The fictionalization of history in Central American women's narrative, 1966--1996
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Description
This dissertation explores the fictionalization of history in narratives published by Central American women writers between 1966 and 1996. The project examines the work of authors such as Claribel Alegria, Gioconda Belli, Rosario Aguilar, and Tatiana Lobo, who not only question political reality in their texts---as do many Central American writers with leftist sympathies---but also problematize the human social arrangement at its most basic levels: the relations between men and women; the nature of the roles assigned according to gender; and the place of women and other marginalized people in the memory of the modern state. My project focuses on these women writers as they confront history in their fictions, analyzing especially their attempts to speak the silenced past of women and reconfigure notions of history and memory. In order to examine the intersection of historical and gender concerns in these fictions, I draw upon several related fields of inquiry, including post-colonial studies, cultural studies, and feminist theory and criticism It is my hypothesis that in a moment of crisis, during which the ruling patriarchies of modern Central American states became vulnerable to attack by groups they had repressed for centuries, the voices of women swiftly entered into the dialogue to influence and shape the construction of another, more egalitarian society to replace the one that had begun to disintegrate. This discursive entry of new voices occurred at a critical moment when the hegemonic powers (namely, the government and economic elite) began to lose their ability to persuade and turned to an almost exclusive reliance upon force to maintain social order. In the face of this repression, the 'Others' of the isthmus mobilized discourse for a dual purpose: to demythologize the establishment and to posit alternative social arrangements. According to my analysis, the texts by these Central American women participate in this struggle for interpretive power by contesting accepted representations of key historical moments, using fiction to disrupt the dominant narrative of modernity and ultimately to alter the terms of debates in national and global contexts