Symbiosis Between Slavery and Feminism in Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda's Sab?

Abstract— Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda's novel Sub (1841) has been subject to many interpretations. Early criticism considered it as little more than a sentimental and shocking romantic story: the impossibly unconventional love of a black slave for a white woman. Later critics'have sought to establish Snb as a pioneering antislavery novel. This article will attempt to demonstrate that Avellaneda's main purpose was not to narrate a doomed love, nor to present a denunciation of slavery, but to express her feminist ideology, establishing the parallelism between the situation of black slaves and the oppression of white women in the bourgeois society of her time. However, we cannot say that Avellaneda created a symbiosis between slavery and feminism; the theme of slavery is only a metaphor, doubly shocking because it exposes her own emancipating ideas in an oppressive society that did not forgive those voices ivhich dared to transgress its norms. 0 1997 Society for Latin American Studies.     

Asserting State Authority through Environmental Monitoring: Venezuela in the Post‐Gómez Era, 1935–1945

In Venezuela, the task of consolidating the central state fell to Presidents Eleazar López Contreras (1936–1941) and Isaías Medina Angarita (1941–1945). This meant asserting fiscal control over the oil companies operating in the state of Zulia as well as appeasing restive working and middle classes. The government sought to exert power over both by moving towards a system of environmental monitoring of the petroleum industry. López Contreras was reluctant to apply real political pressure to the companies and accordingly environmental monitoring tended to be lax. Medina Angarita personally visited zulianos and made fiery speeches designed to assuage Venezuelan pride. What is more, he allowed the press to denounce the companies for their environmental abuse. Through his environmental monitoring efforts, Medina demonstrated to the companies that the state was a force to be reckoned with.     

Cuban Anti‐slavery Narrative through Postcolonial Eyes: Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab (1841) has come to be regarded as an iconic work in the canon of nineteenth‐century Cuban fiction, celebrated as much for its literary pedigree as for its radical combination of anti‐slavery and feminist ideas. Yet it has been the subject of very divergent critical appraisals. This essay sets out to breathe new life into Avellaneda’s novel by interpreting it through a postcolonial optic. Drawing on ideas from the scholarship of Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, as well as the ideas of literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, these pages explore the implications of its nationalist, racial, sexual and feminist politics for Sab’s anti‐slavery meaning. This postcolonial reading provides a possible solution for the conflicts between its various interpretations.     

The Disarticulated Movement: Barriers to Maya Mobilization in Post‐Conflict Guatemala

Over the last decades, indigenous movements have propelled the political empowerment of historically marginalized groups in Latin America. The Maya struggle for ethnic equality in Guatemala, however, since its reawakening during the peace process, has reached an impasse. Based on field research consisting of dozens of elite interviews, this article analyzes the patterns of and obstacles to present‐day Maya mobilization. It combines movement‐internal and ‐external factors in an overarching theoretical argument about indigenous movements' capacity to construct strong collective voices. In the Guatemalan case, organizational sectorization, the lack of elite consensus on key substantive issues, and unclear alliance strategies compromise the effectiveness of horizontal voice among Maya organizations. These problems are exacerbated by the lasting effects of the country's unique history of violence and state strategies of divide and rule, preventing the emergence of a strong vertical voice capable of challenging the Guatemalan state.