Colonial Desire Research Articles

La foresta tropicale come paradiso perduto: Green Mansions di W.H. Hudson

In W.H. Hudson’s Green Mansions (1904) the mysterious and enchanting quality of the natural world is represented through the writer’s powerful imagination, and the exotic landscape of the South American rainforest is related to British territorial expansion: according to a long-standing literary tradition, the European colonial desire is projected onto remote, unknown places. On the one hand, the pristine forest appears a pure space, a site unspoiled by colonial expansion, the primitive and sacred world nourishing Western exotic dreams. On the other hand, by revisiting the myth of the lost paradise, Hudson conveys the late nineteenth-early twentieth century European perception of the tropical world, a patchwork of Charles Darwin’s theories, Biblical echoes and colonial ideology. Abel surrenders to the influence of the wild, ventures into the weird and entangled forest, seemingly refusing male invasion and domination. Rima’s subsequent death symbolizes the ecological catastrophe brought about by the Europeans in the primitive world of South America: the feathered bird-girl is assimilated to an Edenic being at the mercy of destructive forces. At the same time, Abel’s wish to possess the land reinforces the colonial viewpoint of the narration, while the movement from civilization to the wilderness implies the representation of a Darwinian struggle. Hudson frames the tropical space as substantially ambiguous, attractive and destructive for both colonizers and colonized, and through his narrative he introduces the fear of natural loss in the extreme form of the extinction of the green world.

Trading the Happy Object: Coffee, Colonialism, and Friendly Feeling

Trading the Happy Object: Coffee, Colonialism, and Friendly Feeling

<em>British and African Literature in Transnational Context</em>, by Simon Lewis

Reviewed by: British and African Literature in Transnational Context Patrick Brantlinger British and African Literature in Transnational Context BY Simon Lewis Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2011. ix + 257 pp. ISBN 978-0-8130-3602-1 cloth. In a series of "contrapuntal" readings of African and British writers, Simon Lewis demonstrates much of the diversity on both sides of the divide between black and white, European and African, colonizer and colonized. The opening chapter begins with "probably the most obvious point for looking at Anglo-African literature," the contrast between Chinua Achebe and Joseph Conrad. Writing about Heart of Darkness, Achebe called Conrad a "bloody racist." But, Lewis notes, Achebe's Things Fall Apart has also influenced Western readers to think in black-white, Europe-(West) Africa terms. The chapter ends with an analysis of Buchi Emecheta, whose work "unpicks Achebe's poetics of indigenism, national identity, and racial authenticity" (36). Emecheta's novels express a feminist viewpoint and what Lewis calls a "Black Atlantic affiliationist poetics" (39). Chapter two discusses Abdulrazak Gurnah, a writer of Arab descent from Zanzibar who now lives in England. Lewis notes that for most non-Africans, ideas about the continent are based on sub-Saharan West Africa, as in Conrad and Achebe. But Gurnah and East Africa complicate matters through Islam and "the history of the Indian Ocean world" (51). In novels such as Dottie (1990) and By the Sea (2001), like Lewis himself, Gurnah "is as suspicious of potentially racist and sexist African nationalism as he is critical of its racist and sexist colonialist antecedent" (54). [End Page 187] The next two chapters, which might have been combined into one, feature British writers William Boyd (An Ice-cream War) and Alan Hollinghust (The Swimming Pool Library). Like Conrad, "Boyd fails to represent Africans as properly articulate and rational" (84). Hollinghurst's "gay novel" illustrates "colonial desire" through the protagonist's "absolute adoration of black people" (qtd. 100) while it critiques British racism and classism. Chapter five contrasts three very different plays, T. S. Eliot's A Cocktail Party, Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman, and Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine. In the last two chapters, Lewis turns to writers from South Africa and Zimbabwe. These chapters cover much postapartheid South African fiction. The contrast between two novels by J. M. Coetzee versus K. Sello Duiker's Thirteen Cents and Chris Van Wyk's memoir Shirley, Goodness and Mercy is especially interesting. Duiker and Van Wyk are both grounded in black (and "coloured") South African cultures and locations, while Coetzee—who today resides in Australia—is abstract and metaphysical. The final chapter turns to Zimbabwean Yvonne Vera and "Southern African" "coloured" writers Yette Christiansë amd Zoë Wicomb, with an aside to Tsitsi Dangarembga (Nervous Conditions). Vera's Nehanda features a Shona priestess and heroine of an 1890s anticolonialist rebellion, while Christiansë (Castaway) and Wicomb (David's Story) produce feminist literature that cannot easily be categorized in national or racial terms. All three contest standard assumptions—both European and (male) African—of what it means to be African. Lewis's work is an erudite, well-written study that will be of interest to all postcolonialists and scholars of African literature. Patrick Brantlinger Indiana University brantli@indiana.edu Copyright © 2012 Indiana University Press

Strange Hybridities?

Strange Hybridities? Jacqueline Stevens (bio) Vicki Hsueh, Hybrid Constitutions: Challenging Legacies of Law, Privilege and Culture in Colonial America. Duke University Press: 2010. US $21.95 (paper). US $74.95 (cloth), 208 pages. ISBN 10: 082234632X, ISBN 13: 978-0822346326. Vicki Hsueh's Hybrid Constitutions: Challenging Legacies of Law, Privilege, and Culture in Colonial America explores how the constitutions and charters issued by the British government during the century leading up to the American Revolution emerge from a variety of legal authorities, rules of sovereignty, and political-economic objectives. The thought that the British Crown issued grants of sovereignty designed for a uniform consolidation of its subjects' authority over non-British nations, or even each other, is a legacy of "law, privilege, and culture in colonial America" Hsueh in her subtitle claims to challenge. (The book offers 133 pages of body matter, and 60 pages of notes and other back matter.) Hsueh develops the concept of "hybrid constitutions" in order show that the grantees of proprietary charters and other settlers in territory staked out by the British Crown invoked in their various struggles among themselves and with other nations a variety of legal authorities. These different political contests emerged from a range of idiosyncratic and political contexts that produced a changing line up of winners and losers. Hsueh's hybrid constitutions are part and parcel of the era and exemplify its contingencies: "To re-characterize colonization in this way shifts the terms of debate," Hsueh writes, "There may have been unabated colonial desire for settlement during the seventeenth century and eighteenth century, but those ambitions were nonetheless shaped by practices that stressed flexibility and change over time" (116). Hsueh also explains that those relying on what turn out to be fantasies of stadial histories, that is, histories implying necessary stages of political development, would expect a stronger and more complete exercise of sovereign power by the center over the periphery than the constitutions or charters of this era in fact reveal by their plain language or observed practice. Historians, as Hsueh shows, are well-aware of the patchworked affair called British colonialism, but their scholarship has not sufficiently permeated other fields' analysis of U.S. political development. The scholarship that most troubles Hsueh, the debate she wants to shift, appears in portions of work by Bhiku Parekh, Iris Marion Young, and James Tully, all singled out in the introduction (6). She is especially troubled by Tully's view of England's fusion of constitutionalism and colonialism toward the end of achieving an "'empire of uniformity'" (6, quoting Tully). On Hsueh's account, Tully's Strange Multiplicities: Constitutionality in an Age of Diversity (1995) misleadingly links "elements of homogeneity, exclusion, and coercion in modern constitutional forms to the entangled development of English colonialism and constitutionalism in the early modern period" (6). Tully, according to Hsueh, claims the English legal documents implementing their colonial institutions assumed a homogeneous and exclusive political community that their legal documents themselves created. Hsueh's main quarrel with Tully appears to be about his framing of these documents, as opposed to claiming that he is inaccurately describing or excluding any document in particular; nor does Hsueh engage at length any specific theoretical claims about colonialism or modern constitutionalism. Hsueh's original argument advanced through her reviews of the charters and constitutions, and against Tully and stadial history more generally, may seem somewhat modest. The historiography of colonialism should note contingencies and specific contexts: "while much contemporary theory seeks to unearth the instrumental and coercive forces helping to form modern constitutionalism, its reliance on macro-historical narratives of colonialism and more formal accounts of constitutionalism often thwarts this ambition" (7). The truth is in the details, Hsueh suggests. English colonialism was a bit of a mess and its methods and objectives have no necessary relation to those of modern constitutionalism. The addressees of Hsueh's second line of arguments, about the disparate sources and uses of early modern legal instruments of colonialism, are less obvious. She stresses colonialism's tensions and their implications for narratives that might or might not connect the multiple sources of legitimacy, political tensions, and the different parties' uneven win-loss records with the...

Fear and Desire: Regional Aesthetics and Colonial Desire in Kate Chopin's Portrayals of the Tragic Mulatta Stereotype

The interrogation of the category of race in Kate Chopin’s fiction represents an essential dimension of regional aesthetics, and it offers an alternative view to previous interpretations that focus primarily on feminist themes. This article examines the role of Louisiana as a specific region in the construction of the tragic mulatta stereotype in the fiction of Kate Chopin, primarily in her stories “Desiree’s Baby” and “La Belle Zoraide,” and by analogy in her most successful novel The Awakening. I propose to extricate Chopin’s work from the virgin/ whore dichotomy so often applied to white and non- white characters respectively. 1 From a new perspective, an illumination of the portrayals of the tragic mulatta figure in Chopin’s texts invites a reconsideration of the stereotype of the tragic mulatta that typically oscillates between evocations of the exotic and the sentimental. Attempting to reclaim the category of race in regionalist fic tion by examining the tragic mulatta stereotype in the selected texts, I see parallels between this pervasive image of southern local color fiction and the post- colonial paradigm, i.e. the dichotomy of the colonizer versus the colonized as it is suggested by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks as well as the notion of stereo type as a form of normalizing, yet contradictory, judgment in Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture. From this perspective, the trope of the tragic mulatta appropriated by Chopin in her fiction represents an essential point of concurrence of the issues of gender, race, and region, and it points to the underlying racial anxiety mani fested by the existence of ambivalent feelings of fear and desire toward

The male state

At the turn of the twentieth century British colonial officials imagined women in Burma to be distinctly more liberated than their sisters in other quarters of British India, but this posed a set of specific problems. The perceived influence women held over their husbands in official positions led to fears that they caused corruption. Women represented private interests infiltrating public duties. Thus the desired, normative subordinate colonial official was assertively masculine and in a position of authority over their female spouse. In this colonial desire there was a curious parallel with the everyday acts of misconduct committed by subordinate officials that was most apparent in rape investigations. Indigenous women faced great difficulties, even dangers, when seeking redress for crimes of gendered violence due to the machinations of subordinate state employees. High-ranking British officials demonstrated at best indifference, at worst suspicion, concerning women’s accusations. These everyday acts of subordinate officials were more important in gendering the colonial state than has been previously recognised.

A Study of Island or Strange Place in Shakespeare

The purpose of this study is to explore the space of island or strange place represented in Shakespeare’s tragic and comic worlds. Especially, it will be studied how the dual perspectives of island as an isolated and romantic space are represented in Shakespeare’s literary world. Island or strange place sets the most effective space that portrays the tragic reality and the romantic ideal. In the tragic world of Othello, the meaning of the tragic space of island will be inspected by comparing Cyprus with the main land of Venice. In the comic world, the strange space of Ilyria of The Twelfth Night and Caliban's island of The Tempest will be treated. Cyprus of Othello is the isolated space from the mainland of Venice, the space of military strategy. It is a frontier area which detects the enemy’s move, and also a very dangerous space which is vulnerable at the enemy's invasion by sea. Furthermore, as Cyprus is separated from the mainland, it is the space comparatively free from the control of the power and the law. Therefore, it’s the space that reflects the desperate reality, and also the space that awakes instinctive desires of human being. It is the space where Iago’s betrayal and wicked intrigue are activated, and the space where Othello’s hidden jealousy and wildness arise, and finally the space of death which results in pain and destruction. On the contrary, the strange spaces in comedies are portrayed as mysterious but ideal spaces, where the troubled save their lives and realize their desires. Illyria in The Twelfth Night is the romantic space where Viola saves her life and gets her love by means of disguise. We can find the confusion of gender role and hierarchical order in the romantic space of Illyria. The island of The Tempest is also portrayed as a romantic space of life where the exiled Prospero and Miranda arrive and achieve their desires. It is a supernatural space where we meet witch, fairy, monster, and wizard. But Prospero’s control of the island and Caliban’s resistance reflect the colonial desire of the European and the critical perspective of such an idea. Therefore, the reality of island space in comedies is not ideal. In the romantic comic space of The Tempest, we can find hate, conflict, greed, and despair. Only the ideal vision for change, fortune, love, and happiness exist beyond the unfortunate reality.

In het land der Boeren: De receptie van de Anglo-Boerenoorlog in de Poolse jeugdliteratuur

In the land of the Boers: The reception of the Anglo-Boer War in Polish youth literature Polish writers and journalists frequently used the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) as a symbol of resistance against foreign rule in their country. Since 1795 till the end of World War I, Poland had been absent from the map of Europe, divided between the European powers of Prussia (later Germany), Russia and Austria. In this context, high hopes for independence were encouraged, among others, by the romantic patriotism of national uprisings. Foreign inspirations, such as the Anglo-Boer War, also embodied prospective freedom. Symbolic meanings of the Anglo-Boer War are most clearly visible in the youth literature of the time. At that period, youth literature was not only conceived as entertainment, but also as a messenger of contents forbidden from schools as a result of russification and germanisation policy. In this context, the Boer fight provided suitable ground for allusions to the contemporary political situation of Poland. Two factors facilitated the delivery of the idea of independence – the censorship was less strict with respect to the youth literature and, secondly, there existed strong Boer support on the side of the whole Europe. This paper aims at showing the ways in which the contents related to the state of subjugation, such as political repressions, forced migration, critique of the rulers, unfortunate national uprisings were all included in the books whose main plot took place in South Africa. Paradoxically, the symbolism of subjugation was accompanied by Polish colonial desires. The colonized Poles would eagerly recall the times of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, one of the largest European powers in between 1386–1772. In this context, the myth of the Polish border – the area of the eastern frontier colonized by the Poles, covering roughly present day Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus was born. In this area, the Polish nobleman was viewed as an agent of acculturation, supposed to live in harmony with his neighbours and fight the barbarian Tatar hordes. The reality of the Commonwealth was, however, much less idyllic, much more brutal and colonial in its nature. Also this component of “Polish colonialism” was transported into the South African literary space. 

VISIBLE SEXUALITIES OR INVISIBLE NATIONS

This essay examines the construction of Two-Spirit identity in three contemporary narrative films, Big Eden, Johnny Greyeyes, and The Business of Fancydancing, arguing that, despite each story's focus on a queer Native protagonist, by their conclusions each film fractures Two-Spirit identities. Whereas Big Eden elides indigenous identity, Johnny Greyeyes and The Business of Fancydancing segregate indigeneity from queer sexuality, thereby relegating queerness entirely to off-reservation spaces. As this essay demonstrates, when the films' protagonists cross reservation lines, they literally leave behind their queer lovers and figuratively abandon all that those lovers represent when the storylines turn nearly exclusively to familial and cultural ties. As a result, such films suggest that the boundaries of nation in indigenous contexts are constructed and maintained by the heteronormative gaze and that Two-Spirit people are therefore forced to choose between sexual and national affiliations. This theme of division, in which indigenous affiliations with tribe and nation are split from expressions of queer sexuality, demonstrates how contemporary representations of Two-Spirit identities in narrative film continue to mirror the ongoing legacy of settler colonialism. In the case of Big Eden, Indian people, and thus any potential for actual Two-Spirit erotics, vanish completely under the weight of colonial desires; in the case of Johnny Greyeyes, though the aftermath of settler violence is both highlighted and healed by invoking a Two-Spirit relationship, articulations of Two-Spirit desire are bounded by the walls of the prison; and, finally, in the case of The Business of Fancydancing, regulating settler logics, which long degraded and denied Two-Spirit cosmologies, are replicated and, in fact, reinvigorated by deploying a gay imaginary that rests on dominant constructions of queerness.

An Incubus Upon the District’

In 1862 the New South Wales Government ordered an inquiry into the future of the Field of Mars Common, a tract of unalienated land in Sydney’s north-west. This article argues that the Select Committee inquiry was intimately connected to a set of broader anxieties and fears concerning the colony’s future. Occurring in the immediate aftermath of the Robertson Land Acts of 1861, the inquiry offers an alternative perspective on the colonial liberal desire to ‘unlock’ the land for individual freehold — one underpinned by reference to the idea of progress, civilisation and morality taken from the four stages theory of the Scottish Enlightenment.This article has been peer-reviewed.

Signs and Wonders: Fetishism and Hybridity in Homi Bhabha's The Location of Culture

Bhabhas discussion of colonial discourse: the fetish and hybridity: Bhabha sets hybridity as a site of interruption of the fetishistic logic and fixation that structure European colonial discourse. Yet the two terms frame not only his manifest engagement with the colonial encounter, but also his endeavor to recontextualize the colonial book in general and reading in particular in contemporary (post)colonial studies. Still, relatively little attention has been paid to the way he positions the fetish and hybridity in relation to book and reading. The following is an attempt to chart the deployment of these four termsfetish, hybridity, book, and readingin Bhabhas essays. I shall suggest that as he celebrates colonial desire and pleasure through hybridity, he quite explicitly dismisses reading, and as he shies away from reading the colonial book, he fetishizes that book. His essays thus reproduce the same logic he decries.

The other Mr Wilberforce: role conflict and colonial governance in Sierra Leone 1878–1913

This article considers role conflicts for Africans who occupied leadership positions in the colonial governance structure of the Sierra Leone Protectorate in the late nineteenth century. In particular it examines the source of conflicting identity issues for Western-educated or mission-converted indigenous leaders. It focuses these general issues through the example of the Rev. D.F. Wilberforce, who was both a missionary and a colonial appointee to a paramount chieftaincy. Wilberforce exemplifies the kinds of problems faced by colonial appointed chiefs, problems exacerbated by his role as an American missionary. It examines the pressures inherent in the contradictory roles he was required to fulfil. More generally it suggests that economic shifts in agricultural practice resulting from the late colonial desire to make West African colonies self-funding exacerbated already declining relations between the colonial authorities and indigenous rulers in the Protectorate. It examines the way colonial governments dealt with traditional governing practices vested in native social organizations and societies; how colonial paranoia about African secret societies allegedly involved in ‘ritual murder’ and ‘cannibalism’ compromised the colonial government's understanding of traditional authority structures; and how this influenced the exercise of political and legal control over these organizations and over supposedly recalcitrant native rulers.

Melville and Maugham:Colonial Desires in the South Seas

Melville and Maugham:<i>Colonial Desires in the South Seas</i>

The Limits of Law in the Mandated Territories: Becoming Manamba and the Struggles of Sisal Plantation Workers in Tanganyika

This article examines the limits of legal regulation of sisal plantation workers in the Mandated Territories of Tanganyika 1923–1958. By focusing on the making of the 1923 Labour Ordinance and its subsequent amendments I demonstrate the tension and conflict between colonial desires to control and manage labouring subjects, while simultaneously ensuring a regular flow of labouring bodies to plantations. The failures confronted on a daily basis in managing migrant labour – that originated not only from diverse provinces within the territories but also from across the boundaries of empire – rendered the limits of legal codes visible and necessitated their constant revisiting. Migrating men and women capitalissed on the ambiguity of the laws, the multiplicity of regulating agents, and a dense social network among migrant workers in challenging the laws as well as the racial and gendered assumptions about ‘native’ subjects that were embedded in the laws and the practice of their implementation.

Anatolia as a site of German colonial desire and national re-awakenings

AbstractAnatolia played an important role in German nineteenth-century colonial aspirations that was subsequently blacked out in both the Federal Republic of Germany and the Turkish Republic, due to their political re-orientation. To recreate the important role that Anatolia played in German colonialism, classic approaches to the studies of imperialism, such as tracing government actions through official documentation, are insufficient. This approach must be combined with a close reading of consular archives, travelogues, propaganda leaflets, and personal letters, in order to ascertain correctly the dissemination of motives underlying the Germans' actions in nineteenth-century Anatolia. Based on this approach, one can differentiate between three different roles that Anatolia played in German colonial thoughts and deeds: as an untouched land destined for agricultural settlement; as a source of inspiration for the German Empire to reshape itself in the image of ancient Pergamon; and as a site where German colonialism and Turkish nationalism could cooperate to their mutual benefit.

Iron Law and Colonial Desire: Legality and Criminality in Paton's Too Late the Phalarope

Summary Too Late the Phalarope [1955]1971 provides an occasion to reflect on the relationship between colonialism, law and criminality. I argue that Paton indicts Afrikaner Christian nationalism by dramatising a paradox inherent in it. Afrikaner nationalism's uncompromisingly strict legality – both the normativity that regulates the behaviour of members of the Afrikaner community, and the strict enforcement of these norms – renders its members vulnerable to that which the community disavows and criminalises in the Immorality Act: the libidinal attraction to the Other manufactured by colonialism's “desiring machine”. Moreover, by producing the conditions under which the “colonial desire” of the colonised – the desire for continued survival – cannot lawfully be fulfilled, colonial law is responsible for the criminality of the colonised.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Antipodean Myths Transformed: The Evolution of Australian Identity

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Antipodean Myths Transformed: The Evolution of Australian Identity

Postcolonial Psychoanalysis

J.M. Coetzee's undervalued paper `The Mind of Apartheid' provides a novel means of identifying the preoccupations of a `postcolonial psychoanalysis'. Such an approach to critique offers a tentative psychical-political diagnostics which pertains not only to the affective and discursive dynamics of the colonial sphere as a whole, but also to the subject-/desire-positioning enforced by the pathological colonial relation. Not reducible to the level of textual reading practices, this style of critique makes reference to a series of psychoanalytic concepts (anxiety, fantasy, ambivalence, disavowal) which are never merely figurative and which remain necessarily related to the frame of individual psychical functioning. Ultimately a postcolonial psychoanalysis offers a political analytics of desire that proves useful in engaging both the contents (racial/sexual fantasy) and the dynamics (affective economies, relational subject-positioning) of the psychic life of colonial power. It allows us to identify potential subversions (slippages of colonial authority and identity, the `return effect' of colonial desire) and to bring into focus those process elements (metaphoric condensation, metonymic displacement) that spread and sustain racist ideology and thereby much of the underlying rationality of (post)colonial power.

Looking for Adê: A contribution to Timorese historiography

In the centuries-old and turbulent history of Portuguese colonialism in East Timor, place names such as Lifao, Mena, Manatuto, Kupang and Dili (after 1769) are redolent of the early record of contact and trading relationships that fuelled the colonial desire for sandalwood, slaves and Christian souls in equal measure. Another name of similar antiquity and significance, also widely reported in the collective Portuguese archive, is the trading entrepôt of Adê (sometimes written as Adem). However, whereas most of these former ports of Portuguese engagement have retained their emplaced identity both within the historical record and as sites of contemporary settlement, the significance of Adê has faded with time. It rarely features in the contemporary Portuguese literature, and much uncertainty now surrounds its physical location beyond a general idea that it lay somewhere along the north coast of the island east of the current capital of Dili. In this brief communication I attempt to shed some light on the whereabouts of this curious and otherwise obscure fragmenta of Timorese historiography.

Cultural Alienation and Colonial Desire in "Alienación" by Julio Ramón Ribeyro

DESPITE its independence that dates back to the early 19th century, Latin America has been the subject in one way or another of overt or inconspicuous forms of neo-colonial domination exercised by the United States. The US's imperialist discourse--now disseminated with even greater efficiency under the guise of neo-liberalism and globalization--reproduces itself in different sites of the colonized, becoming visible in such aspects as race, ethnicity, difference, representation, migration, and imperial suppression. This essay proposes a postcolonial reading of the short story Alienacion by the Peruvian author Julio Ramon Ribeyro, in order to shed light on how the metropolitan modes of representation are received and appropriated by the periphery, as the story's protagonist plays out the politics of the imperial, meaning North American, paradigm. (1) I will also argue that the text dismantles colonial discourse by highlighting its unsuitability within Peruvian/Latin American context and by exposing the false promise of the metropolitan project. Ribeyro, the recipient of the highly regarded 1994 Premio de Literatura Juan Rulfo, echoes the Mexican literary icon in his exquisitely concise prose, which relies on a strong emotional charge that transpires through his realistic texts, and in his concern for the lives of the wretched. In the same vein, Ribeyro exhibits a strong interest in every aspect of the experience of marginalization, be it spatial (as in living on the border, or markedly outside the metropolis), physical (concerning one's appearance, which inevitably encompasses social and cultural limitations as well), and finally existential, oftentimes being the result of one's inability (contested or not) to interiorize predominant cultural norms. This disorienting paradox of 'otherness,' of feeling foreign within the realm of the familiar, while at the same time sensing sameness in a territory of difference, shows in the story Alienacion the effects of what Roberto Fernandez Retamar terms the infection with the ideology of the enemy, where the Latin American subject is but a distorted echo of what occurs elsewhere (3). The story offers an ironic and ultimately tragic insight into the life of Roberto, a mixed-race limeno, whose dream is to become a white American from the United States. As part of this frustrated project of assimilation, he strives to transform himself physically, dresses like a US tourist, and seeks to learn English. He eventually relocates to New York, where after months of poverty he enlists in the US Army, where things end tragically. The very first sentence of the story encapsulates the protagonist's multi-layered marginalization within Lima's society. Roberto is a zambo--which implies his social inferiority--and his name, Lopez, locates him within the most common and the lowest sector of a society whose elite traditionally boasts foreign-sounding last names. While Roberto looks like a zaguero de Alianza Lima, a football club traditionally associated with blacks and mulattos, he aspires to resemble a blond futbolista from Philadelphia. This dissonance between Roberto's appearance and his projected fantasy of origin and identity reveals that he has been afflicted by what Homi Bhabha would call political and psychic violence within civic virtue (43), a self-hatred in this case disseminated by the racist discourse of North American imperialism and interiorized by its colonial subjects. The signs of Roberto's marginalization in relation to the other actors of the story reach further, since he lives on the very edge of his generally white neighborhood, in ultimo callejon que quedaba en el barrio (262), thus physically occupying a peripheral space as well. In sum, Roberto's looks, his origin, and his economic status marked by his modest living quarters and his mother's lowly profession of washerwoman place him at the very bottom of the social hierarchy. This markedly inferior status complicates the development of his bodily schema, where instead of seeing himself for what he is, he begins to evaluate himself in terms of what he is not. …