Transnational Discourses on Class, Gender, and Cultural Identity by Irene Marques (review)

Marques characterizes her study as exploring “three different issues: class, feminist, and cultural identity discourses, the latter more specifically in relation to race, nation, colonialism, postcolonialism, and economic and cultural imperialism” (1). The study actually revolves around four authors whom Marques describes as “world writers”: Mia Couto, Clarice Lispector, Jose Saramago, and J. M. Coetzee. Marques’s discussion, though interesting, offers little original analysis or critique of how the aforementioned social constructions (race, colonialism, etc.) are manifested (reproduced) in and through the discourses deployed by these four writers. Instead, she offers laudatory summaries and praiseful amplifications of the writers’ works. The facile description of these four authors as “world writers” presages a rather uncritical engagement with the four. Had Marques initiated her study with the understanding that she is reading three settler–colonial authors (a white South African, a Mozambican of Portuguese descent, and a Brazilian author of Lithuanian descent) and one European author (Saramago), rather than four “world writers” (whatever this means), perhaps she would have produced a more critical examination. Nevertheless, Marques provides some interesting interpretations of the works under consideration, making abundant use of psychoanalytical concepts, and engaging numerous theorists—notably Lévinas, Cixous, Irigaray, Heidegger, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty.

The rationale for juxtaposing these four authors—four white writers from three different continents, three men and one woman, three Lusophone and one Anglophone—is that “all four are political in the sense that they bring to the forefront important issues pertaining to the power of literature to represent, misrepresent, and debate issues related to different subaltern subjects: the postcolonial subject, the poor subject … and the female subject” (1). It is unclear why Marques uses the theoretically suggestive term “subaltern,” rather than the more generic “oppressed,” since her use of “subaltern” bears none of the specificity intended by subaltern studies scholars. It is unfortunate that Marques does not engage subaltern studies at all, as those perspectives would have helped refine and enrich her discussion.

Part 1, “The Bolder Politics of Agency,” discusses Couto and Saramago, whom Marques reads as more overtly political than Lispector and Coetzee. Couto and Saramago, writes Marques, “take their art as a site where politics ought to be directly discussed and where the voice … of the artist has the power, ability, and responsibility to unmask certain oppressive structures, give voice to the oppressed, and expose some of the myths guiding the society in question” (1–2). In her discussion of Couto, Marques insightfully notes that the displacement of indigenous Mozambican languages by Portuguese disrupts people’s access to the historical, aesthetic, epistemological and spiritual perspectives embodied in the indigenous languages. Given this insight, it is surprising that Couto’s work is credited with “rescuing traditions and values that have been overshadowed by the colonialists” and helping Mozambicans “regain the epistemologies of the past” (182). The fact that Couto writes in a “modified” Portuguese, rather than the “standard” Portuguese, certainly distinguishes him from European writers. One still wonders, though: If a settler–colonial version of Portuguese is what gives one access to “the soul of Mozambique, to its philosophy of life and epistemology” (182), where does that leave indigeneity? Who gets to define the “soul of Mozambique”? We might also note that in Marques’s interpretation of the interactions between the little girl and her father in Couto’s stories, “the little girl is the metaphor for the Mozambican land, its people, and their holistic or sacralized conception of the universe. The little girl is the nation of Mozambique and the father represents the governing elite of colonial and postcolonial states” (47–48). This interpretation recalls colonial discourses that link indigenous people, colonized people, and the “Third World” in general with childhood, while making adulthood and “reason” the property of Europe.

In her discussion of Jose Saramago’s O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis, Marques presents a remarkably uncritical interpretation/celebration of the character of Lídia, presented...