Postcolonial compañeras? The desire for a reciprocal gaze in two Mexican women's accounts of Africa

This article considers texts by two Mexican women writers that directly concern or are derived substantially from their experiences in Africa: María Luisa Puga's Las posibilidades del odio (1978) is a fragmented novel set in Kenya in the late 1970s; Verónica Volkow's Diario de Sudáfrica (1988) is a journal of a trip to South Africa in the mid-1980s. Via an analysis of the ways in which these writers treat the theme of the gaze, in particular the differing effects of, and reasons for, their focus on reciprocal direct gazes, the article explores the possibility of comparable experiences between different post-colonial/colonised peoples.