Travels and Identities in the Chronicles of Three Nineteenth-Century Caribbean Women

The labor of rescuing forgotten women’s voices and experiences, and the analysis of the feminine imaginary, are—for those of us for whom literature is a scholarly discipline—not only professional obligations but above all political and ideological commitments. During the last three years I have dedicated my research to the investigation of the autobiographical discourses of Puerto Rican and Cuban women of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from which work stems this exploration of their incursions into travel literature, examined here from within the perspective of gender ideology and the autobiographical stance. I am interested, above all, in how women’s literary expression is determined by cultural representations of sexual difference and by the hierarchies of power and influence that these differentiations produce in social life. I am particularly motivated by the need to formulate new evaluations of the autobiographical text to challenge the premises of universality and representativity that characterize male autobiography.