Against productivity : unproductive writing as resistance in early Latin American fiction
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation examines Latin American novels from the 1840s through the 1920s in which characters use writing as a means to resist oppression. While acknowledging that in the period of nation-state consolidation, writing worked as a colonial imposition (Mignolo), a tool for neocolonial domination (Rama), and a means of social indoctrination (Sommer), I argue that certain writing practices of the time were rebellious and "unproductive" in that they worked against the economically productive interests of slavery-based and emerging capitalist societies. I show that Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda's Sab (Cuba, 1841), José de Alencar's The Guarani (Brazil, 1857), Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis's The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (Brazil, 1881), and Teresa de la Parra's Iphigenia (Venezuela, 1924) depict disenfranchised subjects (clerks, homemakers, enslaved peoples, former Indigenous leaders) writing in minor genres (notes, letters, scribbles, diaries) to take a stance against racial, gendered, and social norms, as well as to escape the oppressive experiences of domestic, pauperized, and forced labor. Given the paucity of archival evidence documenting penning habits in the national consolidation era, novels serve as privileged sources to interrogate how nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Latin Americans conceived of the writing process and experienced its liberating power. By considering the freeing function that writing adopts in early national novels, my research shifts the conversation away from the binaries that have dominated the fields of literary, cultural, and historiographical studies of Latin American societies, including writing/orality, original/derivative, local/colonial, and foundational/afoundational. I move away from binaries by demonstrating that in nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Latin America, acts of writing were not mere colonial impositions of the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, but also practices that might have historically worked alongside oral traditions to turn colonial legacies and their successor neocolonialist orders against themselves. Following early novelists, writing may have served to oppose experiences of enslavement, migration, solipsism, and physical confinement and to creatively resist the expectation of "productivity" by socioeconomic systems.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2023; ©2023 |
| Publication date | 2023; 2023 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Wainberg, Romina | |
|---|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Hoyos Ayala, Héctor | |
| Thesis advisor | Hoyos Ayala, Héctor | |
| Thesis advisor | Briceño, Ximena | |
| Thesis advisor | Peluffo, Ana | |
| Thesis advisor | Saldívar, José David | |
| Degree committee member | Briceño, Ximena | |
| Degree committee member | Peluffo, Ana | |
| Degree committee member | Saldívar, José David | |
| Associated with | Stanford University, School of Humanities and Sciences | |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Romina Wainberg. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2023. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/zr273ss5776 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2023 by Romina Wainberg
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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