Literature and Cultural Identity

Abstract

It is often said that literature not only represents the cultural identity of the community from which it emerges, but also literature itself creates identity. We believe that the correlation literature-identity, in order to become productive in literary and cultural terminology, has to be inscribed in a political horizon of comprehension; by doing this so long as the claim of identity and, above all, the claim for a textual literary practice that present identity, problems would not be but, in the end, a political practice of visibility that implies defying ideologies and discourse complacence with "official" stereotypes and with the radical negation of the subaltern subject from instances of domination. We begin from the suposition that identifying effects, belonging to literature (or that can be reclaimed by literature), have to do more with non-identity than with identity, with the absent and the possible aspects that it is materialized as at "presence" through literary memory or imagination that construct the "other history of history".