This week, the Department of English Language and Literature
is hosting a lecture by Assoc. Prof. Dr. RoseAnna Mueller who has been a
faculty member at the Columbia College Chicago in Humanities and Foreign
Languages, Department of Humanities, History and Social Sciences. She acted as
the Humanities Coordinator from 1996 to 1999, and is currently the Director of
Women’s/Gender Studies Minor.
Professor Mueller’s talk is based on the Venezuelan author
Teresa de la Parra’s Three Lectures:
Women’s Influence in the Formation of the American Soul (1930), which
described the important roles women played during the Conquest, Colony, and
Independence eras in Latin America. De la Parra believed that women’s history
had yet to be written and that as a public intellectual she owed it to her
audience to inform them of the contributions women had made to Latin American
history and how they were poised to contribute to its future.
A more recent and contested way to document women’s lives is
through testimonio. Postmodernism
brought with it a new way to interpret this
literary genre and testimonio gives voice to a previously
marginalized person by virtue of class, gender or race. The testimonies of Rigoberta Menchú
(Guatemala), Domitila de Chungarra (Bolivia), and Reyita de los Santos (Cuba)
are excellent and dramatic examples of this genre. They document the lives of
three “ordinary” women struggling with race, class and gender issues, as well
as economic and patriarchal life circumstances.
Another way to document women’s lives is through film. The
Argentinian filmmaker María Luisa Bemberg used this medium to tell the story of
two powerful women. Yo la peor de todas
tells the life of the intellectual colonial Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la
Cruz. Camila tells the powerful and previously censored story of Camila O’Gorman, who
defied the state, the church and her family to be with her lover.
Assoc.
Prof. Dr. RoseAnna Mueller ‘s talk entitled “Women Narrating Latin
American Women’s Lives” will take
place on Wednesday, April 3, in C-Block Amphitheater at 5:40 p.m. Everyone
interested in literature, narration and testimonio is invited.
Refreshments will be served before and after the talk. For more information,
please contact elit@bilkent.edu.tr.
