Abstract
In So Far from God, Chicana author Ana Castillo focuses on the consequences of the colonial wound theorized by Gloria Anzaldúa in Bordernalds/La Frontera. Following the lives of four young Chicana women and their resourceful mother Sofi, Castillo’s novel invites an interventionist reading of US multiculturalism. A country that prides itself on its multicultural identity and continues to oppress its minority groups through political, economic and symbolic violence has failed to live up to the promise of the dream of “liberty and justice for all”. Adopting various strategies of survival in the modern world, from failed assimilation to open rebellion against the phallogocentric norm, the novel’s female characters both fall victim to the continuing legacy of coloniality/modernity and struggle to build a viable alternative to their invisibility within the dominant culture. The paper demonstrates how Castillo appropriates the feminine in her decolonial use of Christian spirituality to endow her Chicana characters with agency. Drawing strength from the reintegrated feminine principle, Sofi and her Chicana comadres are capable of constructing a viable vision of a new world across class, race, and gender differences. The feminist utopia imagined in the pages of So Far from God is curiously reminiscent of the Zapatistas’ dream of “a world in which many worlds fit”.
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Notes
- 1.
The sophiology of Sergey Bulgakov, Nicolai Berdyaev, and Vladimir Solovyov are cases in point.
- 2.
In 1958 in his private journals Merton recorded several dreams about a lovely Jewish girl whose name was Proverb. He recognized in her the Wisdom figure of the bible and several years later, while in hospital, he was taken care of by a young nurse who looked exactly like the Proverb of his dreams. Merton developed a deep attachment to the nurse and this relationship helped him heal the emotional traumas of his childhood (Cunningham, 1996, pp. 176-17, 182; Daggy, 1998, pp. 243–329).
- 3.
In Greek philosophos means a lover of wisdom.
- 4.
See, e.g., Mignolo, (2011, pp. 213–251).
- 5.
- 6.
This idea is most fully developed in Mignolo (2011).
- 7.
For instance, Catherine of Siena insisted that pope Gregory XI return from Avignon to Rome.
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Poks, M. (2017). The House Sofi Built: Critique of Multiculturalism and Christian Patriarchy in Ana Castillo’s So Far from God . In: Mydla, J., Poks, M., Drong, L. (eds) Multiculturalism, Multilingualism and the Self: Literature and Culture Studies. Second Language Learning and Teaching(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61049-8_5
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