Las heterotopías posmodernas de Marlene Nourbese Philip, Giannina Braschi y Howardena Pindell

Abstract

The analysis of the poetry of Marlene Nourbese Philip and Giannina Braschi and the paintings of Howardena Pindell allows the comparison of the ways in which these artists explore the question of space through specific postmodern paradigms. The in-depth reading of El Imperio de los Sueños(1988), by Braschi, She Tries her Tongue, her Silence Softly Breaks (1989), by Philip, and Autobiography (1988), by Pindell, shows that these artists make, on the one hand, a personal and quite feminine representation of the concept of heterotopia, originally described by Michel Foucault in “Of Other Spaces” (1984), and, on the other hand, a socio-political critique by means of an explicit postmodern aesthetic that defies Fredric Jameson’s description of contemporary culture in his Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1994). The postmodern texts of Braschi, Philip and Pindell create a subject capable of questioning from a multiple and heterogeneous location. The linguistic heterotopias of these artists generate ideological spaces that portray a new way of looking at reality from alternative perspectives. The challenge to both the present politico-cultural power structures as well as the Western historical discourse based on arbitrary hierarchization is central to the artistic agenda of the texts considered in this study.