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Forms of Dictatorship examines novels that depict the historical reality of dictatorship and exploit dictatorship as a literary trope.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: Dictating Narrative Power
- Chapter 2: The Borderlands of Authoritarianism
- Chapter 3: The Floating Dictatorship
- Chapter 4: Plotting Justice
- Chapter 5: The Fall of the Patriarchs
- Coda
- Works Cited
About the author
Jennifer Harford Vargas is an Associate Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College.
Summary
An intra-ethnic study of Latina/o fiction written in the United States from the early 1990s to the present, Forms of Dictatorship examines novels that depict the historical reality of dictatorship and exploit dictatorship as a literary trope. This literature constitutes a new sub-genre of Latina/o fiction, which the author calls the Latina/o dictatorship novel. The book illuminates Latina/os' central contributions to the literary history of the dictatorship novel by analyzing how Latina/o writers with national origin roots in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central and South America imaginatively represent authoritarianism. The novels collectively generate what Harford Vargas terms a "Latina/o counter-dictatorial imaginary" that positions authoritarianism on a continuum of domination alongside imperialism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, neoliberalism, and border militarization. Focusing on novels by writers such as Junot Díaz, Héctor Tobar, Cristina García, Salvador Plascencia, and Francisco Goldman, the book reveals how Latina/o dictatorship novels foreground more ubiquitous modes of oppression to indict Latin American dictatorships, U.S. imperialism, and structural discrimination in the U.S., as well as repressive hierarchies of power in general. Harford Vargas simultaneously utilizes formalist analysis to investigate how Latina/o writers mobilize the genre of the novel and formal techniques such as footnotes, focalization, emplotment, and metafiction to depict dictatorial structures and relations. In building on narrative theories of character, plot, temporality, and perspective, Harford Vargas explores how the Latina/o dictatorship novel stages power dynamics. Forms of Dictatorship thus queries the relationship between different forms of power and the power of narrative form --- that is, between various instantiations of repressive power structures and the ways in which different narrative structures can reproduce and resist repressive power.
Additional text
Elegantly written, with a series of striking analyses, Forms of Dictatorship draws together Latin American critical history of the dictatorship novel and US Latino/a novels about authoritarian regimes. Vargas' attention to formal innovation, combined with her breadth of knowledge of the literature of the Américas, makes Forms of Dictatorship a crucial contribution to the study of contemporary literature.
