Latin American Postmodernisms: Women Writers and Experimentation (review)

Reviews  233 nod in that critical direction, but perhaps she will pick up that gauntlet at some time in her academic future. AMY FASS EMERY, Dickinson College tompkins, cynthia margarita. Latin American Postmodernisms: Women Writers and Experimentation. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2006. 226 pages. Cynthia Tompkins’s book addresses an important group of writers: late twentieth -century Spanish American women novelists whose work, she argues, has still not received the critical attention of their male counterparts. Tompkins brings together the work of Julieta Campos, Alicia Steinberg, Luisa Valenzuela, Albaluc ı́a Ángel, Brianda Domecq, Ana Teresa Torres, Alicia Borinsky, Diamela Eltit, and Carmen Boullosa, in order to analyze their collective production in terms of ‘‘an ethically grounded postmodernism’’ (3). In the course of her study she reads one or several of each author’s narrative works to demonstrate how all participate in an ‘‘ethics of dissensus.’’ This is a term she derives from Zygmunt Bauman and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek’s readings of Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of ‘‘anarchic obligation’’ which is linked to a ‘‘nonappropriative relation to the Other’’ (7). At the close of her Introduction Tompkins explains how Bauman reads Levinas to derive his own idea of a postmodern, non-universalizable morality , ‘‘an ethics of self-limitation’’ that visualizes ‘‘the consequences of action or inaction’’ (7). Ziarek adds the term ‘‘dissensio’’ which she uses to characterize the ‘‘irreducible dimension of antagonism and power in discourse.’’ Ziarek also proposes an ‘‘ethos of becoming’’ that offers new modes of being through a concept of freedom that is not subjective but engaged in practice (7). These are intriguing ideas that, along with certain shared regional experiences, mutual quests for ‘‘female’’ language, and inheritance from modernist experimentalism, unite this group to some degree; but in other ways the list of characteristics Tompkins elaborates in her introductory chapters may also over-generalize, eliding important differences among these writers. They do not all ‘‘give voice to the subaltern,’’ as Tompkins claims, for example, just as they do not all share the same degree of invisibility (Eltit and Valenzuela are certainly well-known; Campos ’s and Boullosa’s work has also received considerable attention, with the others having achieved differing degrees of recognition). After her initial introduction, the author continues to explain her project in her theoretical introduction to Latin American Postmodernisms (literary and social). Her very condensed review of the social and economic circumstances defining the postmodern moment in the region covers a lot of territory in just two pages; Tompkins has 16 footnotes here and her discussion is reinforced by this subordinated dialogue with others; however, her argument could have been more fully elaborated by bringing more of this dialogue into the body of the text. The next section traces changes in twentieth-century narrative from the avant-garde through new novel, Boom, magical realism, the neo-baroque and post-Boom. Here, as throughout these introductory chapters, I found myself wondering what audience she envisioned for her book; at times she provides 234  Revista Hispánica Moderna 60.2 (2007) information that seems meant for readers not familiar with the Latin American literary tradition, while at other moments she seems to assume her readers are well-acquainted with the texts. The list of novels on page 11 that testify to the ‘‘stylistic sophistication and social commitment’’ of early twentieth-century literature , for example, reads like a list of the canon that includes Raza de bronce, Doña Bárbara, and El juguete rabioso, among others. However, these are very different narratives at many levels; some are stylistically innovative and others not, just as some are more political than others. Again, when she characterizes the Latin American avant-garde, she falls into overgeneralizations that elide important distinctions and do not deal consistently with the specificity of the arts in the region (12). In this rendition, Huidobro seems to be associated more with ultraı́smo than Borges, and creacionismo is not mentioned. On pages 4–5 Tompkins mentions Cuban Lydia Cabrera, ‘‘who introduced magical realism’’ (an assertion that merits more development), but Cabrera’s name does not appear later, when she states that Asturias and Carpentier ‘‘tend to be considered the initiators of Latin American magical...