Catherine Davies

colonial dependence and sexual difference: reading for gender in the writings of Simón Bolívar (1783–1830)

The article explores the textual construction of gender categories in the political discourse of Simón Bolívar by means of a close critical reading of his seminal writings made public between 1812 and 1820. The historical and political processes known as Latin American independence constitute a moment of radical transformation. It was during this period that the questions of political rights, nationality and citizenship were most open to debate throughout the continent. The article shows how the category woman is constructed ambiguously in Independence/anti-colonial discourse, how gender is employed to create hierarchical systems of social organization to legitimate the exercise of power by an elite of white creole men and how myth is deployed in order to reinforce gender hegemonies. It will be shown that in Bolívars writings colonial relations are recast as family relations and political independence from Spain legitimated in terms of sexual difference and masculine domination.

On Englishmen, women, Indians and slaves: Modernity in the nineteenth-century Spanish-American novel

Flicking through a book I was recently sent to review, a collection of essays on testimonial literature by Spanish-American women, I noticed that of the fourteen contributions only one was written by a man. This was not in itself surprising given the topic under discussion. What did surprise me, however, was to find that the sole male contributor was a certain Donald L. Shaw.1 Seeing his name made me smile, for here again was proof of what makes Donald special—unabated intellectual curiosity. On this occasion he was getting to grips with women’s testimonial writing (Nidia Díaz’s Nunca estuve sola) in the context of Boom fiction, teasing out the literary techniques in the reportage. Donald never fails to surprise and impress. Bearing in mind his unfailing interest in the Spanish-American novel (and, no doubt, in women, Indians and slaves, though less so, I suspect, in Englishmen) I would like to dedicate this article to him, and to thank him for the hours he spent attempting to extricate the limpid poetry of Rosalía de Castro from the fog of my turgid prose. I begin with Carlos J. Alonso’s essay ‘The Burden of Modernity’, a useful summary and foretaste of the complex set of ideas further elaborated in his book of the same name.2 Alonso argues that Spanish-American cultural discourse is characterized by a ‘simultaneous embracing of and distancing

Spanish–American Interiors: Spatial Metaphors, Gender and Modernity

Abstract In this article I discuss how spatial metaphors signify modernity in terms if gender. I refer to two novels written by women in nineteenth-century Latin America: Pablo, ou la vie dans les pampas (paris, 1869) / Pablo o la vida en las pampas (Buenos Aires, 1870) by Argentine author Eduarda Mansilla (1838–1892), and Aves sin nido (1889) by Peruvian author Clorinda Matto de Turner (1852–1909). These novels explicitly engage with the dominant gender regime, contemporary political debate, and the legacy if colonial economies. By foregrounding the domestic interior they inscribe modernity as problematical on account of womens ambiguous status vis-à-vis the state.

The Poet(isa) and the Queen: The Paradoxes of Royal Patronage in 1840s Spain

Abstract The article indicates the significance of the relationship between Cuban poet, dramatist and novelist, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814–73), and Queen Isabel II of Spain (1830–1904), Isabel, some sixteen years younger than Gertrudis, reigned for thirty-five years until she was deposed by the Revolution of 1868. It was during her reign that liberal Constitutionalism and a liberal economy, based on private property and the freedom of exchange, was finally established in Spain. Avellaneda was the most celebrated woman writer of the mid-nineteenth-century Spanishspeaking world. How did she achieve such celebrity? What were the conditions of her phenomenal success? Avellaneda owed her acclaim to the small circle of Spanish liberal letrados operating in Madrid, many of whom were politicians and military officers recently returned from exile, and in particular to the royal court and royal patronage. The young queen contributed to Avellanedas social and symbolic capital in a very real sense. However, in the final instance the poets success was not considered indicative of the potential of womankind but an unnatural exception and an aberration. Her social and symbolic capital was amassed during Isabels reign but, when the queen was toppled from her pedestal, Avellaneda fell too.

The Gender Order of Postwar Politics: Comparing Spanish South America and Spain, 1810s–1850s

The Spanish American Wars of Independence, triggered by the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, the forced abdication of the Spanish King, and the Spanish War of Independence (known in English as the Peninsular War), resulted in the fall of the Spanish Empire and a wave of violence, social upheaval and political experimentation on a vast scale. The Wars of Independence in Spanish America—affecting an area from California in the north to Patagonia in the south—lasted some 16 years, from 1810 to 1826, and were arguably the most profound consequence of the Napoleonic Wars. These liberation wars were civil wars, and although belligerence against Spain ended in the 1820s, the wars continued through to the 1830s and in some regions into the 1870s and beyond. The new Spanish American republics did not take their final shape regarding borders, systems of government and institutions until after the mid-nineteenth century.1

Rafael María de Labra and " La Revista Hispano-Americana", 1864-1867: revolutionary liberalism and colonial reform

In a recent commemorative volume dedicated to the enduring impact of the Cortes de Cádiz and the Constitution of 1812, Antonio Rivera makes an astute distinction between two fundamentally distinct concepts of liberty operating in Spain at the time: 1) revolutionary, defined as the freedom to do, to act; a liberty of rights, and 2) Catholic or counter-revolutionary, defined as the freedom to choose to obey; a liberty of duty. The first was predicated on civil liberties, that is, the right to do as one pleases without harming others within the law which is the expression of the collective will, a corpus of collectively self-imposed laws. This revolutionary concept is premised on the sovereignty and self-government of the people or ‘nación’ (‘nación’ meaning all Spaniards rather than, in the Romantic sense, transcending the individual). The Constitution is considered to be the expression of the nation’s collective will; it recognizes the civil rights of each individual, rights of movement, press, commerce, property, legal representation and religious tolerance. The exemplary progressive Constitution at the time was the British. As Flórez Estrada wrote in ‘Reflexiones sobre la libertad de imprenta’ in 1809: