Gulf Gothic: Mexico, the U.S. South and La Llorona's Undead Voices by Dolores Flores-Silva and Keith Cartwright (review)

IF 0.1 3区 文学 0 LITERATURE
Alexander Lalama
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New York: Anthem Press. $24.95 sc. 90 pp. <p>Dolores Flores-Silva and Keith Cartwright’s <em>Gulf Gothic: Mexico, the U.S. South and La Llorona’s Undead Voices</em> adds a critical layer to the growing field of Gothic studies, and in particular contributes another voice to the growing questioning of how we define the gothic in terms of national and colonial literatures. Commonly viewed as beginning in eighteenth century Britain with the publishing of Horace Walpole’s <em>Castle of Otranto</em> in 1764, gothic literature is associated with a constellation of tropes, anxieties, and themes. Flores-Silva and Cartwright build on the decolonizing trajectory that has erupted in the past decade in regards to gothic literary studies, alongside recent work by Maisha Wester, Leila Taylor, and Xavier Aldana-Reyes. <em>Gulf Gothic</em> argues the Gulf of Mexico—specifically the Mexican and US gulf coast region—has always been a gothic realm, one whose gothic nature is exacerbated by the legacies of colonization, plantation slavery, as well as capitalist extractivism, not to mention the environmental catastrophes that reveal the underlying social and racial hierarchies that often remain submerged in dominant narratives of the region. Even more critical, though, is Flores-Silva and Cartwright’s excavation of the gothic that existed in the Gulf long before the arrival of Columbus and Cortés, far earlier than Walpole’s novel, what they call a “Gulf gothic performance” (2022, 7). <strong>[End Page 134]</strong></p> <p>La Llorona becomes the central image and figure of the Gulf gothic, a figure, folktale, and monstrous specter that represents the transnational nature of the Gulf gothic. Flores-Silva and Cartwright call into question the dominant narrative of La Llorona as beginning with Doña Maria, also known as Malinche, the Indigenous woman who served as Hernan Cortés’s translator and lover during the Spanish arrival, the often-repudiated and misogynistic image of Mexico’s conquest. As a cautionary tale of the deceitfulness and duplicitous ways of the wronged woman, <em>Gulf Gothic</em> locates images and narratives of other La Llorona-like figures extant in Veracruz’s Gulf shore long before the arrival of Spaniards to the region. What arises is a genealogy of La Llorona that extends back to texts like the <em>Popol Vuh</em>, in Aztec figures such as Tlazoltéotl, and in clay figures of women who died in childbirth (<em>Cihuateteo</em>) in a death shrine at the pre-colonial ruins of El Zapotal. All of these weeping-woman figures are images of seduction, of repressed truth, of women who have become couched as monstrous temptresses and sirens: all evoke the Gothic narrative associated with La Llorona long before her appearance in folklore following the Spanish conquest.</p> <p>As such, La Llorona’s pre-colonial predecessors speak to a Gulf gothic figure whose Indigenous roots prefigure the postconquest use of La Llorona to speak of anxieties within colonial and post-colonial Mexico regarding the nation’s Indigenous past, where the cultural narrative of <em>mestizaje</em> hides the undead voices of natives. Here, Flores-Silva and Cartwright represent how contemporary Mexican Gothic iterations of La Llorona serve to recuperate the Indigenous presence in the Gulf. In the process, <em>Gulf Gothic</em> shows the ways earlier La Llorona figures traverse the waters of the gulf to the US gulf shore, offering a Gothic image for Chicana feminist writers like Sandra Cisneros and American Indigenous writers like Leslie Marmon Silko, a gothic figuration that materializes the spectral figure in the form of real-life women who wail against gendered structures of violence, abuses at the US-Mexico border, and the dispossession of Indigenous land as the result of settler-colonialism. Reading these through the outlined history of La Llorona opens up a line of flight from the disgraced image of La Llorona to one that cries not due to her own regret over infanticide but to reclaim and mourn the lives and spirits lost in the wake of violence.</p> <p>The metaphor of the...</p> </p>","PeriodicalId":44728,"journal":{"name":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","volume":"66 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1000,"publicationDate":"2024-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"COLLEGE LITERATURE","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/lit.2024.a917868","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:

  • Gulf Gothic: Mexico, the U.S. South and La Llorona’s Undead Voices by Dolores Flores-Silva and Keith Cartwright
  • Alexander Lalama
Flores-Silva, Dolores, and Keith Cartwright. 2022. Gulf Gothic: Mexico, the U.S. South and La Llorona’s Undead Voices. New York: Anthem Press. $24.95 sc. 90 pp.

Dolores Flores-Silva and Keith Cartwright’s Gulf Gothic: Mexico, the U.S. South and La Llorona’s Undead Voices adds a critical layer to the growing field of Gothic studies, and in particular contributes another voice to the growing questioning of how we define the gothic in terms of national and colonial literatures. Commonly viewed as beginning in eighteenth century Britain with the publishing of Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto in 1764, gothic literature is associated with a constellation of tropes, anxieties, and themes. Flores-Silva and Cartwright build on the decolonizing trajectory that has erupted in the past decade in regards to gothic literary studies, alongside recent work by Maisha Wester, Leila Taylor, and Xavier Aldana-Reyes. Gulf Gothic argues the Gulf of Mexico—specifically the Mexican and US gulf coast region—has always been a gothic realm, one whose gothic nature is exacerbated by the legacies of colonization, plantation slavery, as well as capitalist extractivism, not to mention the environmental catastrophes that reveal the underlying social and racial hierarchies that often remain submerged in dominant narratives of the region. Even more critical, though, is Flores-Silva and Cartwright’s excavation of the gothic that existed in the Gulf long before the arrival of Columbus and Cortés, far earlier than Walpole’s novel, what they call a “Gulf gothic performance” (2022, 7). [End Page 134]

La Llorona becomes the central image and figure of the Gulf gothic, a figure, folktale, and monstrous specter that represents the transnational nature of the Gulf gothic. Flores-Silva and Cartwright call into question the dominant narrative of La Llorona as beginning with Doña Maria, also known as Malinche, the Indigenous woman who served as Hernan Cortés’s translator and lover during the Spanish arrival, the often-repudiated and misogynistic image of Mexico’s conquest. As a cautionary tale of the deceitfulness and duplicitous ways of the wronged woman, Gulf Gothic locates images and narratives of other La Llorona-like figures extant in Veracruz’s Gulf shore long before the arrival of Spaniards to the region. What arises is a genealogy of La Llorona that extends back to texts like the Popol Vuh, in Aztec figures such as Tlazoltéotl, and in clay figures of women who died in childbirth (Cihuateteo) in a death shrine at the pre-colonial ruins of El Zapotal. All of these weeping-woman figures are images of seduction, of repressed truth, of women who have become couched as monstrous temptresses and sirens: all evoke the Gothic narrative associated with La Llorona long before her appearance in folklore following the Spanish conquest.

As such, La Llorona’s pre-colonial predecessors speak to a Gulf gothic figure whose Indigenous roots prefigure the postconquest use of La Llorona to speak of anxieties within colonial and post-colonial Mexico regarding the nation’s Indigenous past, where the cultural narrative of mestizaje hides the undead voices of natives. Here, Flores-Silva and Cartwright represent how contemporary Mexican Gothic iterations of La Llorona serve to recuperate the Indigenous presence in the Gulf. In the process, Gulf Gothic shows the ways earlier La Llorona figures traverse the waters of the gulf to the US gulf shore, offering a Gothic image for Chicana feminist writers like Sandra Cisneros and American Indigenous writers like Leslie Marmon Silko, a gothic figuration that materializes the spectral figure in the form of real-life women who wail against gendered structures of violence, abuses at the US-Mexico border, and the dispossession of Indigenous land as the result of settler-colonialism. Reading these through the outlined history of La Llorona opens up a line of flight from the disgraced image of La Llorona to one that cries not due to her own regret over infanticide but to reclaim and mourn the lives and spirits lost in the wake of violence.

The metaphor of the...

海湾哥特:多洛雷斯-弗洛雷斯-席尔瓦和基思-卡特赖特所著的《墨西哥、美国南部和拉罗罗娜的亡灵之声》(评论)
以下是内容的简要摘录,以代替摘要:评论者: 海湾哥特:多洛雷斯-弗洛雷斯-席尔瓦和基思-卡特赖特的《墨西哥、美国南部和拉罗罗娜的亡灵之声》 亚历山大-拉拉马-弗洛雷斯-席尔瓦、多洛雷斯和基思-卡特赖特。2022.海湾哥特:墨西哥、美国南部和 La Llorona 的亡灵之声》。纽约:Anthem Press.$24.95 sc.90 pp.多洛雷斯-弗洛雷斯-席尔瓦和基思-卡特赖特的《海湾哥特》:墨西哥、美国南方和拉罗洛娜的亡灵之音》为哥特式研究领域的不断发展增添了重要的一环,尤其是为我们如何从国家和殖民地文学的角度定义哥特式这一日益增长的问题提供了另一种声音。一般认为,哥特式文学始于十八世纪的英国,1764 年出版了霍勒斯-沃波尔的《奥特朗托城堡》,哥特式文学与一系列套路、焦虑和主题相关联。弗洛雷斯-席尔瓦和卡特赖特以过去十年间哥特式文学研究中爆发的非殖民化轨迹为基础,与梅莎-韦斯特、莱拉-泰勒和泽维尔-阿尔达纳-雷耶斯的最新研究成果并驾齐驱。海湾哥特》认为墨西哥湾,特别是墨西哥和美国海湾沿岸地区,一直是一个哥特式的领域,殖民化、种植园奴隶制以及资本主义采掘业的遗留问题加剧了这一领域的哥特性质,更不用说环境灾难揭示了该地区主流叙事中经常被淹没的潜在社会和种族等级制度。更重要的是,弗洛雷斯-席尔瓦和卡特赖特发掘了哥伦布和科尔特斯到来之前海湾地区的哥特风情,这比沃波尔的小说要早得多,他们称之为 "海湾地区的哥特风情表演"(2022, 7)。[La Llorona 成为海湾哥特式的核心形象和人物,这个人物、民间故事和恐怖幽灵代表了海湾哥特式的跨国性质。弗洛雷斯-席尔瓦和卡特赖特对 "La Llorona "的主流叙事提出质疑,认为它始于Doña Maria,又名Malinche,是一位土著妇女,在西班牙人到来时担任埃尔南-科尔特斯的翻译和情人,是墨西哥征服时经常被否定的厌恶女性的形象。海湾哥特》是一个关于受屈妇女的欺骗和两面性的警示故事,它将维拉克鲁斯海湾沿岸早在西班牙人来到该地区之前就存在的其他类似拉洛洛娜的人物形象和叙事进行了定位。由此产生的 "La Llorona "谱系可追溯到《波波武》等典籍、特拉佐尔特奥特尔等阿兹特克人的形象,以及 El Zapotal 前殖民遗迹中一个死亡神龛中死于分娩的妇女泥像(Cihuateteo)。所有这些哭泣的妇女形象都是诱惑、被压抑的真相、被描述为畸形诱惑者和女妖的妇女的形象:所有这些形象都唤起了哥特式叙事,与早在西班牙征服后出现在民间传说中的 "Llorona "有关。因此,La Llorona 在殖民前的前身是一个海湾哥特式人物,其土著根源预示着征服后的墨西哥利用 La Llorona 来表达对殖民地和后殖民时期墨西哥土著历史的焦虑,在这种焦虑中,混血的文化叙事掩盖了土著不死的声音。在此,弗洛雷斯-席尔瓦和卡特赖特展示了当代墨西哥哥特式作品《La Llorona》如何重新唤起海湾地区土著人的存在。在这一过程中,《海湾哥特》展示了早期《La Llorona》的形象如何穿越海湾水域到达美国海湾沿岸,为桑德拉-西斯内罗斯(Sandra Cisneros)等奇卡娜女权主义作家和莱斯利-马蒙-西尔科(Leslie Marmon Silko)等美国原住民作家提供了哥特式形象,这种哥特式形象以现实生活中女性的形式具体化了幽灵形象,她们对性别暴力结构、美墨边境的虐待行为以及定居殖民主义对原住民土地的剥夺发出哀嚎。通过《La Llorona》勾勒的历史来解读这些内容,可以从《La Llorona》的失宠形象中找到一条出路,即她的哭泣并不是因为自己对杀婴的悔恨,而是为了恢复和悼念在暴力中失去的生命和精神。拉罗娜的隐喻......
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COLLEGE LITERATURE LITERATURE-
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