Artesana de sí misma

Artesana de sí misma by Claudia Cabello-Hutt reevaluates the place of Nobel laureateGabriela Mistral in the literary and intellectual history of Latin America, illuminating and filling a number of lingering voids in the study of this canonical figure. Cabello-Hutt introduces readers to Mistral’s vast but scarcely studied journalistic prose as well as her unpublished manuscripts, letters, and images held in the United States and in newly opened Chilean archives. Moving beyond her amply discussed poetry, Cabello-Hutt demonstrates that Mistral’s essays,visual representations, and gender performance are key to understanding Mistral’s self-construction as a Latin American female intellectual and internationally recognized writer.

From 1920 until herdeath in 1957, Mistral shaped salient national and transnational debates, brokered relations between major writers, and fashioned a new model of thetransnational intellectual in the context of anti-imperialist Latino americanism, US-promoted Pan-Americanism, and rising populist politics and social movements of the time. Placing Mistral’s gender, class, and racial performances in richer context, Cabello-Hutt reveals them as not only groundbreaking and strategically fashioned, but also as a logical product of the tensions, desires, and power struggles of the cultural field of this period— a cultural field in the process of redefining the interactions between the intellectual, the masses, and political and cultural institutions. Further, by mapping out the transatlantic intellectualnetworks in which Mistral operated— networks that included José Vasconcelos, Alfonso Reyes, Victoria Ocampo, and Joaquín García Monge—Artesana de sí misma also examines the processes of democratizationand modernization that transformed the cultural field in the wider regionbetween 1910 and 1940.

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Artesana de sí misma de Claudia Cabello Hutt reevalúa el lugar de Gabriela Mistral, premio Nobel de literatura, en la historia literaria e intelectual de América Latina. Cabello Hutt acerca a los lectores a la amplia, pero escasamente estudiada, prosa periodística de Mistral además de a un conjunto de manuscritos, cartas e imágenes provenientes de archivos norteamericanos y chilenos así como del recientemente abierto archivo de su albacea y compañera, Doris Dana. Artesana de sí misma explora más allá de la ampliamente estudiada poesía de Mistral y demuestra que su prosa, representación visual y performatividad de género son claves para comprender la auto-construcción de esta figura como una intelectual latinoamericana y una escritora de reconocimiento internacional. Desde 1920 hasta...