Traveling objects in Flora Tristán's Pilgrimages of a pariah and Frances Calderón's life in Mexico

Leila Gómez

pp. 159-178

in: Tania Gentic, Francisco LaRubia-Prado (eds), Imperialism and the wider atlantic, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

Flora Tristán's Peregrinations of a Pariah (1833–1834) and Frances Calderón's Life in México (1842) have been studied by critics of empire as Eurocentric narratives. Gómez proposes a more complex analysis of this already established ethnocentrism by carrying out an Atlantic reading of these female travelers. The Atlantic traveler is read as a bicultural subject that constantly moves between two geographic and cultural continents with a double consciousness. Gómez's approach is based on Thing theory (Bill Brown, Bruno Latour), per which there is a revealing politics in objects. The objects that accompany the traveler determine the traveler's routes and interaction with locals, and reveal the changes in their subjectivity along the way, changes that most often are not discursively articulated in the story of the journey.

Cited authors

Latour Bruno