Performing Women and Modern Literary Culture in Latin America: Intervening Acts by Vicky Unruh, and: The Avant-Garde and Geopolitics in Latin America by Fernando J. Rosenberg (review)

188 The Latin Americanist Fall 2006 aquellas personas interesadas en el marxismo y su relevancia en las actuales circunstancias mundiales y, particularmente, latinoamericanas. Sin duda, 10s trabajos de Tischler Visquerra representan un considerable esfuerzo tedrico por intentar ofrecer nuevas formulaciones a 10s problemas generales que plantea la accidn revolucionaria en la actualidad. Como muy certeramente apunta John Holloway en el prologo, “el libro se niega a caer en el confonnismo que esta crisis ha producido en tanta gente, y explora nuevos caminos hacia delante, nuevas maneras de pensar el tiempo, la historia, la memoria y el sujeto, nuevas formas de pensar la esperanza revolucionaria” (x). Jose‘IgnacioAlvarez-Femandez Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University Performing Women and Modern Literary Culture in Latin America: Intervening Acts. By Vicky Unruh. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006, p. 276, $45.00. The Avant-Garde and Geopolitics in Latin America. By Fernando J. Rosenberg. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. 2006. D . 211. $27.95. Recent work on the Latin American vanguards has highlighted a broader participation in the arts and a more fine-tuned, delicate positioning regarding contributions to cultural ideas such as antropofagia and transculturation. In their recent books, Vicky Unruh (University of Kansas) and Fernando Rosenberg (Yale), both scholars who represent these ideas emphatically and skillfully , encourage interpretationsof the vanguard movements along the lines of self-aware thought. Unruh explores, in the artistic as well as social strategies of eleven vanguard women writers, conceptualizations of performance as cognition, while Rosenberg examines, in general but also specifically regarding the novels and travel writings of M&o deAndrade and Roberto Arlt, cosmopolitanism as a cognitive more than a geographical phenomenon. Unruh’s introduction to Performing Women encompasses a marvelous summary of performance theory. In her paradigmatic 1994 work, Latin American Vanguards: The Art ojContentious Encounters, Unruh had already begun to inscribe the centrality of performance to the avant-gardegestalt in Latin American contexts . By focusing exclusivelyon women writers in her new study, Unruh not only brings attention to several undesemedly lesserknown artists, but also foregroundsthe social dynamicsof women Book Reviews 189 who create “textual intervention in a cultural conversation” (7-8) while co-optingperformativeroles assigned by male artists within that same cultural conversation. Alfonsina Storni’s manipulation of her poetisa label, or Patricia Galviio’s growing reluctance toward her persona as the muse Pagu, illustrate the difficulties that writers who happened to be women faced regarding even the most basic of procedural matters, such as access to publication and distribution, and being reviewed for one’s work as opposed to one’s gender. Unruhtraces an arc fromvenezuelan writerTeresadela Parra to the BrazilianGalviio(thetwo writerswho Unruhclaims enacted the greatest negations of societal roles for women) that includes ArgentinesStorni, Victoria Ocampo, and Norah Lange; Mexicans Nellie Campobello and Antonieta Rivas Mercado; Cubans Mariblanca Sabas Alomi and Ofelia Rodriguez Acosta; and Peruvians Magda Portal and Maria Weisse. In each case, Unruh provides necessary biographical detail but focuses on individual stylistic techniques, metaphors and imagery. For example, Unruh teases out Ocampo’s tendency to write about “breakthroughs in learning as bodily events” and “bodily liberation through dialogue” (63-64)as a way of opening up new possibilities or expanding the gestures in one’s socioculturalrepertoire, especially in the experimental theatricalcontextof Ocampo’sLa Zaguna de Zos nenufares. Lange, like Galviio fashioned into a muse by her male colleagues, escapes from her inscription as image precisely through the “discovery of the cognitive power of her assigned role as performer” (79).Her body-centered narrativessuch as Discursos and Cuadernos de infancia feature unique synecdoches depicting a cognitive dissonance between image and voice. Campobello-who trained as a dancer-and Rivas Mercado -writer, maecenas and muse-exemplify a hyperawareness of stance, pose, and attire. Unruh draws on differences between posing and performing in the case of Campobello’s embodiment of the charroiconographyduringthe post-revolutionarycharacterization of mexicanidadas virility. Rivas Mercado, underminingas well the casual nature with which a pose or a look can be assumed, refers to her writing as a way of dressing or undressing the mind. In contrast to the prevalence of traditionalist discourse even within the avant-garde in Mexico, the Cuban vanguards were very strongly linked tofeminism.Evenso,awriter suchasSabasAlomi, the...