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Marchant, Elizabeth A. Critical Acts. Latin American Women and Cultural Criticism. Gainseville: U of Florida P, 1999. 144 pp. ISBN: 0-8130-1683-5
In Critical Acts, Elizabeth Marchant evokes a rich foundational tradition of Latin American cultural criticism by women. By taking the essays of Gabriela Mistral, Victoria Ocampo, and Lucia Miguel Pereira as the focus of her attention, Marchant moves out of the range of strictly literary concerns with which these women are usually identified in order to posit the formation of alternative public spheres that are heavily inflected by gender. This endeavor is deeply suggestive for rethinking the cultural canon and its margins, the status of the essay and the memoir in constructing public opinion, and the role of women in a national configuration of modernity. Too. Marchant's enterprise incisively brings to mind the struggles embraced by Latin Americanist scholars in the 1980s in order to construct a field of study in which gender set the terms for understanding the operations of culture. In other words, by renewing the debate about the status of intellectual work by women, Marchant reopens questions about the authority of the entire field of feminist scholarship and its stature among humanistic pursuits. At the heart of Marchant's book and of these feminist challenges is the valorization of "difference".
Difference has been a creative working tool, supplying a powerful force of analysis. It has allowed one to see from the stranger's perspective, to cut against the grain of established truths, to see obliquely through the sediment of accepted fact that has set in place over time. Beyond this, it has also allowed the observer to step into the vortex of contradiction, to wrestle with incompatible evidence, and to enact, from those sites of tension, a performance on the stage of reading. I have to agree with historian Joan Scott when she wrote that feminists cannot give up "difference"; it would deter not only the flow of political energy, but also the flow of aesthetic meditation. Indeed, the constantly proliferating differences that have attracted the scholarly eye have been fruitful to break down binary structures, to find points of impasse in research agenda, to locate projects of self-differentiation within those dominant subjects who enjoy the privilege of arenas of power. Moreover, this...