Tessa Morrison (SAS) - 2015-16 Students
tessa.morrison@postgrad.sas.ac.uk

Writing (from the outside: exile, marginality and identity in the works of Alicia Kozameh, Reina Roffé and Nora Strejilevich

In Space, Place and Gender (1994), Doreen Massey wrote: ‘the identity of a place does not derive from some internalized history. It derives […] from the specificity of its interactions with “the outside”’. My research will reframe this insight by taking a comparative approach to the work of three contemporary Jewish-Argentine women writers, Alicia Kozameh, Reina Roffé and Nora Strejilevich, who have lived in exile since the 1980s. It will explore the dialectics of space in their works: the interplay of internalized repressive and traumatic histories on the one hand and the experiences of liberation through marginality and exile on the other. I will draw on feminist literary discourse developed by the writers themselves and their contemporaries, rather than imposing theories proceeding from a European and North American context. By deviating from the traditional canons of écriture féminine, this project constitutes a timely, innovative contribution to the field.