Latin American Postmodernisms: Women Writers and Experimentation (review)

Tompkins is clearer in the sections of her introductory chapters that deal with the specific characteristics of postmodern writing: indeterminacy, parody, fragmentation, self-reflexivity, linguistic experimentation, a non-unified subject, and an "effect of simultaneity that does away with causality" (15), traits she highlights in each of the authors she considers in the chapters that follow. Tompkins ably interweaves other readers' insights with her own idea of an ethics of dissensus "based on responsibility and accountability rather than on power and knowledge" (69), a concept that really resonates with this authors' works. In the case of Angel's Las andariegas, she mentions the comparison with Monique Wittig's text (unnamed in Tompkins's book, it is Les Guérrilléres), but doesn't go into what Wittig's text is or does, how its revolutionary gender politics or stylistic experimentation may enter into the Colombian writer's work. Venezuelan Ana Teresa Torres's family history represents another historiographic metafiction and Tompkins concludes with the idea that "by emphasizing the continued political and socio-economic discrimination experienced by the so-called illegitimate branch of the family [...], Torres, like Levinas, urges us to take responsibility for the Other" (92).