Embodied land: Narratives of nationhood in the Americas (Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, Guadeloupe)

Through the comparative analysis of six nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels of North and South America and the Caribbean, “Embodied Land” explores the danger and appeal of narratives proposing an inherent connection between American nations, peoples, and space. Characterizing American nations as a union between the national territory and the bodies of national subjects, such narratives celebrate the putatively “natural” constitution of American nation-states. Yet while these narratives extend promises of freedom and equality, they rely upon unequal categories of gender, race, class, and sexuality to naturalize the radical inequities of American societies. Chapter one outlines the ways in which nations and nationalisms are sustained through narrative and situates the dominant narrative strategy of American nationalisms within the historical context of American struggles for independence.{09}It argues that the narrative link between American bodies and lands is fraught with contradictions and omissions that invite literary intervention within the political and social constructions of American nations. Chapter two considers two nineteenth-century responses to this invitation—José de Alencar's Iracema, which celebrates the poetic possibilities of the national narrative regardless of its genocidal implications, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, which cautions that literary attempts to reimagine national community are likely to replicate the same oppressive conditions they contest. Chapter three analyzes the more creative responses that arise from national conflict, as characters in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Elena Garro's Los recuerdos del porvenir attempt to renegotiate relationships between nation, body, and land by positioning themselves within narratives of “the natural” or proposing alternative constructions of nature. Chapter four explores the limits and possibilities of the more strategic and sustained challenges of Reinaldo Arenas' Arturo, la estrella más brillante and Maryse Condé's Moi, Tituba, sorciére…Noire de Salem in response to the far-reaching horrors of the slave-run plantation system and its modern legacies. In conclusion, “Embodied Land” argues that these narrative engagements with the nation, its land, and its embodied subjects gesture to imaginary American communities that are not sustained through the naturalized oppression of their members.