SOURCE: Kantaris, Elia. “The Politics of Desire: Alienation and Identity in the Work of Marta Traba and Cristina Peri Rossi.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 25, no. 3 (July 1989): 248–64.

In the following essay, Kantaris argues that both the work of Marta Traba and Peri Rossi deal with the mechanisms of dictatorship, particularly the function of alienation and group identity.

In an essay entitled “Garcia Márquez y el arte del reportaje: de Lukács al post-boom”¹, the (exiled) Paraguayan critic Juan Manuel Marcos describes how the military dictatorships which sprung up in the “Cono Sur” of South America during the 1970s provoked a decisive change of direction in much of the literature of the subcontinent. The mass expulsion of thousands of intellectuals from Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, coupled with the rigorous, centralising control exercised by the military in all areas of public communication, created the hostile conditions in which...