Mujeres en tránsito: viaje, identidad y escritura en Sudamérica (1830–1910) by Vanesa Miseres

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mujeres en tránsito: viaje, identidad y escritura en Sudamérica (1830–1910) by Vanesa Miseres Natalie Love Miseres, Vanesa. Mujeres en tránsito: viaje, identidad y escritura en Sudamérica (1830–1910). Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 2017. 240 pp. ISBN: 978-14-6963-580-4. Mujeres en tránsito provides an innovative, multifaceted study of the travel narratives of four female writers who ventured to South America from Europe, travelled within their home territory of South America, or departed from the region to explore Europe and the United States during the transitory period of nation formation in nineteenth century Latin America. These writers include the French Peruvian Flora Tristan, the Argentines Juana Manuela Gorriti and Eduarda Mansilla, and the Peruvian Clorinda Matto de Turner. According to Miseres, while these authors of dissimilar backgrounds write under different models and travel to diverse places for distinct motives, what connects them is their "imaginario transnacional" that allows them to challenge predominate notions of national identity in turn of the century Latin America (14). Rather than defining the nation as a homogenous entity with clearly established cultural, geographical and political borders, Miseres shows how these female travellers writing from the margins develop a more complex vision of a nation composed of heterogeneous identities and fluid boundaries that permit contact with diverse regions, histories and voices. By describing these women as "in transit," Miseres does not simply refer to the displacement of these authors from one geographical place to another, but the way in which their travels place them in a continual movement between two or more cultures, leading them to negotiate identity on a personal, national and international level. In her discussion of Tristan's Peregrinaciones de una paria, Miseres describes how the author's voyage to Peru from her birth country of France to claim her paternal inheritance leads the author to envision herself as a "paria," an individual with an ambiguous national identity who lacks a full sense of belonging to one particular nation or another. According to Miseres, Tristan simultaneously identifies with and distances herself from her French and Peruvian nationalities as a strategy to expose the political inefficiencies of the Peruvian Republic, while highlighting opportunities for female agency. Upon clinging to her "yo europeo" Tristan establishes her authority as an outsider who sees behind the corruptness of Peru's educational, military and religious institutions (39). However, by reclaiming her South American origins, Tristan appeals to readers from the country and crafts a fictional bond with Peruvian women who share her transitory sense of identity and use it as a mechanism to subvert patriarchal control. By analyzing Gorriti's discourse on traveling within the South American homeland, Miseres displays how the author destabilizes dominant political ideologies of nineteenth century Argentina, while uncovering histories and voices marginalized by national projects that looked to unify the population under a homogenous identity. In her speech to El Club Literario de Lima, Gorriti utilizes the topic of traveling through "la tierra natal" to reject the hegemonic notion of the "Grand Tour," a trip made by the aristocratic youth to educate themselves in the high society of Europe (87). In the author's voyage to her home of Salta after a long exile in La tierra natal, [End Page 158] Gorriti challenges "the official history" of Argentina by evoking the country's colonial past, indigenous roots and political tensions between the Unitarians and Federalists (101). Finally, in Peregrinaciones de una alma triste, Gorriti reverses discriminatory classifications of gender, class and race established by the dominant sector through the liberating local travels of the female protagonist. Eduarda Mansilla travels from France to the United States with her diplomatic husband, placing her in a cultural, linguistic and political triangulation between Argentina, Europe and the United States. Miseres highlights Mansilla's transnational vision in Recuerdos de viaje by showing how the author authoritatively judges various aspects of United States society from a trained ideal of beauty and a series of "escenas de traducción," both of which are products of her elite Argentine status and knowledges acquired during her travels through Europe (137). From her European/South American perspective...