Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela – författare

Spain's attempt to establish a "New Spain" in Mexico never fully succeeded, for Spanish institutions and cultural practices inevitably mutated as they came in contact with indigenous American outlooks and ways of life. This original, interdisciplinary book explores how writing by and about colonial religious women participated in this transformation, as it illuminates the role that gender played in imposing the Spanish empire in Mexico. The author argues that the New World context necessitated the creation of a new kind of writing. Drawing on previously unpublished writings by and about nuns in the convents of Mexico City, she investigates such topics as the relationship between hagiography and travel narratives, male visions of the feminine that emerge from the reworking of a nun's letters to her confessor into a hagiography, the discourse surrounding a convent's trial for heresy by the Inquisition, and the reports of Spanish priests who ministered to noble Indian women. This research rounds out colonial Mexican history by revealing how tensions between Spain and its colonies played out in the local, daily lives of women.

This volume illuminates and gives voice to actors, objects, events, and processes from the early 1400s to the late 1800s and thinks about how they may relate to Latinx expressive literatures and cultures, challenging common paradigms that think of the field as resolutely modern. Drawing on a diverse range of expertise from scholars from around the globe and examining objects ranging from chronicles, histories, letters, journalism, poetry, talismans, performances, and comix, the volume engages with counternarratives and multifaceted contexts that address intersections of race, gender, class, and other social and political locations. The volume significantly contributes to methodological debates around Latina/o/x studies, offering in-depth and multiple explorations of how to imagine the field's complex evolution. It is an indispensable resource for those seeking to broaden their scholarly understanding of Latinx identity and literature, providing fresh insights and critical perspectives that will enrich academic discussions and research in this field.

Ricardo Palma’s Tradiciones is the first full-length account of Ricardo Palma informed by theories of cultural criticism. Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela sheds new light on important aspects of Palma’s work. She offers a fresh interpretation of the relations between history and literature – perhaps the most discussed aspect of Palma’s work – engaging with new critical thinking on historicism and examining the significance of the marginal and the anecdotal in Palma’s work. By using the tools of postcolonial cultural criticism, Vera Tudela considers Palma’s encounter with modernity, arguing that his recuperation of colonial history plays a crucial part in imagining the modern future. Most innovatively, Vera Tudela examines the multiple and contradictory notions of femininity in nineteenth-century Latin America and in Palma’s writing, showing how a historical consideration of the sexual politics of cultural production transforms our understanding of many of the assumptions about this period. Finally, by applying the insights of cultural geography in analysing the racial, sexual and political identity of domestic, urban and national space in Palma’s writing, Vera Tudela demonstrates that Palma’s literary maps and topographies are uniquely revelatory of questions of power and agency. In its exploration of sexual politics and nationhood, Ricardo Palma’s Tradiciones presents Palma as a proto-modernist who paved the way for many of the experiments of twentieth-century Latin American narrative fiction.