Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2013
Published In
Letras Hispanas
Keywords
Immigration, Globalization, Place, Habitus, Gender, Geography, Transnational feminism, Lucía Etxebarria, Cosmofobia, Contemporary Spanish literature
Abstract
Literary representations of global migration to Spain have augmented in concert with the increase in immigration at the turn of the twenty-first century. While these texts tend to express an empathetic stance toward the hardships that immigrants face, they often fall short in capturing the complexity of the nation’s changing ethnic composition and critically engaging with the issue of a Spanish author narrating the stories of subjects who have immigrated to the Iberian nation. This essay proposes that in Cosmofobia (2007), Lucía Etxebarria purposefully addresses the potentially colonizing position of authoring a fictional text about immigrant experiences in Spain, with narrative strategies that highlight her role in creating the work that we read and that attend to an ethical elaboration of a transnational feminist project. The author’s representation of gender and place in the context of an intricate social web in global Madrid suggests that concerns common to women of different ethnicities may reshape conceptions of community and create new spaces for interethnic collaboration.
Rights
© Letras Hispanas. Reproduced with permission.
Recommended Citation
Leone, Maryanne L. (2013). Narrating Immigration, Gendered Spaces, and Transnational Feminism in Lucía Etxebarria's Cosmofobia (2007). Letras Hispanas 9(1): 48-64. http://www.modlang.txstate.edu/letrashispanas/previousvolumes/vol9-1.html.