Ekphrasis as a dialectical image. A subaltern reading of Cristina Peri Rossi’s Las musas inquietantes

From an analysis of Cristina Perri Rossi’s ekphrastic poetry collection Las musas inquietantes (The anxious muses), the aim of this paper is to highlight the scope in ekphrasis for uncovering the construction of canonical forms of representation, revealing the feminine as a construct within hegemonic androcentric discourses. In visual arts, women are represented as passive and silent objects; their voices and their capacity for self-representation are stifled thereby positioning them as subaltern subjects. By means of its poetic element, ekphrasis brings to light the epistemic violence in the canonical discourse on the Other while at the same time undermining and subverting those same discourses. Understood as a Benjaminian dialectical image, ekphrasis becomes a poetic mode with a disruptive force, as an agency of cultural resistance by bringing what has been obliterated to the present, thereby demonstrating its transgressive potential in its representation of the Other, the subaltern.