Ten days before the 1968 Olympic Games, the Mexican Government violently repressed a massive Student Movement as a result of its unwillingness to negotiate with social sectors that had been adversely affected by the modernization process of the Mexican Miracle. After the repression, the government projected an image of stability and progress under the so called apertura democrática. Nonetheless during the decade of the seventies, Mexican citizens experienced state violence, and a counterinsurgency war known as the Dirty War, in which subversive groups who were considered dangerous for the National Security university students and professors, campesinos, and guerilla fighters were systematically targeted. Narrativas marginales y guerra sucia en México is framed between two grassroots social movements that represent watershed events in Mexicos political life: the Student Movement of 1968, and the Zapatista guerrilla uprising in 1994. This dissertation addresses the issues of political marginality, state violence, representation of torture and political imprisonment, construction of official history, and individual and collective memory. To shed light on the issue of political imprisonment, I analyze the novel ¿Por qué no dijiste todo?, and the prison dairy Los diques del tiempo by Salvador Castañeda, as well as the political prisoners anthology Sobreviviremos al hielo by Manuel Anzaldo and David Zaragoza. In discussing the construction of official history, and the role of memory I analyze the novels Pretexta by Federico Campbell, and Muertes de Aurora by Gerardo de la Torre. These texts were published in the decade of the eighties as fiction. Nonetheless, they can be consider marginal for several reasons: 1) some of these writers were guerrilla fighters and not intellectuals, therefore they had to assault the lettered city (dominant discourses and state cultural institutions) in finding an in-between space (Silvano Santiago); 2) the novels of Campbell and de la Torre are not considered canonical, and have been ignored, even though both these writers belong to the lettered city; 3) all texts expose the mechanisms of authoritarian power, and the contradictions of representation, give voice to marginal subjectivities, and reveal alternatives to official history.

This dissertation arises from the hypothesis that the perspective of indigenism is indispensable as a guiding thread in the reading of a variety of Bolivian literary expressions, now impacted by formulas of literature written in Spanish as well as by modern and postmodern urban culture. There are two main strands that are woven into this reading: one that works to weave in detail each of the works chosen; the other that searches to intertwine the connections that unite those different works, holding in perspective, in both strands, a place of contact between basically the two cultures: Andean indigenous and Westernized. It affirms that both the canonical indigenous positions as well as the proposals of mestizaje that operate by omission of the indigenous make themselves apparent in two of the most important novels of the Bolivian literary historiography: Juan de la Rosa (1885) y Raza de bronce (1919). The first operates through omission of the indigenous by erasing the Indian from the novelistic epic; the second, by superimposing on the Indian vision a series of mediations that end up blurring that vision in front of the reader, allowing only the narrators view. Therefore, both function around an authoritarian narrator and operate in a similar fashion both discursively and ideologically regarding the Indian. Instead, Yanakuna (1952), which is considered in general as part of orthodox indigenism and a mere repetition of its principles and denunciations, denotes important breaks in relation to the two aforementioned works and to other novels of orthodox indigenism. In it, the interweaving of literature and politics marks an enrichment of the discourse. Counter-representational or de-representational postures and strategies of reversion are achieved through actively discordant textualities in relation to earlier classical indigenist propositions in the four other narratives under study: Manchay Puytu, el amor que quiso ocultar dios (1977); Manuel y Fortunato: una picaresca andina (1997); Chojcho con audio de rock psshado (1993) and Cuando Sara Chura despierte (2003). These works offer an other way of looking that makes possible the translation of diversity.

"CONFLICT, HEGEMONY AND DEPENDENT NATIONALISM IN COLOMBIA 2002-2008: BETWEEN GOVERNMENTAL COMMUNICATION AND FICTIONALIZED TELEVISION NEWS" Fabio López de la Roche, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2009 This dissertation explores two key components in the contemporary production of hegemony in Colombia: presidential discourse and television news narratives. Analyzing the Álvaro Uribe Vélez administrations policy of democratic security and its communications, the author highlights its articulation with an authoritarian and regressive patriotic presidential discourse, which attempts to re-narrate the Colombian history of the last fifty years by turning guerrilla movements, especially FARC, into a scapegoat for all national and local problems. Appealing to the populations feelings of fear and hatred of the FARC (a result of its practice of kidnapping), President Uribe Vélez succeeded in reorienting the affective attention of Colombian public opinion against that guerrilla movement. The FARC, conceived of as the major public enemy, has thus contributed to uniting the government and population around a right-wing political project. The author also points out the ambiguous nature of Uribe Vélezs nationalism, characterized by the presence of traditionalist Colombian symbols and values and by its unconditional subordination to the George W. Bush administrations hemispheric policy. The dissertation includes a case study of the representation in the television news program Noticias Caracol of the January 11, 2008 liberation of Clara Rojas and Consuelo González, two Colombian hostages kidnapped by the FARC guerrilla group. The analysis allows the author to address questions of both pluralism and homogeneity in television news, the relationships between hegemony, preferred readings, the realistic presence of fiction and dramatic strategies in the news, and the use of audiences feelings about the phenomenon of kidnapping in manufacturing television stories. The dissertation represents an interdisciplinary research project inscribed among the fields of communication studies, journalism studies, critical analysis of discourse, narratologic inquiry, and political studies. The author uses a wide variety of sources: television news broadcasts; personal field notes of analysis of television news programs; journalistic reports on the Colombian conflict; newspapers; magazines; academic journals; and electronic magazine and newspaper articles. The dissertation is addressed to specialists as well to a wider public interested in the relationships between mass media discourse, hegemony, and political culture.

In my dissertation, I trace the representation of drug use, globalization, social marginality, and violence in the two well-known films by the Colombian director Víctor Gaviria. My approach is framed by Walter Benjamins critical-theoretical work on the notions of experience and intoxication, Gilles Deleuzes idea of double becoming, and Giorgio Agambens concept of bare life. I am also concerned with what might be called the ethical dimension that is inherent in Gavirias strategy (the use of natural actors, the question of pornomiseria, etc.). These films involve what I call the paradox of drug euphoria, this paradox, I argue, means that for those whose existence have become bare life, in Agambens sense of the term, using drugs is an opportunity to reassert their lives. Drugs help the central characters in Gavirias films create a collective experience and give value to themselves and their social environments. On the other hand, global accumulation, deterritorialization (the specter of Medellín as a kind of chaotic postmodern megalopolis), and frenetic stimulation are also effects of drugs, once productive of bare life." These destructive effects are interrupted by the utopian desire of the characters in the films, who are also real people, not only actors representing the urban poor. However, these fleeting moments of utopian plenitudenot unlike what Benjamin meant by illuminations are interrupted in turn by the force of capitalist deterritorialization and dehumanization. Gavirias films exist in and portray the dialectic relation between these two forces. In short, I develop the paradox of euphoria into a critique of contemporary society and a new understanding of collective experience.

This dissertation explores the process that drives Bartolomé de Las Casas from his early support for introducing black slaves in the West Indies to his late and strong criticism of the Portuguese slave trade in the third volume of The History of the Indies, and his regret for his early support of slave trafficking. Seeking to move beyond the traditional apologetic approach, our argument proceeds by a close genealogical reading of all of Las Casas known writings on the question of slavery. Our hypothesis is that from a representation that presents African slaves as a necessary commodity for the colonization of the New World, Las Casas will move toward a point of view according to which black slaves are similar to the indigenous population that he had defended in many of his works. However, this attempt to equate the black slaves with the indigenous population remains unresolved in Las Casas work. In his last writings, Las Casas comes to think of both slavery and slave population itself as a plaga. We connect Las Casas texts with (1) the early laws proposed by the Spanish authorities regarding black slaves, (2) the attempts of some Portuguese and Spanish chroniclers and intellectuals to justify slavery, as well as some early criticisms of the enslavement of Africans, and (3) the defense of the indigenous population that Las Casas proposes and develops. Our research allows the recognition of an early and decisive moment in the debate about slavery in the Iberian world. By following Las Casas texts about black slavery in the Indies, we can trace the basic arguments of both (1) discourses that justify and encourage black slavery, and (2) discourses that confront and criticize the Atlantic slave trade from its very beginning. Our conclusion is that the origins but also the aporias of an abolitionist position in the Iberian Atlantic pre-dating by almost a century and a half Northern European abolitionism are to be found in Las Casas.

This dissertation aims to compare and contrast an aspect of the fin-de-siècle literature and history of anti-imperialism in Cuba and the Philippines. I focus my study on what may be the most prominent authors of the two contexts: José Martí (1853-1895) and José Rizal (1861-1896). Although scholars such as Benedict Anderson and Leopoldo Zea have already noted the obvious relations between Martí and Rizal, their anti-imperial texts have not been systematically compared. Caught between the two empires (Spain and the United States), their projects were equally overwhelming: while studying the history of the failed independence movement in their respective colonies, they attempted to transform the dilemmas of imperial culture into the building blocks for national liberation. Based on this historico-political premise, my study attempts to explore how Martí and Rizal employ different literary forms to articulate their discourse of protest and to what extent their political writings create the conditions of possibility for a transnational, inter-colonial form of resistance against imperial domination. One of the central contentions of this dissertation is that the two writers' anti-imperial texts construct the conceptual framework for the idea of what I call "global resistance." By this, I mean to indicate the ways in which Cubans and Filipinos shared certain anti-colonial ideas and struggles against common opponents in the nineteenth century. Through literary analysis and historical study, I intend to examine both the possibilities and the limits of global resistance. The project involves diverse cultural points of reference, ranging from the Caribbean to Asia and seeking to participate in the ongoing debate within the field of Trans-Pacific Studies.

This work investigates the representation of domestic servants within mid-twentieth century novels of female development, which are written by middle class women. The comparison is between the following authors: Rosario Castellanos from Mexico, Jean Rhys from the West Indies, and Clarice Lispector from Brazil. Postcolonial women writers have needed to tackle hegemonic structures within their own fiction, as they confront the privilege of the modern writing subject who frames herself in opposition to the silence of colonized female characters. Working to rewrite history, and to develop texts that speak from the margins, there is a conscious effort to incorporate subaltern voices into their narratives. Nevertheless, anxiety arises within those texts of middle-class writers who are preoccupied with the management of differences, stemming from a realization that in fact there is no place within the privileged writing subjects text from which the subaltern can actually speak. Therefore the authors struggle to write within a masculine-centered literary tradition that privileges certain voices over others, while at the same time recognizing their complicity with that system that works through exclusions. While the servant is silenced, the writing also shields her from being appropriated and defined by the mistress who needs her as a caregiver while she pursues a personal growth and awakening. That is, silences are used to form a protective space in which the marginalized woman cannot be merely the embodiment of alterity for the narrators quest for subjectivity. An element of shame is therefore revealed by means of an implied author, which reminds them that they are expressing an ideal that they themselves have not lived up to. The marginal character becomes a negative element that points to the inability of the narrative to adequately represent her. It questions the model of solidarity through shared oppression that readings of womens and postcolonial writings often take, suggesting that new forms of community need to be imagined that take into account inequalities and injustices between women.

My project deals primarily with connections and conflicts between the three institutions that formed Mexicos model of national identity; these institutions are the State, the Church and literature. Since the processes of the conquest and colony almost cast away the pre-Columbian religious and cultural epistemological worldviews, we can say that the Mexican nation was actually established on an unprecedented foundation of Catholic faith, the Spanish language and imperial power. The later has been historically re-issued with every political regime that has governed Mexico, from the nineteenth century dictatorships to the long-lasting regime of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The project begins analyzing literary texts from the first half of the twentieth century, in which writers critique of the State and the Church aims to uncover the homogeneous identity model these institutions were trying to establish in Mexico. However, I argue that the literature of this period, even with its lucid historical review, was a cultural project in which the religious beliefs of the people were condemned to an ignominious place in regard to social and political life in Mexico. The extreme secularization implicit in their discourses made of religiosity a synonym for alienation, ignorance and superstition. In the last decades, popular religion along with reinforced pre-Hispanic rituals have shown how religion, in a wider sense, can be a way to repair the damaged identity of Mexican believers. The second part of the dissertations works with marginal literary representations from Mayan writers to popular testimonies where the faith and spiritual beliefs are part of a complex rearticulation of a moral agency formerly dismissed by the hegemonic cultural projects of the State and the Church. My analysis is focused in how these texts confront institutional discourses to create a space at the border of the national identity model, which still try to embrace a dogmatic Catholicism, on the one hand, and the anachronism of the Revolution period on the other.

This dissertation examines the relationship between literary writing and geographical discourse in Domingo Faustino Sarmientos Facundo: Civilización y barbarie (Argentina, 1845), Euclides da Cunhas Os Sertões (Brazil, 1902), and Rómulo Gallegoss Doña Bárbara (Venezuela, 1929). These narratives are often read as locating their authority in the discourse of science or within the didactic lessons of the national allegory. I contend that both readings simplify the legacies of these works and elide the significance behind the form coupled with their content. To fully understand the politics of these mixed forms, we must move from the general (empiricist science) to the particular (geographical discourse). I defend this move by demonstrating that Sarmiento, Cunha, and Gallegos emerge as literary figures alongside, and even participate in, the formation of politically oriented geographical institutions; between 1833 and 1910 over fifty geographical societies appear across the Americas, first in Mexico and later in Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela. This simultaneity between literary writing and institutional formation points to an understudied alignment between literature, geography, and politics in Latin America. I illustrate that, through a host of literary devices (e.g. metaphor, anaphora, alliteration, etc.), these writers give form to a consolidated nation-state by constructing a unifiedor potentially unify-ablegeographic space. By tracing how their narratives are informed by and in dialogue with previous non-Latin American land treatises (by, for example, Alexander von Humboldt, Henry Thomas Buckle, and Agustín Codazzi), I argue for the centrality of geographical discourse in literary, cultural, and social analysis. This project contributes to several conversations in the field, including the discourse of Eurocentrism, the issue of Amerindian versus Occidental epistemology, and the interconnectedness of race, inequality, and land distribution.

This dissertation examines counter-narratives of landscape in Bolivia, Colombia and Peru considering two moments of crisis and political discontent: 1929 and 1989. The main purpose is to understand how these counter-narratives invalidate the exhaustion of the notion landscape as studied by metropolitan scholars such as Danis E. Cosgrove and M.J.T Mitchell. Inspired by Peruvian Gamaliel Churata and British English John Berger, this study initially enters in dialogue with the deconstruction of the landscape and then, prioritizing current trends, locates the conflictive configurations and coexistence of counter-landscapes that politically empower alterity. A specific examination of the last-named scenario takes place along four ashyncronic case-studies or "acts". The first analyzes the Peruvian avant-garde publication referred as the 'journal with four names' (1926-7) where Magda Portal, among others, alters the dominant landscape in order to politically empower Lima's peripheries. The second investigates the avant-garde Colombian artist Pedro Nel Gomez's mural artwork, within the context of the indigenist group "Los Bachués", and how his widely criticized ugliness turns into defiance of cultural harmony and hegemonic perceptions of the landscape. The third act examines Los días azules (1985) by the Colombian writer Fernando Vallejo in which the landscape disrupts the physical sequence of the landscape through the act of remembering. Finally, the fourth act studies Blanca Wiethüchter's poem Madera viva y árbol difunto (1982), in order to explain how the Andean landscape ruptures a naturalistic tradition that attempted to dominate people and places. I argue that each of these four discarded counter-narratives of the landscape questions the colonially-tamed gaze, and its impulse to homogenize cultures and dissidences. As such, instead of dismantling the notion of the landscape, this study will reinstate its social and marginal imaginaries by recognizing the materiality of landscape, and, most importantly the political role of imagination in shaping the sense of the real.