Transnational Discourses on Class, Gender, and Cultural Identity

by Irene Marques

Overview

This exploration of class, feminism, and cultural identity (including issues of race, nation, colonialism, and economic imperialism) focuses on the work of four writers: the Mozambican Mia Couto, the Portuguese José Saramago, the Brazilian Clarice Lispector, and the South African J. M. Coetzee. In the first section, the author discusses the political aspects of Couto's collection of short stories Contos do nascer da terra (Stories of the Birth of the Land) and Saramago's novel O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis (The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis). The second section explores similar themes in Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K and Lispector's A hora da estrela (The Hour of the Star). Marques argues that these four writers are political in the sense that they bring to the forefront issues pertaining to the power of literature to represent, misrepresent, and debate matter related to different subaltern subjects: the postcolonial subject, the poor subject (the "poor other"), and the female subject. She also discusses the "ahuman other" in the context of the subjectivity of the natural world, the dead, and the unborn, and shows how these aspects are present in all the different societies addressed and point to the mystical dimension that permeates most societies. With regard to Couto's work, this "ahuman other" is approached mostly through a discussion of the holistic, animist values and epistemologies that inform and guide Mozambican traditional societies, while in further analyses the notion is approached via discussions on phenomenology, elementality, and divinity following the philosophies of Lévinas and Irigaray and mystical consciousness in Zen Buddhism and the psychology of Jung.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781557536051
Publisher:	Purdue University Press
Publication date:	12/15/2011
Series:	Comparative Cultural Studies
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.56(d)

About the Author

Irene Marques teaches African and Caribbean literatures, comparative and world literature, literary theory, and writing and rhetoric at the Ontario College of Art and Design University. Marques's publications include the edited volume The Works of Chin Ce: A Critical Overview (2007), and numerous articles in journals including African Identities: Journal of Economics, Culture and Society, Research in African Literatures, and CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. She also publishes works of fiction including the volumes Wearing Glasses of Water (poetry, 2007), Habitando na metáfora do tempo: Crónicas desejadas (short stories, 2009), The Perfect Unrevelling of the Spirit (prose poetry, 2012), and The Circular Incantation (prose poetry, 2013).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Note on Translations and Use of Abbreviations
Introduction to Transnational Discourses on Class, Gender, and Cultural Identity
Part One: The Bolder Politics of Agency
Chapter One: The Politics of Agency in Couto
Chapter Two: The Politics of Agency in Saramago
Part Two: The Deeper Politics of Agency
Chapter Three: Authenticity of Being as the Politics of Agency in Lispector
Chapter Four: Authenticity in Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K
Conclusion
Works Cited
Index

Editorial Reviews

"The task of literary criticism at present is to imagine a politics that fits the globe and transcends nations. If it is still too early to achieve that, at least we must put political visions from distant places in dialogue. Irene Marques accomplishes this important task by bringing together four authors from both sides of the Atlantic, both sides of the equator, and both sides of Africa—Couto, Saramago, Lispector, and Coetzee. The novels she considers are not all explicitly political, but what Marques discovers is that implicit politics are not less political. All the authors Marques considers are white by one measure, but she shows the different meanings of white and the varying potential of white to become other in South Africa, Mozambique, Portugal, and Brazil. Transnational Discourses on Class, Gender, and Cultural Identity has crucial things to say about race and nation, politics, and aesthetics today."—Neil ten Kortenaar, University of Toronto

"In a disciplinary field still largely dominated by the primacy of area studies, Irene Marques's critical engagement with a range of narratives from across the Lusophone and Anglophone world is refreshingly innovative and represents an important contribution to comparative literary study. Transnational Discourses on Class, Gender, and Cultural Identity will be of special relevance to those working on Couto, Saramago, Lispector, and Coetzee, as well as to those with an interest in issues of language, postcolonialism, identity, gender studies, and the interplay between the aesthetics of literature and expressions of social and political concern." —David Brookshaw, University of Bristol

From the Publisher