Renegotiating Corporeality and Alterity: Carnal Inscription as Jewishness in David Toscana's "Santa María del Circo" and Mario Vargas Llosa's "El hablador"

Abstract

This essay analyzes representations of corporeal difference in David Toscana's Santa Maria del Circo, and Mario Vargas Llosa's El / hablador. In each text, the body of the protagonist enacts a conflation between physical deformity and marked ethnicity, read here as Jewishness. At the same time, these texts trouble connections between body and meaning, highlight the limits of textual representation, and question the contours of specific Spanish American national, cultural, ethnic and individual identities, as frequently bound to codified syntaxes of corporeality and alterity. The body as text, a figure of simultaneous suture and divide, points to the continuing need for a renegotiation of the roles of disabled or different bodies in the context of Latin American literary and cultural studies.