Carmen Boullosa’s <i>Texas: The Great Theft</i> and the Hemispheric Legacies of White Women Writers of the Nineteenth-Century South

Abstract In Carmen Boullosa’s novel Texas: The Great Theft (2013), nineteenth-century US literary culture makes a notable entrance through characters based on US authors or works, including a quartet of US Southern white women writers. Boullosa uses these characters, based on identifiable authors, to centrally situate US Southern women writers in the hemispheric, discursive spread of empire occurring in nineteenth-century borderland conflicts. As a Mexican writer who has commented on women writers’ roles in shaping Mexican literary traditions, Boullosa recognizes that nineteenth-century US women writers also helped shape the hemispheric traditions in which she writes as a contemporary feminist Mexican novelist. Boullosa shows in Texas: The Great Theft how US Southern white women authors are predecessors with whom all hemispheric producers of literature, and the scholars who study them, must reckon. Carrying out a simultaneous act of literary recovery and critique, Boullosa models one way to ethically and productively engage with racist white women writers in the US South’s past. A living Mexican novelist thus models an insightful and productive pathway for scholars in nineteenth-century US literary studies to engage with US Southern white women writers whose influence and cultural work continue to require confrontation.