Gaze of the Outsider/Insider: US Latino Authors writing of Latin America.
Presentation
Overview
Overview
Description
In the recent years some US Latino authors have shifted the focus of their writings from the Latino community in the United States to the community of their origin or of their ancestors. The presence of the original cultures is obvious in many writings representing the bicultural lives led by many Latinos of the United States, but the focus has never been the people of the land of their origins. To name a few, Julia Alvarez and Achy Obejas are two examples of this shift. Alvarez has been writing about the Dominican female historical figures and the exploitation of HIV positive Dominicans by pharmaceutical companies in her novels In the Time of the Butterflies, In the Name of Salomé and Saving the World respectively. Obejas, part of the Cuban exile community introduced Cuba not simply as a land of the past, but a present that is never represented enough to understand the current situation. In her past novel Days of Awe she looks partly into this reality, and her upcoming novel Ruins (2009) is situated in Cuba and is the tale of a Cuban on the verge of exiling himself. This paper will look at two Peruvian American authors, a culture less represented in the Latino cultural productions, namely Marie Arana and Daniel Alarcón, and their writings, about Perú. This is a study of the representation of a culture from a perspective of a bicultural agent, an insider, yet an outsider. The bicultural agent may not completely be seen as an outsider because of their ancestral ties, but faces the risk of voicing a perspective that although sympathetic, is that of a privileged agent who situates himself/herself in a culture of power and dominance.
