Performative bodies, hybrid tongues: Race, gender, sex and modernity in Latin America and the Maghreb.
Item
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Title
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Performative bodies, hybrid tongues: Race, gender, sex and modernity in Latin America and the Maghreb.
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Identifier
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AAI3063893
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identifier
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3063893
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Creator
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Vigo, Julian.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Vincent Crapanzano
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Date
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2002
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Comparative | Anthropology, Cultural | Art History | Literature, Latin American | Literature, African | Literature, Caribbean
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Abstract
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This manuscript reconsiders the body in literature and visual representation as a physical and gesticulative domain for rethinking the constructions of gender, nationalism, and sexuality. Primarily, examining contemporary literary production, I argue that the body in contemporary North Africa and Latin America serves as a physical and symbolic terrain upon which sexual, textual, national, and linguistic identities are vectored and through which postcolonial and hegemonic antagonisms of power are engaged. Rather than embrace "third world" identity as a residual repository of western thought, colonization, and linguistic infusion, as is often conferred in critical theory, I suggest that the paradigm of cultural identity in the Maghreb and Latin America is best understood through an examination of the emergent corporeal articulations of subjectivity prevalent in these literatures and cultures. This book argues that the body is a critical landscape through which the various discourses of nationalism, gender, and sexuality converge in order to construct a reading of the social that neither amasses identity as singular under the rubric of the "third world," nor that couches the other within western identity.;Herein, the reader will note my use of language that is constantly and consciously calling into question the very words I use and my use of language may often seem to "contradict" itself. Indeed, this is the heart of my experiment, for this work both discusses the collapse of western parochialism and epistemological imperialism while also calling into question the very dichotomies that are examined by virtue of their being juxtaposed through language. For instance, I would love to never again use the words "western" and "non-western", "third world" and "first world" or "traditional" and "modern", since as I later elaborate, these modalities are as real as they are fictive, they are as polarized by the myths of certain cultural settings as they are non-identifiable in other cultures. They are as much a product of a certain historical and social consensus (of certain persons in certain places) as they are terms that are under erasure (by other certain persons in other certain spaces). This work attempts a critique of the "non-sense" of specifically western literary, anthropological, and philosophical discourses which on the one hand wish to collapse the binaries of identity and "liberate" the subject from language, but on the other hand, disavow any possibility of such liberation since the transgressive act of renaming identity becomes reinterpolated into a system of categorization which necessarily throws the subject at the very mercy of language.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
