La subversión del discurso orientalista en <em>Dijo el camaleón</em> de María Victoria García

Abstract

This paper examines how Moroccan reality is represented in the work Dijo el camaleón, by Mexican author María Victoria García. Using an eclectic methodology, the paper presents and analyzes some of the narrative strategies the writer uses in her subversion of the usual postulates of highly eurocentric, classical Orientalist discourse, attempting to present a new model of contextualized Spanish American narrative in the East. It also seeks to demonstrate how key elements in the work, such as linguistic variations, semantic alterations and the destabilization of historiographic myths about Moroccan reality, enable the Mexican author, first, to produce a discourse characterized by hybridity and, second, to bring about a deorientalization of the writing. The result is a narrative model that celebrates the encounter between Eastern-Moroccan alterity and Mexican sameness and furthers a more horizontal Orientalist representation that seeks to overcome the preju- diced vertical and ethnocentric paradigm frequently found in Orientalist writings.