Along the Banks of the Amazon: Ethnicity and Crosscultural Imaging in Jules Verne\u27s La Jangada

This article focuses primarily on Jules Verne’s novel La Jangada (1881) within an evaluative and interdisciplinary postcolonial framework that emphasizes the novel’s relevance to scholars concerned with issues of ideology and visual culture in colonial Latin America. The postcolonial focus is implicated in the process of rendering visible the novel’s ideological agenda - one that addresses the role of the non-Westerner (Amazonian tribes, to be specific) in modernization. It is also foregrounded in relation to other works by Sue and Bernardin that describe Latin American “worlds” unknown to European readers and in the discussion of Léon Benett’s illustrations in relation to the text. These illustrations, in particular, are suggestive of the need to consider the novel’s text-image rapport as a way of understanding cross-cultural and inter-ethnic relations that have survived well beyond the time of La Jangada’s publication

Becoming-Bertha: virtual difference and repetition in postcolonial 'writing back', a Deleuzian reading of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

Critical responses to Wide Sargasso Sea have seized upon Rhys’s novel as an exemplary model of writing back. Looking beyond the actual repetitions which recall Brontë’s text, I explore Rhys’s novel as an expression of virtual difference and becomings that exemplify Deleuze’s three syntheses of time. Elaborating the processes of becoming that Deleuze’s third synthesis depicts, Antoinette’s fate emerges not as a violence against an original identity. Rather, what the reader witnesses is a series of becomings or masks, some of which are validated, some of which are not, and it is in the rejection of certain masks, forcing Antoinette to become-Bertha, that the greatest violence lies

Politically Escapist… or Engaged? History and Subversion in Leonardo Padura’s La novela de mi vida

Politically Escapist… or Engaged? History and Subversion in Leonardo Padura’s La novela de mi vid

Politically Escapist… or Engaged? History and Subversion in Leonardo Padura’s La novela de mi vida

Politically Escapist… or Engaged? History and Subversion in Leonardo Padura’s La novela de mi vid