Towards a Mestizaj Identity: A Post-colonial Reading of Isabel Allende's Zorro

Abstract

Zorro, a novel of quasi-romance structure, has been written by Chilean writer Isabel Allende in 2005. She is a cousin of Salvador Allende, Chile's first socialist president who was assassinated during the 1973 military coup d’état. Being mostly analyzed within the framework of Feminism, gender-related issues, or socio-political approaches, Isabel Allende, therefore, has been regarded by literary critics as a politically exiled woman writer who seeks to portray a range of female characters who are caught inside a patriarchal socio-cultural context, seek to free themselves, and search for self-recognition. Within the postcolonial context, however, her fiction can be interpreted from quiet different perspectives. Elaborating on certain critical concepts from post-colonialism, particularly Homi Bhabha's theory of hybridity and the transculturation proposed by Fernando Ortiz and Angel Rama, the present article explores the process by which Allende creeps through the mist of clashing voices and opposing means of representation to form her ideal model both in character and in writing mode: a transcultural phenomena that ends at a negating negotiability in its especial form of characterization.