Re-thinking the Vanguardia: The poetry and politics of Magda Portal (Peru, Spanish text)

Very few studies have dealt with women's participation in the Latin American Vanguardia. The social, economic, and political revolutions of the 1920s and early 1930s are considered fundamental to the understanding of this literary period. However, the rise of political and intellectual women activists and feminist groups that emerged within this same context have been largely overlooked by critics and scholars. My dissertation focuses on the literary production and political activism of Peruvian poet Magda Portal (1902–1989) to point out one way in which women participated of this aesthetic, social, and literary endeavor. I approach her diverse vanguardist contributions by first contextualizing them within the Peruvian socio-political and artistic milieu of the 1920s.; A reading in detail of Portal's vanguardists poetry from her collection Una esperanza y el mar (1927) reflects an eclectic style and innovative approach to the subject of aesthetic and social renovation. I further discuss how Portal, through the evaluation of a distinctive set of images, re-creates in her poetry women's position as subjects rather than objects of representation. She also incorporates both a female poetic voice and an ambiguous poetic subject. The incursion of a female subject becomes what Susan Suleiman calls “a subversive act” that questions the predominant-male subjectivity of this vanguardist movement. I use Judith Butler's notion of the social “abject” as theoretical framework which explains the process of inscribing an experience that has no prior modes of representation.; Portal's subversion within the Latin America Vanguardia reveals a gender revolution parallel to the aesthetic and social concerns of that time. If vanguardists were against all traditions, then Portal's vanguardist poetry can also be seen as subverting patriarchal modes of representation. I contend that this new subjectivity practiced by Portal forces us to examine with a new perspective the works of vanguardist women in particular as a first step in the re-evaluation of the Latin American I in general.