Dictating forms : authoritarian power in the Latina/o novel
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- In "Dictating Forms: Authoritarian Power in the Latina/o Novel, " I identify an emerging corpus of literature by contemporary Latina and Latino writers who, I contend, are using the resources of the novel to articulate intersecting connections between authoritarianism, imperialism, and racism in the Américas. Reading narrative forms as abstractions of social relations, I argue that this new generation of writers is extending the formal and geo-political contours of the Latin American dictatorship novel. The Latin American dictatorship novel represents authoritarian regimes headed by dictators, caudillos, or military juntas in Latin America. Major studies of the tradition theorize the seminal novels published by the 1970s Boom generation while scholarship on contemporary post-dictatorship literary production concentrates heavily on the Southern Cone and Hispaniola. My dissertation extends this body of scholarly work by focusing on U.S. based writers including Junot Díaz ("The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"), Salvador Plascencia ("The People of Paper"), Edwidge Danticat ("The Farming of Bones"), and Héctor Tobar ("The Tattooed Soldier"). I demonstrate how representations of overlapping geographies and histories in these novels reveal continuities between dictatorial structures of power in the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, and the United States. I further illuminate how particular formal devices such as parodic characterization, generic mixture, footnotes, rumor, and metafiction represent imaginary contestations of socio-political domination. By drawing on their community's experiences of dictatorship and their own experiences as racialized minorities in the United States, these writers are generating a transAmerican counter-dictatorial imaginary, thereby developing a new idiom for depicting and theorizing power in Latino and Diasporic Caribbean literature.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2011 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Harford Vargas, Jennifer Marie |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, English Department |
| Primary advisor | Moya, Paula M. L |
| Thesis advisor | Moya, Paula M. L |
| Thesis advisor | Elam, Michele |
| Thesis advisor | Saldívar, José David |
| Thesis advisor | Saldívar, Ramón |
| Advisor | Elam, Michele |
| Advisor | Saldívar, José David |
| Advisor | Saldívar, Ramón |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Jennifer Marie Harford Vargas. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of English. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2011. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2011 by Jennifer Marie Harford Vargas
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