Of Silenced and Unheard Voices from the South

at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Duffy, Ana, 1968- author.

Title: Of silenced and unheard voices from the South : Argentinean subalternity according to Luisa Valenzuela / Ana Duffy.

Description: Oxford ; New York : Peter Lang, [2020] | Series: Hispanic studies : culture and ideas, 1661-4720 ; volume 80 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020004906 | ISBN 9781789972528 (paperback) | ISBN 9781789972535 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789972542 (epub) | ISBN 9781789972559 (mobi)

Subjects: LCSH: Valenzuela, Luisa, 1938- Mañana. | Literature and society—Argentina—Histor—20th century. | Marginality, Social, in literature.

Classification: LCC PQ7798.32.A48 M3633 2020 | DDC 863/.64--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004906.

Cover image: Ripples by Tomás Ruiz (2020). Reproduced with permission.

ISSN 1661-4720

ISBN 978-1-78997-252-8 (print) • ISBN 978-1-78997-253-5 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-1-78997-254-2 (ePub) • ISBN 978-1-78997-255-9 (mobi)

© Peter Lang AG 2020

Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers,

52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU, United Kingdom

oxford@peterlang.com, www.peterlang.com

Ana Duffy has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,

1988, to be identified as Author of this Work.

All rights reserved.

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.

Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the

permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.

This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming,

and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.

This publication has been peer reviewed.

About the author

Ana Duffy holds a PhD in Latin American Literature from the University of Queensland, Australia. She has worked in various Australian universities as a lecturer and tutor in the fields of Latin American studies and literature, Spanish and, being a writer herself, in creative writing and literary studies. As a researcher, she has focused on Luisa Valenzuela, marginality and, more recently, on the practice of creative writing in a foreign country and through a borrowed language.

About the book

Luisa Valenzuela’s oeuvre is marked by a fixation with marginal characters, those often rendered invisible by society and outside hegemony: the subaltern. Valenzuela’s El Mañana captures echoes of the past, aggravated in a globalized world, takes them apart and reassembles them, to then project them into the future. With a clearly dystopian intention, Valenzuela’s novel reveals how instances of subjugation under despotism may be re-enacted by following a pattern of forgetting and repeating.

This book examines the novel’s main fictional characters, who propel the reader to an Argentinean distant and recent past, present and future, challenging and dismantling their founding beliefs, and finally reformulating them from below. The novel is shown to present a decolonial version of the dystopian genre in which a new configuration of power projects the perils of gender, class and patriarchal oppression onto the future, along the lines of coloniality. Ultimately, by addressing themes relevant to the fields of literary fiction, criticism and theory as well as decolonial and postcolonial studies, this book maps out the development of subalternity by performing a situated reading of a major work of Argentinean literature.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Foreword: Unas palabras

Acknowledgements

Introduction

chapter 1
The ripple effect

chapter 2
Leading towards and breaking through subalternity

chapter 3
Locating El Mañana within Valenzuela’s oeuvre

chapter 4
Valenzuela’s subaltern: The characters in El Mañana

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Foreword: Unas palabras

Como las líneas de canto, las song lines de los aborígenes de Australia, su país de adopción, Ana Duffy ha sabido trazar líneas conductoras a lo largo de mi obra literaria. Líneas que sagazmente trazan su paisaje interior.

Pertenezco a la extraña raza de escritores que trabajan sin un plan preconcebido, sin el menor atisbo de hacia dónde nos conducirá el texto que hemos comenzado, porque al escribir novela o cuento no se puede admitir trampa alguna, nada de hacer especulaciones lógicas o de encontrar atajos. Al respeto me alegró leer que mi admirado Michael Ondaadje se refirió en una entrevista reciente a “la excitación del descubrimiento, a la sorpresa de ir descubriendo qué le sucede a los personajes en el camino”.