Winner of the Montserrat Ordóñez Prize 2018 This book provides an original and exciting analysis of Colombian women’s writing and its relationship to feminist history from the 1970s to the present. In a period in which questions surrounding women and gender are often sidelined in the academic arena, it argues that feminism has been an important and intrinsic part of contemporary Colombian history. Focusing on understudied literary and non-literary texts written by Colombian women, it traces the particularities of Colombian feminism, showing how it has been closely entwined with left-wing politics and the country’s history of violence. This book therefore rethinks the place of feminism in Latin American history and its relationship to feminisms elsewhere, challenging many of the predominant critical paradigms used to understand Latin American literature and culture.

How do contemporary female authors in Latin America tackle gender violence in their writings?This book analyses the portrayal of violence against women in the works of ten contemporary Latin American female authors: Alejandra Jaramillo Morales, Laura Restrepo, Ena Lucia Portela, Wendy Guerra, Selva Almada, Claudia Pineiro, Diamela Eltit, Carla Guelfenbein, Lydia Cacho and Fernanda Melchor. Governments in Latin America have routinely failed to protect women from abuse, threats, censorship, repressive policies on reproduction rights, forced displacement, sex trafficking, disappearances and femicides, and this book beats a new path through these burning issues by drawing on the knowledges encapsulated by sociology as much as the visions articulated by literature. Through an exploration of works published in the twenty-first century by women writers from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba and Mexico, this volume reconceptualises positions of privilege and power in the region and provides new readings about the meaning of gender, sexuality, violence and the female body in contemporary Latin America. The aim of this book is to raise awareness of the daily threat of violence against women in Latin America, underline the importance of the voice of Latin American women within that daily struggle, and encourage governments, organisations and institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean to take gender violence seriously and fight to secure peace and social equality for all women in the modern world.ing of gender, sexuality, violence and the female body in contemporary Latin America. The aim of this book is to raise awareness of the daily threat of violence against women in Latin America, underline the importance of the voice of Latin American women within that daily struggle, and encourage governments, organisations and institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean to take gender violence seriously and fight to secure peace and social equality for all women in the modern world.ing of gender, sexuality, violence and the female body in contemporary Latin America. The aim of this book is to raise awareness of the daily threat of violence against women in Latin America, underline the importance of the voice of Latin American women within that daily struggle, and encourage governments, organisations and institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean to take gender violence seriously and fight to secure peace and social equality for all women in the modern world.ing of gender, sexuality, violence and the female body in contemporary Latin America. The aim of this book is to raise awareness of the daily threat of violence against women in Latin America, underline the importance of the voice of Latin American women within that daily struggle, and encourage governments, organisations and institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean to take gender violence seriously and fight to secure peace and social equality for all women in the modern world.

This volume explores women’s literary and cultural production in Latin America, and suggests how such works engage with discourses of identity, nationhood, and gender. Including contributions by several prominent Latin American scholars themselves, it seeks to provide a vital insight into the analysis and reception of the works in a local context, and foster debate between Latin American and metropolitan academics. The book is divided into two sections: Women and Nationhood, and Models and Genres. The first section comprises six chapters which examines women’s responses to, and attempts to carve out space within, national discourses in a Latin American context. Spanning the nineteenth century to the present day, the chapters offer an insight into the ways in which Latin American women have constructed themselves as modern subjects of the nation, and made use of the ambiguous spaces created by modernization and national discourses. The section starts firstly with a focus on the Southern Cone, covering Chile and Argentina, and then moves geographically northward, to Colombia and Bolivia. The second section, Models and Genres, consists of six chapters that examine how women writers engage with, and critically re-work, existing literary discourses and paradigms. Considering phenomena such as detective fiction, fairy-tales, and classical mythological figures, the chapters illustrate how these genres and models–frequently coded as masculine–are given new inflections, both as a result of their deployment by women, and as a result of their re-working in a Latin American context.

Women in exile disrupt assumptions about exile, belonging, home and identity. For many women exiles, home represents less a place of belonging and more a point of departure, and exile becomes a creative site of becoming, rather than an unsettling state of errancy. Exile may be a propitious circumstance for women to renegotiate identities far from the strictures of home, appropriating a new freedom in mobility. Through a feminist politics of place, displacement and subjectivity, this comparative study analyses the novels of key contemporary Francophone and Latin American writers Nancy Huston, Linda Le, Malika Mokeddem, Cristina Peri Rossi, Laura Restrepo, and Cristina Siscar to identify a new nomadic subjectivity in the lives and works of transnational women today.

There is a wealth of published literature in English by Latin American women writers, but such material can be difficult to locate due to the lack of available bibliographic resources. In addition, the various types of published narrative (short stories, novels, novellas, autobiographies, and biographies) by Latin American women writers has increased significantly in the last ten to fifteen years. To address the lack of bibliographic resources, Kathy Leonard has compiled Latin American Women Writers: A Resource Guide to Titles in English. This reference includes all forms of narrative-short story, autobiography, novel, novel excerpt, and others-by Latin American women dating from 1898 to 2007. More than 3,000 individual titles are included by more than 500 authors. This includes nearly 200 anthologies, more than 100 autobiographies/biographies or other narrative, and almost 250 novels written by more than 100 authors from 16 different countries. For the purposes of this bibliography, authors who were born in Latin America and either continue to live there or have immigrated to the United States are included. Also, titles of pieces are listed as originally written, in either Spanish or Portuguese. If the book was originally written in English, a phrase to that effect is included, to better reflect the linguistic diversity of narrative currently being published. This volume contains seven indexes: Authors by Country of Origin, Authors/Titles of Work, Titles of Work/Authors, Autobiographies/Biographies and Other Narrative, Anthologies, Novels and Novellas in Alphabetical Order by Author, and Novels and Novellas by Authors' Country of Origin. Reflecting the increase in literary production and the facilitation of materials, this volume contains a comprehensive listing of narrative pieces in English by Latin American women writers not found in any other single volume currently on the market. This work of reference will be of special interest to scholars, students, and instructors interested in narrative works in English by Latin American women authors. It will also help expose new generations of readers to the highly creative and diverse literature being produced by these writers.

Carolyn Tuttle led a group that interviewed 620 women maquila workers in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. The responses from this representative sample refute many of the hopeful predictions made by scholars before NAFTA and reveal instead that little has improved for maquila workers. The women's stories make it plain that free trade has created more low-paying jobs in sweatshops where workers are exploited. Families of maquila workers live in one- or two-room houses with no running water, no drainage, and no heat. The multinational companies who operate the maquilas consistently break Mexican labor laws by requiring women to work more than nine hours a day, six days a week, without medical benefits, while the minimum wage they pay workers is insufficient to feed their families. These findings will make a crucial contribution to debates over free trade, CAFTA-DR, and the impact of globalization. The book visits continuities and discontinuities among Spanish and Latin American women with regards to the ways in which they approach writing as a political weapon: to express ecological concerns; to denounce social injustice; to re-articulate existing paradigms, such as local versus global, violence versus pacifism, immigrant versus citizen; and to raise consciousness about racist, sexist, and other discriminatory practices. Such use of writing as an instrument of ethical and political exploration is underlined throughout the different articles in the volume as the authors emphasize pluralism, social justice, gender equality, tolerance, and political representation. This book offers readers a broad perspective on the multiple ways in which Hispanic women writers are explicitly exploring the social, political, and, economic realities of our era and integrating global perspectives and gender concerns into their writing, highlighting the unprecedented level of sociopolitical engagement practiced by 20th and 21st century Hispanic women writers.

Rock Aesthetics in Colombian Literature and Culture: Writing the Noise explores the presence of a rock aesthetic in the Colombian literary field and how its pivotal role in creating alternative creative expressions that challenge the dominance of tropicality as the prevailing artistic reference. More than a musical genre or a cultural industry, rock is also an aesthetic: a significant social practice that allows one to understand what people consider beautiful or authentic. Since its birth in the mid-1950s, rock as an aesthetic has expanded worldwide, transforming and establishing dialogues with artistic practices such as literature. Through an analysis of a series of novels, poems, and manifestos written from the 1950s to the early years of the twenty-first century, David Martínez Houghton embarks on a literary, musical, and historical journey. On the way, he explores complex phenomena such as urban violence, the formation of youth identities, the penetration of pop culture, national identity discourses, and even the social and physical transformation of Colombian cities.

What does it take for a woman to succeed as a writer? In these revealing interviews, first published in 1988 as Historias íntimas, ten of Latin America's most important women writers explore this question with scholar Magdalena García Pinto, discussing the personal, social, and political factors that have shaped their writing careers. The authors interviewed are Isabel Allende, Albalucía Angel, Rosario Ferré, Margo Glantz, Sylvia Molloy, Elvira Orphée, Elena Poniatowska, Marta Traba, Luisa Valenzuela, and Ida Vitale. In intimate dialogues with each author, García Pinto draws out the formative experiences of her youth, tracing the pilgrimage that led each to a distinguished writing career. The writers also reflect on their published writings, discussing the creative process in general and the motivating force behind individual works. They candidly discuss the problems they have faced in writing and the strategies that enabled them to reach their goals. While obviously of interest to readers of Latin American literature, this book has important insights for students of women's literature and cultural studies, as well as for aspiring writers.

A comprehensive, encyclopedic guide to the authors, works, and topics crucial to the literature of Central and South America and the Caribbean, the Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature includes over 400 entries written by experts in the field of Latin American studies. Most entries are of 1500 words but the encyclopedia also includes survey articles of up to 10,000 words on the literature of individual countries, of the colonial period, and of ethnic minorities, including the Hispanic communities in the United States. Besides presenting and illuminating the traditional canon, the encyclopedia also stresses the contribution made by women authors and by contemporary writers. Outstanding Reference Source Outstanding Reference Book