Making Faces: Unsettling the Ethnographic Paradigm in Clarice Lispector's "A menor mulher do mundo"

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article reads Clarice Lispector's short story "A menor mulher do mundo" in dialogue with decolonial anthropological thought and performance studies to explore the role literature might play in unsettling the colonial paradigm of ethnographic knowledge. I propose that Lispector's text simultaneously hails its reader as a discoverer or ethnographer and undermines the epistemological privilege of this position. Beyond recriminating the reader for their implication in violent othering practices, the text points to the performative nature of what Dianna Taylor calls the "scenario of discovery," revealing discoverer and discovered, ethnographer and native informant to be roles rather than essential identities. Lispector thus questions the unidirectionality of the colonialist gaze and asserts that its "object" not only looks back with its own desires but also makes faces to disarm this fetishizing gaze. The stakes of this reading extend to debates about World Literature and Lispector's place in it, suggesting that the performative capacities of literary language have an important role to play in governing, even checking, the consumption, assimilation, and canonization of literature from the formally colonized world.