Columbus, Claudette Kemper

About the author: Claudette Kemper Columbus received her PhD in literature from The University of Pennsylvania. She is currently a Professor Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and in 2001 was Distinguished Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru for a series of lectures on the role of narrative in fiction and anthropology. She has published many articles and another book, Mythological Consciousness and the Future: José María Arguedas (Peter Lang, 1986).

Verbal Autobiographies of Contemporary Peruvian Women

2003 0-7734-6834-X
These pieces include interviews across the Peruvian human scale and landscape: freed prisoners and police women, feminists and traditionalists, servants and human rights lawyers, doctors and market women, black, native American, mestizos, and whites. The collection offers English speaking readers a crosscut of a variety of personalities as well as the authentic flavor of various language uses. Most of the interviewed women differ in their own use of language from one another, according to walk of life, background, personality. The study seeks to convey their liveliness both in their language and in their resilience despite tremendously adverse conditions.