Forms of Dictatorship: Power, Narrative, and Authoritarianism in the Latina/o Novel (Oxford Studies in American Literary History)

" 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. "-- "Forms of Dictatorship argues that that Latina/o fiction unveils the horrors of domination in both Latin America and the United States, the manuscript reveals how Latina/os are haunted by multiple kinds of repressive regimes. An intra-ethnic study of Latina/o fiction published from the early 1990s to the present, Forms of Dictatorship is the first book-length study to examine Latina/o novels that employ dictatorship as a historical reality and a literary trope. This work constitutes a new sub-genre of contemporary Latina/o fiction known as the Latina/o dictatorship novel. Forms of Dictatorship is also the first study to comparatively analyze how U.S. Latina/os from different national origins in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central and South America represent authoritarianism. Critical examinations of Latina/o literature have privileged the lenses of race, class, gender, sexuality, migration, and language; my study examines authoritarianism alongside these multiple axes"--… (more)