Thea Pitman

Postcolonial compañeras? The desire for a reciprocal gaze in two Mexican women's accounts of Africa

This article considers texts by two Mexican women writers that directly concern or are derived substantially from their experiences in Africa: María Luisa Puga’s Las posibilidades del odio (1978) is a fragmented novel set in Kenya in the late 1970s; Verónica Volkow’s Diario de Sudáfrica (1988) is a journal of a trip to South Africa in the mid-1980s. Via an analysis of the ways in which these writers treat the theme of the gaze, in particular the differing effects of, and reasons for, their focus on reciprocal direct gazes, the article explores the possibility of comparable experiences between different post-colonial/colonised peoples.

An Impossible Task? Héctor Perea's México, crónica en espiral and the Problems of Writing a Travel-Chronicle of Contemporary Mexico City

This article foregrounds the difficulties inherent in writing a travel-chronicle of contemporary Mexico City at a time when the city itself has been ‘done to death’ by other writers and the genre of the travel-chronicle has fallen from literary grace. Taking a good example of what can be done under these circumstances, Héctor Pereas, México, crónica en espiral (Mexico City, A Spiral-Shaped Chronicle) (1996), it briefly examines evidence of the writers difficulties, and then goes on to analyse his strategies for breathing new life into both genre and subject matter. In particular, it explores the more metaphorical interpretation of travel and travel writing inherent in the ‘dimensions’ of Pereas spiral-shaped chronicle, which takes the reader on a journey through the space of dreams and memories, fiction and poetic imagery, academic speculation and virtual reality. It also measures his success in balancing tradition and innovation, and evaluates whether the resultant text might constitute a postmodern form of the genre.

Introduction: transatlanticism and tricontinentalism

This special issue concerns the confluence of what we have chosen to term ‘transatlanticism’ and ‘tricontinentalism’; or rather, its focus is on a very broad understanding of transatlanticism that encompasses the multilingual, multicultural and multiracial realities of the Atlantic region (with tactical bracketing of the role of traditionally hegemonic ‘white’ European and United States cultures), wherein the discourse and practice of tricontinentalism, stemming from the First Tricontinental Conference of 1966, function as one of the most salient, and indeed most positive, examples of this kind of plural transatlanticism. Hence, our choice of title for the issue ‘new transatlanticisms’ to indicate both the plurality and relative novelty of our approach to transatlantic solidarities, discourses, dialogues and imaginaries. (Of this, more later.) In early 1966, following the First Tricontinental Conference in Havana, Cuba, the Organizacion de Solidaridad con los Pueblos de Asia, Africa y America Latina (Organisation of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America, or OSPAAAL) was founded with the aim of promoting and providing support for anticolonial resistance in the three continents. It was, in effect, a way of allowing Latin America to formally join the pre-existing Organisation of Solidarity for the People of Africa and Asia. Nevertheless, despite being the last continent to be invited to join the organisation, for many key Latin American leaders, thinkers and/or activists the creation of OSPAAAL and the ethos of tricontinentalism that the events of 1966 brought into being the consciousness of the comparable and linked trajectories of the nations of the Third World and the will to actively promote solidarity among ‘tricontinental’ nations and groups were quickly ‘Latin-Americanised’, to the extent that the organisation still has its official headquarters in Havana some 40 years later, and is still today publishing its widely distributed and almost infamous journal, Tricontinental. It goes without saying that this ‘joined-up’ anti-imperialist thinking across the Third World as a whole does not start with the Havana conference, and neither, strictly speaking, does Latin American involvement with this movement. With respect to the latter issue first, prior to the 1966 conference, Latin Americans had

Introduction: Latin American women's writing, then and now/Las escritoras latinoamericanas, ayer y hoy

As early as 1978 the Colombian writer Albalucı́a Ángel started a project to produce an anthology of interviews with approximately thirty of the Latin American women writers with whom she felt a special allegiance, an allegiance based on a shared sense of each other as the alternative community that they needed to relate to during the protracted experience of exile for so many of them in the bleak years of dictatorship and/or social upheaval of the 1970s and 80s. This group is referred to by Ángel quite loosely as ‘mi generación en adelante’ (Ángel 1998, p. 16). The interviews included authors as prominent in the field as the Argentinian Luisa Valenzuela, the Mexican Elena Poniatowska, the Uruguayan Cristina Peri-Rossi, and the Chilean Isabel Allende, although at the time, only Allende had achieved substantial fame on the back of the Latin American post-‘boom’. The interviews were specifically focused around the topic of what it meant to try to create a role and a voice for oneself as a woman writer in a Latin American context and in particular they dealt with these writers’ impassioned and troubled relationship with language. Many of the interviewees speak of the struggle to ‘express oneself’ and the vexed question of whether an ‘écriture feminine’ is possible, desirable and how this relates to ontological issues – as Luisa Valenzuela would later remark, ‘escritura femenina no es un patrimonio hormonal’, no matter how much women may want to differentiate their literary production from that of men (Valenzuela 2005). And as a counterpart to the question of selfexpression the interviewees also touch on the question of silence – women writers’ emergence from traditional silence, the danger of being silenced once again, and, on occasion, the choice to fall silent as a means of resistance. As Ángel subsequently said of the project: ‘Me proponı́a también hablar de alevosı́as. De constancias. De silencios cubiertos por el tiempo y por nieves eternas que dejan intocadas y en capullo las palabras no dichas todavı́a’ (Ángel 1998, p. 2). Despite various abortive attempts at having the collection published, Ángel had still not given up on the idea at the time that she came to spend a year as writer in residence in the then Department of Spanish and Portuguese, at the University of Leeds, in September 2004. During her time in Leeds Ángel conducted a second wave of interviews with the authors concerned, updating their responses to the various questions asked. In the process the meaning of the collection’s title changed for Ángel. Instead of referring to the initial attempts made by Latin American women writers to break into the male-dominated sphere of Literature, it gained added significance in that it also referred to the fact that, despite the increasing prominence of writing by Latin American women in the 1970s and ’80s, such literature had not consolidated the critical