Abstract
If all texts are equal in the production of meaning, then how should we interpret the textual maps that introduce Allende’s historical fiction?2 What do they suggest about the situated territories of the Americas and the people who inhabit these territories?3 If the value of a map may affect the behavior of others by “binding” groups of people to the mutual territory they inhabit, then how do Allende’s maps unite the observer to a sense of past history as well as to a perception of how the future will be lived within the represented territory?4 Indeed, how do they give a “feel for the shape” of how the world is perceived?
In the storeroom where they kept castoffs, she found her uncle John’s old maps, travel books, and logs, which gave her a feel for the shape of the world.
—Isabel Allende, Daughter of Fortune 1
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Notes
Isabel Allende, Daughter of Fortune, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (London, UK: Harper Perennial, 1999), 44.
Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1987), 211. Also, thanks to Laird Buchanan Craig for insights regarding the relationship of history and memory.
See Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), 6–7. He writes about the map, “Its objectivity is a serious fiction that represents a particular intellectual landscape from a particular point of view.”
Denis Wood, Rethinking the Power of Maps (New York: Guildford Press, 2010), 17.
See George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 214, for a discussion about a more “inclusive and collective truth.”
Gordon S. Wood, The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 200.
Lois Parkinson Zamora, “The Usable Past: The Idea of History in Modern US and Latin American Fiction,” in Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? ed. Gustavo Pérez Firmat (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 11.
Werner Sollors, “Introduction,” The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations, ed. Marc Shell and Werner Sollors (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 2.
Gustavo Pérez Firmat, “Introduction: Cheek to Cheek,” Do the Americas Have a Common Literature?, ed. Gustavo Pérez Firmat (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 2.
See Anita Karl and Jim Kemp, “Map,” in Daughter of Fortune, by Isabel Allende, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (London, UK: Harper Perennial, 1999).
See Jan Adkins, “Map” (2005), Zorro, by Isabel Allende, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006).
See Magdalena García Pinto, “Chile’s Troubadour,” in Conversations with Isabel Allende, Revised Edition, ed. John Rodden (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 54–55.
Miss Rose exclaims to Jeremy, “But we are foreigners, Jeremy, we speak scarcely a word of Spanish” (DOF 47). In the nineteenth century, Valparaíso’s city population was one third “foreign.” See Jay Monaghan, Chile, Peru, and the California Gold Rush of 1849 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 8.
See George Edward Faugsted, The Chilenos in the California Gold Rush (San Francisco: R&E Research Associates, 1973), 62.
Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” in Other Spaces: The Affair of the Heterotopia: Die Affäre der Heterotopie, eds. Roland Ritter and Bernd Knaller-Vlay (Graz, Austria: Haus der Architektur, 1998), 36.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London, UK: Continuum, 1987), 427.
For a further account of space in the trilogy, see Karen Wooley Martin, Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits Trilogy: Narrative Geographies (Woodbridge, UK: Tamesis, 2010).
See Paul Carter, “Spatial History,” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London, UK: Routledge, 1995), 335.
Vincente Pérez Rosales, Times Gone By: Memoirs of a Man of Action, trans. John H. R. Polt (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003), 208.
Thomas Oliver Larkin, as referred to in Janell Watson, Guattari’s Diagrammatic Thought: Writing between Lacan and Deleuze (London, UK: Continuum, 2009), 56.
Félix Guattari, Soft Subversions: Texts and Interviews 1977–1985, trans. Chet Wiener and Emily Wittman, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 2009), 230.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1984), 126.
See Kenneth Surin, Freedom Not Yet: Liberation and the Next World Order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 159.
See José Rabasa, “Allegories of Atlas: From Inventing A-M-E-R-I-C-A: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentricism,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London, UK: Routledge, 1995), 319.
Susan Pérez Castillo, “Introduction,” in Engendering Identities, ed. Susan Castillo (Porto: Universidade Fernando Pessoa, 1996), 10.
Steve Giacobbi, Chile and Her Argonauts in the Gold Rush1848–1856 (San Francisco: Robert D. Reed, 1967), 61.
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, UK: Routledge, 2004), 2.
Yellow Bird [John Rollin Ridge], The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta: The Celebrated California Bandit (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955). For a discussion of the many versions of the story of Joaquín Murieta, see
Joseph Henry Jackson, “Introduction,” in The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta: The Celebrated California Bandit (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955), xi–l. For further analysis of John Rollin Ridge and Joaquín Murieta, also see
Rebecca Tillett, Contemporary Native American Literature (Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 20–22.
See Remi Nadeau, The Real Joaquín Murieta: Robin Hood Hero or Gold Rush Gangster (Corona del Mar, CA: Trans-Anglo Books, 1974), 125–26.
Susana Nuccetelli argues that while Hispanics appear to not share any “relevant superficial features at all,” they share “a wealth of communal experiences, including some very characteristic past events and states. There is now logical space to maintain that it is precisely these that constitute their identity and make them the people they are. There is, for instance, a common history Hispanics share, consisting in their quite idiosyncratic relations with other nations and with their physical environment.” Susana Nuccetelli, “What Is an Ethnic Group?” in Race or Ethnicity? On Black and Latino Identity, ed. Jorge J. E. Gracia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 143.
Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846–1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 53.
For further discussion of race and ethnicity, see Jorge J. E. Gracia, “Race or Ethnicity? An Introduction,” in Race or Ethnicity? On Black and Latino Identity, ed. Jorge J. E. Gracia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 2.
Many Latin American nations today consider their populations to be predominately “White,” in particular the Southern Cone nations of Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. Ginetta E. B. Candelario, “Color Matters: Latina/o Racial Identities and Life Chances,” in A Companion to Latina/o Studies, ed. Juan Flores and Renato Rosaldo (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 338.
Faugsted, The Chilenos in the California Gold Rush, 32. Also see Fernando Purcell, “Becoming Dark: The Chilean Experience in California, 1848–1870,” How the United States Racializes Latinos: White Hegemony and Its Consequences, ed. José A. Cobas, Jorge Duany, and Joe R. Feagin (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2009), 54–67.
See Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Does Truth Matter to Identity?” in Race or Ethnicity? On Black and Latino Identity, ed. Jorge J. E. Gracia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 42.
See J. L. A. García, “Racial and Ethnic Identity?” in Race or Ethnicity? On Black and Latino Identity, ed. Jorge J. E. Gracia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 77.
Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 240.
Martin Winckler, Le Rire de Zorro (Paris, France: Bayard, 2005), 41.
Edward W. Said, “Resistance, Opposition and Representation,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London, UK: Routledge, 1995), 97.
Eugene L. Conrotto, Miwok Means People: The Life and Fate of the Native Inhabitants of the California Gold Rush Country (Fresno, CA: Valley Publishers, 1973), 104.
For a discussion of Indian-Spanish relations in California, see Steven W. Hackel, Children of Coyote, Missionaries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
Ruth Spack, America’s Second Tongue: American Indian Education and the Ownership of English 1860–1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 5. Spack writes of this “silencing” in that indigenous populations of North America often were forced to learn the English language.
Edward W. Said, “Resistance, Opposition and Representation,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London, UK: Routledge, 1995),
Also see Gloria Anzaldúa, “Towards a New Consciousness,” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London, UK: Routledge, 1995), 208.
A Gregory, Geographical Imaginations, 416. Also see Derek Gregory, Ron Martin, and Graham Smith, Human Geography: Society, Space and Social Science (Baskingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1994).
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London, UK: Routledge, 1995), 344.
See Gregory, Geographical Imaginations, 74. Also see J. B. Harley, “Deconstructing the Map,” in Writing Worlds: Discourse Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape, ed. Trevor J. Barnes and James S. Duncan (London, UK: Routledge, 1992), 231–47.
Charlotte Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends, Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 11–12.
Judy Yung, Gordon H. Chang, and Him Mark Lai, “Part One: Early Chinese Immigrants, 1852–1904,” in Chinese American Voices: From the Gold Rush to the Present, ed. Judy Yung, Gordon H. Chang, and Him Mark Lai (Berkeley: University of California, 2006), 1.
William J. Courtney, San Francisco’s Anti-Chinese Ordinances1850–1900 (San Francisco: University of San Francisco, 1956), 13.
See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 8.
Edward Said, Orientalism (London, UK: Penguin, 2003), 27.
See Elmer Clarence Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), 3. The act was repealed in 1943. Also see Judy Yung, Gordon H. Chang, and Him Mark Lai, “Part Two: Life under Exclusion, 1904–1943,” in Chinese American Voices: From the Gold Rush to the Present, 104.
Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 36.
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, UK: Routledge, 2004), 4.
See Gloria Anzaldúa, “Towards a New Consciousness,” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London, UK: Routledge, 1995), 208.
See Susan P. Castillo, Notes from the Periphery: Marginality in North American Literature and Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), 30.
Frantz Fanon, “National Culture,” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London, UK: Routledge, 1995), 121.
As Salman Rushdie writes, “It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.” Salman Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands,” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London, UK: Routledge, 1995), 429.
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© 2013 Bonnie M. Craig
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Craig, B.M. (2013). Sites of Transformation within the Americas. In: Rewriting American Identity in the Fiction and Memoirs of Isabel Allende. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137337580_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137337580_6
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