Juli A. Kroll (University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, MN): Between the ‘Sacred’ and the ‘Profane’: Cultural Fantasy in Madeinusa by Claudia Llosa.

Upon initial viewing, Peruvian director Claudia Llosa’s 2006 film Madeinusa resembles an indianist cultural fantasy exploiting cultural practices of the Andean highlands. The film elaborates a tense artistic vision of an Odysseus-like Limeño drawn into the fictionalized Holy Week practices of an Andean village that believes that God cannot see human sin between the time of Jesus’ death on Good Friday and his resurrection on Easter Sunday. The film’s eponymous heroine’s own cultural escapism is achieved through a Penelope-esque patience whereby she elaborates symbols that guard her imagined route to cosmopolitan consumerism and femininity, a route that would follow her own mother’s desperate escape to Lima some years prior to the action of the film. Main character Madeinusa’s song is shown to attract and cast a spell upon the Limeño visitor who will end up becoming her talisman and scapegoat for her flight from a village marked by magic, incest, and alcoholism.

Close inspection of Madeinusa reveals an evolution of themes from both European myths of the era of Atlantic explorations and myths surrounding the continuing strands of cultural alterity that have affected hegemonic perspectives of Andean indigineity. Themes incorporated into the film include the prevalence of cultural figures such as the siren, the insistent dichotomy between the sacred and profane, the reification of religious syncretism, and the study of ritual use of alcohol and religious symbol-objects in the Andes. Additional topics of importance to this study include the film’s reference to postmodern trends examining the urban versus the rural, the global and the local, and the use of the internationalized, hybrid genre of cinema as a free-flowing artistic canvas.


CeCe Rohwedder (North Dakota State University): The Men in their Lives: Female Writers of the Harlem Renaissance Speak.

Though still under-represented, during the time of the Harlem Renaissance, black women’s voices were finally heard through the writings of black women authors.

The protagonists in most of their works are all women, but the writers also speak about the men in the characters’ lives. With the power of the fictional voice, then, how do the authors speak when it comes to men? How do they portray them? What do they say about them, and what do they say to them? Through the freedom that the pen endows, what do these daring, honest, groundbreaking black women say about men, white and black?

The themes in works by Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Georgia Douglas Johnson, among others, differ, but they all share a commonality. The power, strength, and courage are attributed to the women, and their men are shown to be weak, indecisive, passive, submissive, self-centered, domineering, abusive, ineffective, or a combination thereof. The writers speak through their characters, on behalf of the black women of their time. Speaking of the men in their lives, they dare show how in their struggle for freedom, acceptance, and equality in both a white- and a male-dominated world, black women received no help, no support, and no respect from any one, not even the men of their own race. In fact, they have had to overcome the hurdles their men have also imposed on them, thus sharing in the responsibility of making black woman “the mule of the world.”

Claudia Routon (University of North Dakota): Underworld Exile and Transformation in La Reina del Sur by Arturo Pérez-Reverte.


Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s novel, La Reina del Sur (2002), describes twenty-first century space as elastic, fractured, and post-metropolis. Edward W. Soja names this phenomenon Exopolis in his examination of Los Angeles. My study uses Soja’s model to describe the Southern coast of Spain, Gibraltar (the Rock and the Strait) and the coastal towns of North Africa as a network of cities, villages, ports, beaches, and waters bleeding into each other, blurring national and continental borders, ultimately creating a geography that is forever shifting. Illegal traffic impacts economic structures, political alliances, immigration, and contraband and posits a metaphor for the underworld as a method of subversion and a space for personal re-invention. Not only is the detective-reporter-narrator simultaneously unravelling and reconstructing Teresa Mendoza’s story, he is travelling the world to do so. What he discovers and reconstructs is a Mexican-born woman who has forged a self that accommodates post-modern instability by constant transformation. She is both present and absent, substantial and dissolving. She is woman, immigrant, mestiza, and as other, she colonizes the colonizer through narcotics and the media.