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This dissertation is a survey of postmodern historical fiction in 20th and 21st century Spanish American literature. It has diverse manifestations, but the defining characteristic of this kind of historical fiction is a rejection of any rigid distinction between historical and fictional discourse. This is a descriptive rather than a normative study: it examines how eight different authors use the techniques of postmodern historical fiction to develop implicit critiques of the “great man” theory of history. The Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle popularized this theory in the 1800s, and it asserts that biography is the proper model for history, namely, the biography of prominent individuals – “great men.” It treats these people as the source of history. Opposing this historiographic ideology, many authors of postmodern historical fiction see such figures as subjects that can be “written” and “re-written”; they are not the source of history, but the product of historical discourse. I conduct close readings of nine primary texts to elucidate how they challenge the “great man” historiography of four significant figures from Spanish American history: Montezuma, Simón Bolívar, Christopher Columbus, and Ernesto “Che” Guevara. I conclude that the historiographic critiques in these texts converge around three common strategies in their critiques: an extension of character from the domain of fiction to the domain of history, the subversion of the literary genres of biography and autobiography, and a commitment to rewriting the traditional narratives of specific historical events. / Spanish

After the debt crisis in 1981, Costa Rica shifted from an inward (IDS) to an outward oriented development strategy (ODS). "Neoliberal" economists have characterized this shift as being a result of free trade and liberalization policies and reduced government intervention. The neoliberal perspective has seen inward and outward development strategies as mutually exclusive and has evaluated their success mainly in terms of GDP and export growth. This dissertation first shows that IDS and ODS are in fact not mutually exclusive and that countries which have been successful in applying an ODS, such as Taiwan and Korea, have had strong government intervention, particularly in that they have implemented a selective trade policy. Second, in the case of Costa Rica, it illustrates that the shift towards a more ODS has been the result of previous development achievements, pursuit of macroeconomic balance with social stability, and strong institutional and financial support for export promotion. Additionally, using a computable general equilibrium model, the study also shows that a gradual and combined policy of tariffs and export subsidies may have better overall macroeconomic results, not only in terms of growth, but also in terms of distributional issues, as compared with the neoliberal shock policies, involving import liberalization and large devaluations. This gradual and combined approach is consistent with the policies adopted by Costa Rica in the transition to an ODS; it also helps illustrate the distributional concerns that governments face when choosing a trade policy and development strategy. However, in order for Costa Rica to go beyond an easy stage of export promotion to a deeper export development process and overcome similar problems encountered during the period of import substitution industrialization such as rent seeking, developing an industrial structure with small degrees of value added and increasing trade imbalances and fiscal deficits, it is necessary to transform the productive structure and develop strategic export and import substitution sectors that would give Costa Rica a competitive advantage. The dissertation concludes by proposing a greater role for the state to promote an ODS based on a selective trade strategy and a combined macroeconomic policy of maintaining a realistic exchange rate and gradual and selective fiscal policies.

This dissertation explores the configuration of individual identities that have been redefined in terms of adversity, specifically within the context of globalization that characterizes late modernity, focusing on Latin America. My research focuses on the postnational moment that results from the erosion of the nation-state, the expansion of the global market, and the proliferation of global risks. It also considers aporia as an impasse to thought, reason, and discourse, but also, in a contemporary critical perspective, as a way for transgressing the perplexity caused by adversity. I analyze the new forms of late capitalism, its implementation of biopolitics and necropolitics, defined as the exercise of power and administration of life and death, and the extractive forces that appropriate and instrumentalize human and non-human bodies as well as natural ones. I analyze this context as a scenario for the emergence of new post-traditional or postnational identities, as a process of “mutation” or, in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s terms, “becoming” — in particular becoming spectral and posthuman. Spectral identities imply a condition of erasure and defacement of the subject imposed by structural violence and adversity, and the posthuman identities results from the alteration or reconfiguration of the individual, for instance by technological implementations over the physical body. For this line of inquiry, I analyze contemporary Latin American and Latinx literature, graphic novels, films, virtual reality productions, and visual arts to evidence the regional implications of a global phenomenon. I approach these aesthetic works and these identities in a transversal way centering on three key aspects: labor, violence, and migration. The First Part discusses a new world-wide setting formed in the last decades by the postnational, neoliberal, and globalized conditions and their impact on Latin American cultures and arts. The Second Part addresses the new forms of labor shaped by the posthuman condition in the region and the depiction of new posthuman identities. Here I study the work of the filmmakers Sebastian Hoffman and Alex Rivera, literary works by Pepe Rojo, and a graphic novel created by Diego Agrimbau and Gabriel Ippólit. The Third Part explores violence and the emergence of spectral identities and spectral artistic practices in Latin American art. The artists I study include Teresa Margolles, Lorena Wolffer, Coco Fusco, Regina José Galindo, Rosângela Rennó, Oscar Muñoz, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Adriana Varejão. I also examine the virtual reality films by Alejandro González Iñárritu and Alfredo Salazar-Caro. The aesthetics that I investigate illuminate a moment of global crisis as it pertains to Latin America but also generate possibilities of struggle and allow individuals to deterritorialize themselves from a precarious cartography. / 2026-06-27T00:00:00Z

<p> This dissertation examines the dissemination of power represented in the works of Panamanian writers Roberto D&iacute;az Herrera, Rose Marie Tapia and Mauro Z&uacute;&ntilde;iga Ara&uacute;z. My work focuses on two important periods in Panama's history: the repressive dictatorial era of Manuel Noriega and the post-dictatorial era during which subjugation and power operate in subtle ways, through institutions, mechanisms of civil society, and globalization. The primary sources are D&iacute;az Herrera's testimony, and the novels of Tapia and Z&uacute;&ntilde;iga Ara&uacute;z. In my analysis, I draw upon the notions of power, subjugation and normalization developed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. I also draw upon the thoughts of Mikhail Bahktin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Beatriz Sarlo.</p><p> Chapter one presents the historical overview of Panamanian history and its literature. It shows how power, subjugation and normalization have operated in Panama at different points of its history. Chapter Two analyses the political terror of Noriega through D&iacute;az Herrera's <i>Estrellas clandestinas </i> and Z&uacute;&ntilde;iga Ara&uacute;z's <i>El chacal del general. </i> Both narratives are challenges against Noriega, using scenes of actual persecutions, disappearances and tortures. Chapter Three explains how Tapia uses <i>Roberto por el buen camino</i> to denounce a wide range of inequalities existing in the post-dictatorial society. She focuses specifically on the culture of violence perpetrated by the underclass. Chapter four analyses how Z&uacute;&ntilde;iga Ara&uacute;z's <i>Espejo de miserias </i> takes the reader to a deep journey through a diverse range of social problems affecting women in Latin America, focusing on the subjugation and control of women's bodies through prostitution. This chapter uses Foucault's notion of biopower to illustrate how subjugation operates through globalization and the sex trade market. Chapter five uses Tapia's <i>Mujeres en fuga </i> to show globalization and the global market&mdash;through casinos and shopping malls&mdash;manipulating society, and contributing to Panama's socio-economic fragmentation. In addition to bringing attention to the literature of a country that is often ignored in contemporary Latin American Studies, my analysis demonstrates how these writers examine problems and questions concerning the use and dissemination of power that remain vitally important not only in Panama, but also throughout Latin America.</p>

<p> Though alphabetic script had become a prevailing communicative form for keeping records and recounting histories in New Spain by the turn of the seventeenth century, pre-Columbian and early colonial artistic and scribal traditions, including pictorial, oral, and performative discourses still held great currency for indigenous communities during the later colonial period. The pages of a corpus of indigenous documents created during the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries known as the Techialoyan manuscripts abound with vibrantly painted watercolor depictions, alphabetic inscriptions, and vivid invocations of community elders&rsquo; speeches and embodied experiences. Designed in response to challenging viceregal policies that threatened land and autonomy, the Techialoyans sought to protect and preserve indigenous ways of life by fashioning community members as the noble descendants of illustrious rulers from the pre-Columbian past. The documents register significant events in the histories of communities, often creating a sense of continuity between the colonial present and that of antiquity. What is more, they provide the limits of the territory within a depicted landscape using a reflexive, ambulatory model. Representations of place evoke ritual practices of walking the boundaries from the perspective of the ground, enabling readers to acquire different forms of knowledge as they move through the pages of the book and the envisioned landscape to which it points. The different communicative forms evident in the Techialoyans, including pictorial, alphabetic, oral, and performative modes contribute to understandings of indigenous literacies of the later colonial period by demonstrating the diverse resources and methods upon which indigenous leaders drew to preserve community histories and territories. </p><p> The Techialoyans present an innovative artistic and scribal tradition that drew upon pre-Columbian, early colonial, and European conventions, as well as the contemporary late-colonial pictorial climate. The artists consciously juxtaposed traditional indigenous materials and conventions with those of the contemporary colonial moment to simultaneously create a sense of both old and new. Not only did the documents recount indigenous communities&rsquo; histories and affirm their noble heritages, they also proclaimed possession of an artistic and scribal tradition that was on par with that of their revered ancestors, thereby strengthening corporate identity and demonstrating their legitimacy and autonomy within the colonial regime.</p><p>

My dissertation, entitled 'Cultura y Excepcion: Golpe de estado, medios visuales y literatura en Chile, 1973', studies the conditions of production of avant-garde discourses in the Southern Cone in the context of the Cold War during the 1970s. It focuses on a period of intense cultural transformations in the Southern Cone, during which literary discourses played a leading role articulating political practices within an extremely polarized social scenario. Through close reading informed by selected fictional narratives, films, journal materials, artwork, and political discourses, I reconstruct the itineraries of literary and political avant-gardes, mainly in Chile after the irruption of the military coup After presenting an introduction which outlines the rhetorical and political implications of the avant-garde in the region, I study the Chilean cultural field under Salvador Allende's government (1970--73). I analyze representative authors, such as Pablo Neruda, Jose Donoso, Enrique Lihn, Hernan Valdes, and Ariel Dorfman, within a theoretical framework based on recent literary theory and criticism. The subsequent chapters deal with political discourses that dominated much of the narrative prose written during the 1970s Among the issues I explore are: militarization and literature in Chile; the complex relationship between fiction and testimony in Latin America literature; cultural notions of death and their collapse in the context of military coups. Supplementing the analysis of cultural fields with discussions from the period on mass culture, artistic theory, and sociology, my dissertation historicizes the complex visual and material culture of the 1970s Understanding the military's dictatorships as the instruments of a violent transition to a new social paradigm, I show how avant-garde was abruptly inscribed into a biopolitical space, in which life itself was an object of a systematic political intervention. This crucial period of radical militancy and unusual political violence, I argue, has been underestimated by current cultural and literary studies, whose center of attention have been rather the cultural field opened by the postdictatorship context in the region. This has led me to address recent debates over the status of literature in Latin America as well as the current philosophical discussion opened by thinkers such as Giorgio Agambem and Paul Virilio / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation examines a series of Mexican indigenista narratives published between 1948 and 1962, all of them concerned with the culture and problematics of the Mayan peoples of the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. One of the things that the recent Zapatista rebellion has achieved is to bring the peoples of the marginal region to the center of national discourse and debate. With this fact kept always in the foreground, we examine how these narratives are involved in the construction and (re)definition of the Mexican nation--and how the status of the indigenous peoples of Chiapas has in fact been a focal point of national discourse and debate for quite some time. To further highlight the relevance of these novels to the present moment, attention is also given to the ways in which they shed some light on the rebellion and make it more comprehensible As the title indicates, Mexico's national discourse and debate has tended to revolve around two large issues: the role of indigenous peoples in the modern Mexican nation, and the nature and meaning of the Mexican Revolution. We will see how the narrators of all of the works in question--from Ricardo Pozas's Juan Perez Jolete (1948) to Rosario Castellanos's Oficio de tinieblas (1962)--contribute to the discussion of these issues in creative and often prophetic ways / acase@tulane.edu

Nineteenth-century Argentine prose literature concerning the frontier articulates 'otherness' as a function of a broader textual strategy: the construction of an identifiable, explicit or implicit, normative subject. In Sarmiento's Facundo (1845), gauchos are posited as lacking access to social symbolism and, voiceless, they are depicted on the register of the Lacanian Imaginary. As such, they are inimical mirror images of a normative subject of equally absolute traits. The authorial voice is distinguished from its enemies by its possession and manipulation of language. In Mansilla's Una excursion a los indios ranqueles (1870), gauchos and Indians serve as masks or foils that disguise the authorial sense of exile from a source of power. The first-person narrator is a de-centered subject who recovers lost authority through the production of textual prosopons. His skepticism and irony establish a complicity with his readers and create an urbane 'we' that explores the naive world of the frontier inhabitants. In Gutierrez's Juan Moreira (1879-80), crime replaces geography as a distancing element in the construction of 'otherness' and isolates a traditional individualism pitted against modern impersonality. In spite of the protest element, the implied values are traditional and paternalistic. Zeballos, in Callvucura (1884), buttresses the subject behind a selective avalanche of documentary events, which results in a tightly argued proof of the need for the extermination of the Indians. His next work, the novel Paine (1886), achieves a degree of freedom to approximate the point of view of the 'other.' Consequently, and unlike the case of all the previous texts here considered, the subject is not split between the power of the logos and the powerlessness of the 'other,' but is instead a dialogic construct of whites living among the ranqueles and of Indians whose hardships those whites share. The trip to the 'other,' it seems, can recognize the frontier world only after the singularity of the frontier and its inhabitants has been historically vanquished / acase@tulane.edu