the latter part of the twentieth century and first decade of the twenty-first century represent a feminist practice that persistently addresses, especially since the 1990s, the endured disparities and unequal power relations sustained by hegemonic discourses and neoliberal policies that have shown to be—since the Great Recession of 2008—bankrupt. Their writings continue to situate them as central players in processes that point to the need to enact and strengthen renewed democracies.

Given these recent developments, this chapter is a critical attempt at locating and understanding the journeys of feminist literary (broadly conceived) texts, their travels and translations, their readings and misreadings. This is not an exhaustive list nor a detailed analysis, but a mapping of several authors and texts that might illustrate the particular ways women's writings, grounded in distinct temporalities and cultural and historical legacies, circulate beyond (outside) and within (inside) their localities. My reading identifies the writings (testimonios, autobiographical fictions, essays, novels) as poetic/political interventions or, if you wish, aesthetic/ethical ones linked to contestatory practices.

Redefining the Nation: Testimonio as Mobilizing Texts

The shift that occurred internationally in the 1960s and 1970s as civil rights and social movements based on group identifications fought for recognition and built transnational alliances in solidarity with others based on shared experiences of disenfranchisement can be seen, I suggest, as a postnationalist moment. I understand it as constituting a critique of the politics of the modern nation-state...