Women, Memory, Nation: Writing Identities in Three Latin American Novels

This essay examines how Latin American women writers Griselda Gambaro (Argentina), Ana Maria Machado (Brazil), and Magali Garcia Ramis (Puerto Rico) represent the nation and address questions of national and self-identity through the intersection of fiction, history, memory, and autobiography. The novels examined here offer alternative representations of the nation and of national history grounded not on official historiography, but rather on microhistories, or the life stories of marginalized and displaced individuals. The representation of nation and national identity thus presented problematizes an understanding of these concepts as fixed and unchangeable, rather showing them as ambivalent and affective constructs that dialectically shape and are shaped by individuals' own sense of self-identity. The comparative examination of Latin American novels from three different countries points to a common literary project of rewriting the nation, as it foregrounds the novels' thematic and formal coincidences as well as their disparities.