Translating History into Herstories: Utopian Impulses in the Dystopian Worlds of Christa Wolf and Carmen Boullosa

Abstract

The East German writer Christa Wolf and the Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa translate gendered East–West relations of the past into today’s world by writing imaginary lives for historical and mythological women from countries, cultures, and eras far removed from their own. Wolf’s Cassandra (Kassandra: Erzählung, 1983) and Boullosa’s Cleopatra Dismounts (De un salto descabalga la reina, 2000) construct alternative histories for these two legendary figures in order to critique their heroines’ and their own societies, and to envision alternative models of subjectivity and forms of relating for their readers. Both writers incorporate postmodern literary techniques of self-reflexive narration, intertextual references, and parody to foreground the fictionality of their texts and question literary and historical representation. At the same time, Wolf and Boullosa exhibit a utopian impulse by creating within their texts a feminist space beyond patriarchal culture through which their protagonists imagine possibilities that have not yet been realized in the existing world. This paper explores how two authors from different national, political, and linguistic contexts develop a critical-utopian view of “othered” women in order to address gendered violence, war, and injustice in and beyond their own historical moments.