Private (Brown) Eyes: Ethnicity, Genre and Gender in Crime Fiction in the Gloria Damasco novels and the Chicanos Comic Series

The representation of women in crime fiction has traditionally been a complicated one. Consistently forced into secondary characters (assistants, girlfriends, or damsels in distress) the most active role a female character could aspire to was that of the femme fatale, a pit of perdition, an unwelcome distraction for a man looking for truth and justice. This traditional approach to the genre has been challenged in the last decades by women acting as detectives, trusted with solving their cases in a hostile male world. Similarly, the traditional white male protagonist has been contested by fictions where ethnic minorities are not just consigned to the criminal world, but where detectives are members of ethnic groups, and can use their knowledge of the community to solve the case. This essay focuses on the crossroads of ethnic and women’s detective fiction, specifically the Gloria Damasco series by Chicana writer Lucha Corpi and the graphic novel Chicanos (Trillo and Risso, 1996). Both protagonists (Gloria Damasco, a Chicana clairvoyant detective, and “poor, ugly, and a detective” Alejandrina Yolanda Jalisco) must face both the dangers of investigating criminal cases and discrimination in their professional surroundings due to their gender and ethnicity. By contrasting these texts, the essay elucidates the importance of specific cultural products, their connection to (and defiance of) canonical forms of the genre, and their rejection of generic and gender expectations.

Regionalismos léxicos y paremiológicos en la narrativa de Jorge Amado: aspectos sociolingüístico y antropológico

The work of Jorge Amado collects and processes relevant aspects of Brazilian miscegenation and allows discussion on various issues relating to the cultural productions of the country. If on the one hand the racial mixture can be seen as the result of an harmonious process, as is traditional Brazilian thought that comes from XVIII century, on the other hand it portrays the customs of Bahian society at different times, mixing the humorous tone to the optimistic view of the world. As for the miscegenation, reality of the Bahian people, as of all Brazil, can also be analyzed in their heterogeneity, for whom observes that, in the end, the crossing of economic, social and cultural boundaries have been, in many cases, quite problematic. The aim of this work is to make a journey into reality, past and present in Brazil, to understand the lexical regionalisms present in each work; it is important to understand the history of slavery, indigenous groups and the relation that the white man had with this world. All that enormous database of spoken language (a true linguistic laboratory) served and is serving to describe the Portuguese in Brazil in its regional, ethnic and social varieties. (Bagno, 2011: 104-105) I analyze here two works by Jorge Amado, Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon: Chronicle of an Inner City and Tieta of Agreste, which constitute the corpus of this work, which will consist in detecting an extensive glossary and the collection thereof as well as paremiological regionalisms; phrases or expressions corresponding to a region and time of Brazil...