Razón colonial, imaginario de-colonial y feminismos: Nancy Morejón, Jamaica Kincaid y la construcción de la identidad cultural en la poética del caribe

This paper raises the crucial question as to whether non-Western feminisms have reached a postcolonial historical moment in which new proposals and alternatives may open up a horizon of expectations to counter the development of colonial history and its patriarchal legacy. Engaged writers like Nancy Morejón (La Habana 1944–) and Jamaica Kincaid (St John’s Antigua, 1949–) set themselves up to make room for black women in history, a counternarrative to patriarchal History. An analysis of representative pieces of poetry and fiction by both writers in a dialogue with ideas such as the decolonial imaginary, border thinking and rewriting History shed light on alternatives for emancipatory feminist projects for the 21st century.Este artículo plantea un debate abierto sobre si el feminismo no occidental ha llegado a un momento histórico postcolonial en el que nuevas propuestas abran un horizonte para contrarrestar el devenir de la historia colonial y su legado patriarcal. El trabajo de autoras como Nancy Morejón (La Habana 1944–) y Jamaica Kincaid (St John’s, Antigua, 1949–) se propone inscribir a la mujer negra en la historia entendida como “contra-narrativa” a la historia patriarcal. Un análisis de sus planteamientos a la luz de teorías como la del imaginario decolonial, el pensamiento fronterizo y la reescritura de la historia revelan alternativas con proyección de futuro, emancipadoras para el feminismo del siglo XXI

Louise Bourgeois y el canon modernista en Historia del Arte: Alternativas desde la crítica feminista

Louise Bourgeois began her artistic career in New York in the 1940s as a colleague of the abstract expressionists, whose artwork was hailed by Clement Greenberg as a high point in modernist abstraction. Bourgeois’ peculiar position –poised between two seemingly opposed art movements, surrealism and abstract expressionism and feminism- has created a conundrum for critics. As art historians have increasingly begun to blur the boundaries separating modernism from feminism, however, Bourgeois’ art has acquired fresh urgency. In this paper we suggest that Bourgeois’ artistic oeuvre elaborated avant-garde tropes for the unconscious and for women in order to posit a complex female subjectivity and to challenge the simplistic identification of irrationality with femininity. We also provide a critical approach to her installation “Precious Liquids” (1992) in the midst of feminist art historical debates around the metaphorical potential of the body drawing from the painted traces of the abstract expressionists and from the artist’s own previous rubber and stone sculptures.Louise Bourgeois comenzó su carrera artística en Nueva York en los años 40 como colega de los pintores del expresionismo abstracto, grupo cuya obra fue recibida y valorada por críticos como Clement Greenberg como la cima de la abstracción modernista. La posición peculiar de Bourgeois –a caballo entre dos movimientos artísticos aparentemente opuestos: surrealismo y expresionismo abstracto por un lado, y feminismo por otro- ha resultado ser un problema para la crítica. A medida que los historiadores del arte han empezado a desdibujar los límites que separan al modernismo del arte feminista, la obra de Bourgeois ha cobrado nueva vigencia. En este artículo sugerimos que la obra artística de Bourgeois elaboró ampliamente tropos vanguardistas para el inconsciente y lo femenino para llegar a subvertir la identificación sexista y simplista de feminidad con irracionalidad. También incluimos un comentario extenso sobre su instalación “Precious Liquids” (1992) que se sitúa en la historia del arte en el seno de los debates en torno al potencial metafórico del cuerpo, explorando lo que en ella se deriva del expresionismo abstracto así como de las propias esculturas de piedra y goma de la artista

The Dead Father : retrato del padre en la postmodernidad

Barthelme's portrait of the fictional father provides a cryptic caricature that oscillates between profoundity and nonsense. Through a psychoanalytic reading of the Dead Father (1975), starting from Freud and drawing from Lacan, I reflect upon the fictional representation of the process of internalizing symbolic authority as conscience in postmodem textuality. This allows us to question father structures in fiction, the issue of literary paternity and even our problematic access to the realm of the Symbolic. This paper is in many ways intended as a reflection on Barthelme's novel and on Roland Barthes' affirmation that every narrative "is staging of the (absent, hidden or hypostatized) father"

Why memorialize? Stephen Spender's aesthetics of remembrance in Vienna

Drawing from current theorization on aesthetics and from the heated debates of the representation of war and violence in arts, humanities and the media, this paper engages with the issue of art (and literature) and its condition in the world today, always at risk of masking the extremity or reality of suffering, either by suffocating it or assimilating it and turning it into an object of pleasure for the reader or spectator. With a reflection on issues on mourning and trauma, and within the domain of cultural memory, we take Stephen Spender’s poetry, and his long poem Vienna (1934), as a prime exponent of cultural production where loss and its aftermath—crucial as well in subject formation—becomes constitutive of the aesthetic, formal, and material properties of a good number of poems.A partir de la teorización actual sobre estética y de los acalorados debates sobre la representación de la guerra y la violencia en las artes, las humanidades y los medios de difusión, este artículo incide en la problemática de la representación de todas estas cuestiones en el arte y la literatura en la actualidad. Arte y literatura corren el riesgo de enmascarar situaciones extremas de sufrimiento, bien acallándolas, bien asimilándolas y convirtiéndolas en objeto placentero para ser observado y examinado por lectores y espectadores. A través de una reflexión sobre cuestiones de duelo y trauma, y dentro del marco de la memoria cultural, ilustramos estos debates mediante la poesía de Stephen Spender, y en concreto, de su poema largo Vienna (1934) como exponente de primer orden en el que la pérdida y sus secuelas —cruciales también en la formación de la subjetividad—se convierten en constitutivas de la propiedades estéticas, formales y materiales de éste y otros volúmenes del mismo autor

Avatars of the speaking "I": Denise Riley's meditations on poetry and identity

This paper takes as its point of departure the importance and even urgency of addressing issues of identity and the lyric “I” within contemporary poetry in the UK, which have been matters of concern for a new generation of poets. In Denise Riley’s work, the dialectic between the “I” and the “other,” between poet and community remains largely unresolved. Her poems strive to create a space that shows some cohesion in terms of its apprehension of gender’s centrality to modes of poetic practice, authority and tradition. Throughout this paper, we will try to address the status of the speaking subject, largely a philosophical question that gravitates around the status of the self, and the unfinished conversation between the “I” and its “others,” in a reading of Riley’s important collection Mop Mop Georgette: New and Selected Poems 1986-1993, and her Selected Poems (2000) among other works.Este artículo parte de la necesidad, e incluso la urgencia, de abordar las cuestiones de la identidad y del “yo” lírico dentro de la poesía contemporánea del Reino Unido, cuestiones éstas que han merecido la atención de una nueva generación de poetas. En la obra de Denise Riley, la dialéctica entre el “yo” y el “otro”, entre el poeta y la comunidad, está en gran medida por resolver. Sus poemas intentan crear un espacio cohesionado en relación a la aprehensión de la importancia del género en la práctica poética y su imbricación con la autoridad y la tradicion. A lo largo del artículo intentaremos abordar la situación del sujeto hablante, una cuestión principalmente filosófica que gravita alrededor de la situación del yo, y de la conversación inacabada entre el “yo” y sus “otros”, en una lectura de la importante colección de Riley Mop Mop Georgette: New and Selected Poems 1986-1993, y sus Selected Poems (2000), entre otras obras

Janet Frame's Fictions: Madness and the Subject of Writing in the Narration of Women's Lives

There is a certain resistance to engage in the discourse of and about madness and woman, and we have to wait until feminist criticism in the late 1970s and 1980s opens up a space where theorization and social and critical debate may arise. My essay is an attempt to examine in what way madness does account for what we call literature and what is the relation between women and madness in our reading of contemporary texts. This paper aims at rethinking women’s madness approaching a selection of Janet Frame’s fictions, especially her two novels, Faces in the Water (1961) and Scented Gardens for the Blind (1963). Both narratives pose several crucial questions such as the relationship of silence to confinement, death and madness, the subject’s acquisition of existential guilt, and the characters’ interrelations within an Oedipal configuration. After a retreat into silence, tropes, images and symbols all seem to contribute to Frame’s breaking through the wall of language to finally discover that it opens into darkness. And what is the oracular message of woman in these narratives where madness is so poignantly thematized

La mujer de Noé: Reconstruyendo la ginohistoria

This essay aims to provide a reading of Marilynne Robinson's novel Housekeeping. Housekeeping is a novel written about women and for women, in which Robinson tries to re-construct the repressed gynohistory. Drawing from French feminist theory (Irigaray, Cixous, Kristeva) we reread Housekeeping in the light of the current debate on mothering and assimilate the story of Sylvie —Housekeeping's main character— to Freud's Dora case history. There is another woman, outside of history and the dominant discourse, a woman who cracks the established structures, displaces them while making them crack, a woman "written in white ink" as Cixous says, who refuses marginality; a different woman, another woman. This essay approaches her definition

The Dead Father : retrato del padre en la postmodernidad

Barthelme's portrait of the fictional father provides a cryptic caricature that oscillates between profoundity and nonsense. Through a psychoanalytic reading of the Dead Father (1975), starting from Freud and drawing from Lacan, I reflect upon the fictional representation of the process of internalizing symbolic authority as conscience in postmodem textuality. This allows us to question father structures in fiction, the issue of literary paternity and even our problematic access to the realm of the Symbolic. This paper is in many ways intended as a reflection on Barthelme's novel and on Roland Barthes' affirmation that every narrative "is staging of the (absent, hidden or hypostatized) father"

Rewriting History, Post-Coloniality and Feminism: Lee Maracle's Autobiographical Works

Lee Maracle’s I Am Woman (1988) and Bobbi Lee. Indian Rebel (1990) are autobiographical works that rewrite the conventions of representing the Native in the context of Canadian history and society. Through her autobiographical “I”, Maracle narrates herself as politicalrepresentative for women and for the Métis. This essay aims to investigate Maracle’s political displacement of conventional representational practices. The importance of IAW&BLIR to revisionary historiography is that both works document the struggle of Natives today within a history of resistance. Writing from a position of “cultural siege”, “under occupation”, Maracle analyzes her position as a Native woman within an active struggle of decolonialization. Hers is a new history and historiography different from both white writing on the Native and traditional Native “historical”, oral narratives. It is the history of struggle in the 1960s and 1970s in a hybrid narrative mode. As we shall argue, this is history as narrating, as telling, in traditional native fashion, but within recognizable dates and events and the conventions of “colonial” history

Epigenetic clocks in relapse after a first episode of schizophrenia

The main objective of the present study was to investigate the association between several epigenetic clocks, covering different aspects of aging, with schizophrenia relapse evaluated over a 3-year follow-up period in a cohort of ninety-one first-episode schizophrenia patients. Genome-wide DNA methylation was profiled and four epigenetic clocks, including epigenetic clocks of chronological age, mortality and telomere length were calculated. Patients that relapsed during the follow-up showed epigenetic acceleration of the telomere length clock (p = 0.030). Shorter telomere length was associated with cognitive performance (working memory, r = 0.31 p = 0.015; verbal fluency, r = 0.28 p = 0.028), but no direct effect of cognitive function or symptom severity on relapse was detected. The results of the present study suggest that epigenetic age acceleration could be involved in the clinical course of schizophrenia and could be a useful marker of relapse when measured in remission stages