{"id":24883,"date":"2012-08-20T13:22:57","date_gmt":"2012-08-20T13:22:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=24883"},"modified":"2012-08-21T02:12:28","modified_gmt":"2012-08-21T02:12:28","slug":"dfdambivalent-examples-the-multiple-creole-subjects-of-spanish-american-nineteenth-century-narrative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=24883","title":{"rendered":"Ambivalent examples: The multiple Creole subjects of Spanish American nineteenth-century narrative"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ambivalent examples: The multiple Creole subjects of Spanish American nineteenth-century narrative<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

University of Pennsylvania
\n2006
\n371 pages
\nPublication Number: AAT 3225427
\nISBN: 9780542797194<\/p>\n

Elisabeth L. Austin<\/strong><\/p>\n

This dissertation proposes a paradigm for 19th-century Spanish American Creole subjectivity that considers it to be a multiple, unstable construct rather than a coherent or constant entity. From this premise I explore exemplarity as a rhetorical mode that seeks to engage its reader’s subjectivity, and I posit that exemplary narrative becomes not only a site of subjectivity construction for the Creole reader but also a place for negotiating the problematics of the liberal order at the end of the 19th century. I maintain that reading exemplary narrative as an articulation of multiple Creole subjectivity allows us to study the contradictions and indeterminate pedagogy of many of these texts, and therefore to better analyze the ambivalence and problems they describe. My project investigates the work of four authors: Eugenio Cambaceres (Argentina), Jos\u00e9 Mart\u00ed (Cuba), Clorinda Matto de Turner (Peru), and Juana Manuela Gorriti (Argentina). Cambaceres’s four novels\u2014Potpourri: silbidos de un vago<\/em> (1882), M\u00fasica sentimental<\/em> (1884), Sin rumbo<\/em> (1885), and En la sangre<\/em> (1887)\u2014establish a social critique that culminates in the invention of a Creole national subject, depicted as a father figure for the future mestiza America, who is ultimately rendered non-viable within these narratives. Mart\u00ed’s only novel, Luc\u00eda Jerez<\/em> (1885), articulates a profound gender anxiety that threatens Mart\u00ed’s ideal “natural man” and problematizes his dreams of solidarity and miscegenation as part of a future American identity. Matto’s Aves sin nido<\/em> (1889) argues for liberal political intervention on behalf of Peruvian Indians while it simultaneously launches a critique of liberal ideology as an insufficient instrument of such change. Finally, I read Gorriti’s cookbook, Cocina ecl\u00e9ctica<\/em> (1890), as a text that exemplifies multiple Creole subjectivity and negotiates authority and gender within irreducibly plural models of feminine subjectivity. These narratives profess pedagogical pretensions that are questioned and at times undermined within the texts themselves, and my dissertation argues that such contradictions illustrate rather than resolve the crises of Creole ideology and subjectivity brought about by the failure of Spanish American liberalism at the end of the 19th century.<\/p>\n

TABLE OF CONTENTS<\/p>\n