Rereading European Cultural Heritage in Latin American Women Writers’ Travel Literature of the early 20th century: contrasting testimonies to build inclusive historical discourses

Cultural heritage is a sociocultural discursive construction, embedded in power relationships, which tends towards the selective preservation of historical memory and the support of a particular reading of History.

However, History is multivocal and to achieve egalitarian societies where identity diversity is respected, it is necessary to deconstruct the hegemonic historical discourse including different narratives from the perspective of otherness.

REWIND proposes to study how historical discourses around European Cultural Heritage (ECH) have been constructed using travel literature written by Latin American women authors from the early 20th century.

As such, non-European women, committed to feminist movements and who claimed miscegenation, become historical agents and cultural mediators that counteract a Eurocentric and patriarchal historical discourse.

Thus, it is not about adding womens testimony, but about rereading historical narratives about heritage in order to protect and transfer a cultural legacy that reflects the memories and subjectivities of a diverse society.

REWIND is based on Foucaults theories of discursive formations, since it analyses the elements of the ECH that authors highlight in their travels and descriptions from both the physical and the emotional point of view.

Firstly, using Digital Humanities approaches based on Geographic Information Systems, the project will identify and locate ECH items.

Secondly, REWIND will apply sentiment analysis techniques to recognise the impressions that ECH provokes in women travellers.

And, finally, the information offered by travel guides and official documentation of cultural institutions will be contrasted with the data of travel literature applying semantic technologies and the decolonial gender theory.

So, through this innovative methodology, REWIND will give voice to a silenced testimony, recovering part of the collective memory and offering new ways of interacting with the past in the present.