The Charged Strolls of the Brown Flâneuse in Sandra Cisneros's “The House on Mango Street”

Abstract

This essay shifts the perspective oí flânerie from the European metropolis and the white flâneur, and suggests that the protagonist of Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street can be categorized as a flâneuse through her fluid stroll in a Chicagoan barrio. Cisneros's novel introduces re-conceptualizations of flânerie by presenting a Chicana stroller whose Odyssey comes across additional social, cultural, and economic afflictions particular to the inner city. Her flânerie falls into three main configurations: mapping ethnicity, mapping gendered spaces, and mapping identity. The analysis is anchored by Walter Benjamin's work on flânerie and recent revisions of the term in the works of Keith Tester and Anne Friedberg.