%0 Journal Article 
%A López López, Margarita
%T Descentralización del texto maestro mediante la resemantización en "The memories of Ana Calderón" de Graciela Limón
%D 2010
%U http://hdl.handle.net/10017/8350
%X My analysis focuses on Graciela Limón’s novel The Memories of Ana Calderón
to show; first, how the author participates in Ellen McCracken’s idea that Latina
narrativists present alternatives to totalizing master texts, resignifying the ostensibly
univocal nature of such claims to truth and at the same time foregrounding the limits
of their own narrative enterprises; and second, how the text opens itself to literary
experimentation, decentralizing and amplifying historical master texts to corrode the
artificial border between gender and ethnicity. Considering the text’s focus on what Iain
Chambers calls metaphors of movement, such as migration and diaspora, I explore how
the returning and reelaboration of events in the protagonist’s life imply a need for a
different way of thinking, that which allows for cultural transgressions by Chicanas not
only in Western society, but also in the Latino community and family. I further illustrate
how Limón utilizes strategies of resemantization of master texts to present alternative
texts that form a new Latina identity. For this, I analyze how this counternarrative is
structured around alternative reappropriations of the body, transgression, feminist
strength, resignified religious imagery, and experiments with narrative voice to exemplify how Bakhtin’s concept of “double voice” unmasks the language of the other and
articulates the author’s feminist discourse. The protagonist’s distancing from her place
of origin opposed to the cultural sexist traditions is studied as a transformation of
Bakhtin’s “intentional hybrid” in her new state/space in the U.S. – a heterotopia where
she questions these traditions to make room for her liberation from such oppression and
integration in a new social order in which Latinas are emerging cultural identities in
transition situated in Anzaldúa’s state of being “mitá y mitá.” I conclude that by not
insisting on the characters’ ethnicity and focusing on individual worth instead, Limón’s
novel is directed towards a new way of thinking about borders as para-sites that never
take over a field entirely but erode it slowly and tactically.

%K Critical article
%K Ensayo
%K 20th century american fiction
%K American literature
%K Chicana contemporary fiction
%K Hispanic literature
%K Inmigrants
%K Latino literature
%K Mexico
%K Novela americana en el siglo 20
%K Literatura de los EEUU
%K Literatura chicana contemporánea
%K Literatura hispana
%K Inmigrantes
%K Literatura latina
%K México
%K Humanidades
%K Historia de América
%K America-History
%K Arte
%K Art
%K Literatura
%K Literature
%~ Biblioteca Universidad de Alcala