La historia como misterio: Novela policiaca de America central y Cuba
Description
My dissertation explores detective fiction written in Central America and Cuba in the last two decades of the XX Century. Since the late eighties and early nineties, events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall an the collapse of the USSR, the end of the Sandinista era, the economic and ideological crisis in Cuba, and the emergence of post-war and post-dictatorial governments in Central America, have demanded a new approach to the concepts of truth and nation. The need of a new historical discourse has emerged as well. Central American and Cuban detective fiction writers have been offering responses to these questions through novels in which official history is deconstructed, and alternative historical narratives surface My research draws on Michel Foucault's work about power and truth; Pierre Bourdieu's analysis of the relationships between social behavior and non-economic forms of capital; Marx and Josefina Ludmer's theses on crime as a productive phenomenon; as well as Georg Lukacs and Hayden White's work on history and language. Based on this theoretical framework, I propose the following hypothesis: In contemporary detective fiction from Central America and Cuba, history could be considered as an alibi voiced by the State with the purpose of hiding its own criminal actions Six novels are analyzed in this project: Castigo divino (1988), by Nicaraguan writer Sergio Ramirez; El ano del laberinto (2000), by Costa Rican writer Tatiana Lobo; Pasado perfecto (1991), Vientos de cuaresma (1994), Mascaras (1997) and Paisaie de otono (1998), by Cuban author Leonardo Padura. In Chapter One, my research examines the relationship between the nation-building project, the rise of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, and the discourses of law in Castigo. In the same chapter, my search also focuses in the contradictions between violence, repression and the Costa Rican liberal discourse of peace and progress in El ano. Finally, in chapter two, my project explores Padura's work as an example of the current trends in Cuban detective fiction. Known as the best example of revolutionary literature in the seventies, Cuban detective fiction has been evolved into a discourse of resistance against Fidel Castro's regime in the nineties