Female Subjectivity and Crossed Out Female in Alfredo Bryce Echenique’s Don’t expect me in April

Abstract

Drawing from semiotics, we intend to question the indigenous identity discourse through two representations of women, personages of the fiction, both servants in Lima in Alfredo Bryce Echenique’s novel Don’t Expect Me in April (1995). Revolving on gender theories as well as on the course of history, the identity discussion points towards a submission versus subversion dialectic. The discourse of the “Marginalized other” comes to correlate the stereotyped representation of the indigenous woman physically humiliated which, on a symbolic level, is a sign of cultural violence against indigenous peoples in the Americas. In contrast, we see the emergence of another discourse rehabiliting the indigenous woman. And since it originated right in the mutating Lima of the fifties, through a process called ‘the cholificación’ it ends up being a layer of the cultural colonial subject.