Women essayists of the Hispanic Caribbean: Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. A state of the art

Abstract

In the intellectual history of Latin America there is a gap regarding the production of women in the essay genre. It is the essays of identity, of male workmanship, that build the canon regarding the themes and the ways of being approached. The gender essays that the women writers have done are
articulated in response to this dominant vision of the social, political and cultural processes of Latin American countries. They reveal a strong discontent with the construction of female identity, a concern for the construction of full citizenship and represent a response to the political and cultural social demands of women and other marginal groups. The intellectuals debated, discussed and argued with the proposals that the dominant speeches carried in this regard and the gender essay becomes the “weapon of combat.” What is presented here is aimed at recovering this body of knowledge in the literary history of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. A work of literary archeology of themes, works and authors from the twentieth century. The book Women Essayists of the Hispanic Caribbean: Hilvanando el silencio (2007) by Anna Freire Ashbaugh, Lourdes Rojas and Raquel Romeu, provides a panoramic view of the group of essayists from each country. Other researchers such as Catharina Vallejo, Ivette Sóñora, Carmen Dolores Hernández and Consuelo Meza Márquez
will expand that corpus and point out some thematic features of the essayist work of authors such as Luisa Campuzano, Mirta Yáñez, Nara Araujo, Marta Núñez Sarmiento and Zaida Capote Cruz de Cuba; Concha Meléndez, Rosario Ferré, Norma Valle Ferrer, Nara Negrón Marreño and Silvia Álvarez Curbelo of Puerto Rico; and, from the Dominican Republic, Camila Henríquez Ureña, Carmita Landestoy, Carmen Durán and Rosa Inés Curiel Pichardo.