CLASSIFYING, NAMING AND COLONIZING: THE EUROPEAN COLONIZER AND THE OTHER IN CLARICE LISPECTOR’S SHORT STORY

Abstract

This article aims to interpret, from a critical-literary perspective, the white man's need to name, classify, and colonize, based on Clarice Lispector’s short story “The Smallest Woman in the World”, published in 1959. The narrative, through a third-person narrator, reveals the gaze of the colonizer and of French society at the time, exposing acts of appropriation that are typical of colonial processes. Through the character Little Flower, the story constructs the colonized subject as inferior—someone observed under the lens of curiosity and identity reduction. Upon being discovered, measured, and named by a European explorer, the character ceases to be the subject of her own story and begins to exist only through the gaze and language of the other. The tale highlights how the imposition of language upon the body and culture of the colonized functions as a mechanism of silencing and symbolic domination. With subtlety and irony, Lispector deconstructs the seemingly scientific and neutral discourse of exploration, exposing its ethical and political implications and the violence embedded in the act of naming. The narrative thus invites readers to reflect on how language, knowledge, and power intertwine in the processes of colonization and erasure of the other. In this context, naming is not an act of recognition, but a mechanism of control and suppression of alterity. The story reveals the symbolic strategies of power that permeate colonial discourse and the subtleties of violence inscribed in the language and gaze of those who observe the other from a place of superiority.