María Antonia, esclava y músico: La traza de un rostro borrado por/para la literatura chilena

Abstract

This proposal is based on the idea of leaving and maintaining open the difference of the dehumanized, spectral other. To draw up the face of a ghost that rambles quietly-a face erased from a history that seemed evermore whitewashed, our history-allowing this spectral one to become more and more clear so we can see its specificities, successes and defeats. To exert the memory, says Nelly Richard in the prologue of Policies and Aesthetic as Memory, serves to expose those maneuvers of erasure that make up forgetfulness and indifference. In this way, Maria Antonia Palacios, black slave to the service of Gertrudis Palacios during the XVIIIth century, allows us to enter a space of the Chilean colonial period that is practically unknown. A story that very intuitively we will be working as the central axis of a literature that forgot a protagonist and, in its defect, reduced it to a secondary role in the national scene