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Contemporary Women's Writing 2007 1(1-2):98-117; doi:10.1093/cww/vpm001
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

I Call it New Orleans

Debra A. Castillo

Cornell University, USA dac9@cornell.edu

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

"A todo esto ... le llamo Nueva Orleans" / "All of this ... I call it New Orleans," says one of the characters in Cristina Rivera Garza's 2004 novel, Lo anterior.1 In this particular novel, "todo esto" includes a wind blowing out of the l950s, "el sonido anaranjado de la melancolía / the orange sound of melancholy," nausea and vomiting (Rivera Garza 2004: 136–7). A strangely specific referent in this highly abstract and literary novel, the allusion to the city of New Orleans largely seems like a gratuitous metaphor, a marker for an abjected and exotic liminal psychological state rather than a crucial geographical setting. It becomes a trope for a tainted past which, like tainted food, must be violently expelled. But why is New Orleans represented at all, even fleetingly, in this novel where there are so few markers of specific geography? And what resonance does this US . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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