<b>"Don´t Cry for me Ireland - Irish Women´s Voices from Argentina"</b><br>

• Main Author: Laura P. Z. Izarra
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina 2010-03-01
• Series: Ilha do Desterro
• Subjects: irish women diaspora; nineteenth-century women diasporic writings; memoirs
• Online Access: https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/desterro/article/view/18310

In the South American diaspora space, language and culture are the constituent elements of the process of defamiliarization. Critical issues of gender and a politics of nostalgia are interrelated with the identity politics generated by the tension of being/becoming and belonging. Avtar Brah affirms that the concept of diaspora “places the discourse of ‘home’ and ‘dispersion’ in creative tension”. Moreover, if this problematic is integral to the diasporic condition (Brah 1996. 192-193) I will demonstrate that nineteenth-century Irish women migration to Argentina provides paradoxical writings that disclose the swinging movement of the pendulum between opacity, complexity and equivocal positions in the formation of a diasporic identity. Thus, three different kinds of narratives by Irish women immigrants will be analysed in a comparative way: Marion Mulhall’s travel writing Between the Amazon and Andes (1881), the memories of Barbara Peart in Tia Barbarita (1932), and an autobiographical novel by Kathleen Nevin, You’ll never go back (1946). Following some theoretical issues raised by Breda Gray in Women and the Irish Diaspora (2004) and by Eric Landowski in Presenças do Outro (2002) I will deconstruct the rhetoric of the quotidian to highlight discursive elements that would prove how and why these women achieved the paradoxical status of “controlled independence” (Gray 2004) or were positioned as either “other” or “going native”.