Percepções espaciais no romance Antes da Liberdade, de Julia Alvarez

Resumo: Publicado em 2002, o romance Antes da liberdade, escrito por Julia Alvarez, é narrado a partir da perspectiva de uma jovem de 12 anos, chamada Anita. Com base em suas percepções, o leitor tem acesso a uma realidade ficcional que aborda a última etapa do regime ditatorial de Rafael Leonidas Trujillo na República Dominicana. O relato de Anita esboça um espaço social caracterizado por vigilância, violência e restrição de mobilidade e discute como esses elementos impactam na construção de identidade de seus membros familiares. Adotando o espaço como categoria de análise, este artigo busca recuperar, num primeiro momento, a discussão teórica do conceito de espaço, especialmente em sua problematização a partir da virada espacial. Na sequência, o foco recai sobre a percepção espacial da protagonista e o modo como esse espaço está atrelado a vigilância, violência e restrição de mobilidade.

The Hemispheric Approach of Julia Alvarez’s Novels

This article analyses three novels by Julia Alvarez–How the García Girls Lost their Accents (1991), In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), and In the Name of Salomé (2000)– through the lenses of Hemispheric American Studies. Inspired by the teachings of Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s theoretical work The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (1992), I contend that the categorisation of these novels as Latino literature is not enough to describe all of their richness. These novels portray throughout their pages social, political, and artistic relations that tie all of the Americas together, and their analysis benefits from the essays written by Caribbean post-essentialist critics who developed, during the 1990s, a discourse based on the cultural supersyncretism of the islands that helps us to understand the postmodern globalised worlds as it stands. The novels by Alvarez reflect these theories, as they portray the realities of a New World constricted by the workings of race and racism, capitalism, and postcolonialism.

Familial Longings

In recent reinterpretations of the Caribbean dictatorial past, Caribbean American writers living in the United States challenge the Latin American dictator novel genre as a discursive tradition that reduces Caribbean culture to specific representations of power, oppression, and identity anchored in the political upheavals of the Cold War. This essay examines how the contemporary Caribbean writers Julia Álvarez, Junot Díaz, and Edwidge Danticat use familial dynamics to bring forth the multifaceted and complex realities of transnational communities, dispel ideas of cultural legitimacy based on exclusionary practices, disrupt everyday practices of cultural consumption, and empower Caribbean subjects to claim agency over their own stories and experiences.

The Dinner at Gonfarone's

The Dinner at Gonfarone’s is organised as a partial biography, covering five years in the life of the young Nicaraguan poet, Salomón de la Selva, but it also offers a literary geography of Hispanic New York (Nueva York) in the turbulent years around the First World War. De la Selva is of interest because he stands as the largely unacknowledged precursor of Latino writers like Junot Díaz and Julia Álvarez, writing the first book of poetry in English by an Hispanic author. In addition, through what he called his pan-American project, de la Selva brought together in New York writers from all over the American continent. He put the idea of trans-American literature into practice long before the concept was articulated. De la Selva’s range of contacts was enormous, and this book has been made possible through discovery of caches of letters that he wrote to famous writers of the day, such as Edwin Markham and Amy Lowell, and especially Edna St Vincent Millay. Alongside de la Selva’s own poetry – his book Tropical Town (1918) and a previously unknown 1916 manuscript collection – The Dinner at Gonfarone’s highlights other Hispanic writing about New York in these years by poets such as Rubén Darío, José Santos Chocano, and Juan Ramón Jiménez, all of whom were part of de la Selva’s extensive network.

DIASPORA ETNIK NON-ANGLO-SAXON DALAM MASYARAKAT ETNIK ANGLO SAXON: KEGETIRAN DAN KETERASINGAN

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menemukan, memaparkan dan menganalisis: 1) jenis-jenis represi yang dialami para persona dalam puisi karya beberapa penyair Amerika yang berasal dari etnik non-Anglo-Saxon, yaitu Julia Alvarez, Naomi Shihab Nye, Rhina P. Espaillat, dan lê thį diễm thúy; 2) resistensi yang masing-masing persona lakukan atas represi yang mereka alami; dan 3) bagaimana akhirnya para persona tersebut menemukan jati diri mereka masing-masing sebagai akibat dari represi yang mereka alami dalam kehidupan sehari-hari mereka. Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan deskriptif kualitatif. Sumber data penelitian ini adalah puisi yang berjudul Bilingual Sestina karya Julia Alvarez, Blood karya Naomi Shihab Nye, Bilingual/Bilingile karya Rhina P. Espaillat, dan to my sister lê thi diem trinh shrapnel shards on blue water karya lê thį diễm thúy. Data diperoleh dengan teknik membaca dan mencatat karya-karya tersebut dan dianalisis dengan teori postkolonialisme dan sumber-sumber yang relevan. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa represi yang dialami oleh etnik minoritas ini sebagaimana direpresentasikan oleh persona dalam masing-masing puisi di atas terjadi dalam aspek kehidupan sosial-budaya, ekonomi, dan politik mereka, dan represi tersebut tidak hanya dilakukan oleh etnik mayoritas Anglo-Amerika, namun juga oleh kelompok mereka sendiri. Resistensi yang mereka lakukan pun terjadi dalam bidang yang sama. Jati diri yang mereka temukan berpijak pada resistensi yang mereka lakukan yang sebetulnya merupakan “counter attack” mereka. Kata kunci: Anglo-Saxon/Amerika, postkolonialisme, represi, resistensi, temuan jati diri THE DIASPORA OF NON-ANGLO-SAXON ETHNICS IN THE ANGLO-SAXON ETHNIC COMMUNITY: BITTERNESS AND ALIENATION AbstractThis study aims at finding, describing, and analyzing: 1) types of repression experienced by the personae in some poems by American writers of non-Anglo-Saxon ethnic origins, i.e. Julia Alvarez, Naomi Shihab Nye, Rhina P. Espaillat, and lê thį diễm thúy; 2) the resistance against the repression they experience; and 3) how they come to their self-recognition on account of the repression which they bear in their everyday life. The study employed a qualitative descriptive approach. The data sources were poems entitled Bilingual Sestina by Julia Alvarez, Blood by Naomi Shihab Nye, Bilingual/Bilingile by Rhina P. Espaillat, and to my sister lê thi diem trinh shrapnel shards on blue water by lê thį diễm thúy. The data were collected by reading and making notes on the works and analyzed by the post-colonial theory and other related sources. The findings show that the repression experienced the ethnic minority as represented by the personae of the poems takes place in their socio-cultural, economic, and political aspects of life, and it is made not only by the ethnic majority of Anglo-Saxon, but also by their own groups. The resistance which they execute also takes place in the same aspects. As a matter of fact, their self-recognition is based upon the resistance they have brought about which is a sort of their counter attack. Keywords: Anglo-Saxon/American, postcolonialism, repression, resistance, self-recognition