Spanish American Ethnobiography and the Slave Narrative Tradition: "Biografia de un cimarron" and "Me llamo Rigoberta Menchu"

1990 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal
PMLA ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 113 (3) ◽  
pp. 422-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Richmond Ellis

The Autobiografía of the Cuban slave poet Juan Francisco Manzano is the only Spanish American slave narrative written by a person living in slavery. In this text Manzano recounts his corporal punishments in graphic detail but explicitly veils certain key episodes of abuse. I contend that this veil is a marker of sexual assault and that the Autobiografía bears silent testimony to the rape of male slaves. Manzano, however, was not only a victim of homoerotic violence; in one of his poems, “Un sueño” (“A Dream”), he reconfigures homoerotic desire in a way that tentatively reconstitutes his self-integrity and establishes a bond of reciprocity with his enslaved brother. In Manzano's writing, then, homoeroticism is transformed from an instrument of oppression into an act of resistance that challenges the racist and masculinist violence of the colonial slave system.


1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly Rae Connor

2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 710
Author(s):  
Reggie Young ◽  
Kimberly Rae Connor

Author(s):  
Susanna Regazzoni

This essay outlines the history and development of Spanish-American Literature as a subject of university teaching at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. It has a fairly recent history which began when Franco Meregalli, after a long tour in Southern America, sponsored by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for some lectures in several universities, started a course on Spanish-American literature. During his first period as a university teacher, Meregalli had met Giuseppe Bellini in Milan. So in 1969 he called his former student Bellini, who was by then an expert on Spanish-American authors, to teach Spanish-American Literature in Venice. Bellini stayed in Venice for 16 years and left Ca’ Foscari to go back to his home university (Milan) in 1985. Between 1969 and 1984, many important Spanish-American writers, such as Miguel Angel Asturias, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges and several others, came to Venice to lecture on their own works. After Bellini, the Uruguyan poetess Martha Canfield and, later on, Susanna Regazzoni, a former student of Bellini’s, took over the courses of Spanish-American literature, thus keeping alive, with the help of Margherita Cannavacciuolo, the Venetian tradition of Spanish-American Studies.


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