Uma farsa: Post-Dictatorial Strategies of Forgetting and Remembering in Bernardo Kucinski’s K. Relato de uma busca

The novel K. Relato de uma busca, whose publication coincided with the Brazilian National Truth Commission, has proven remarkably more effective in producing a public and institutional reckoning with the crimes of the military regime than any of the institutional mechanisms implemented by the government or any other testimonial novel previously written about the abuses of the military regime. Its appeal, in part, has to do with Kucinski’s usage of various discourses—fiction, testimonial, epistolary—that successfully challenge the authoritative, and non-dialogic discourse of the military regime. This essay argues that in this novel, politics and fiction are inverted: instead of having a law that fictionalizes the memory of the violence perpetrated by the dictatorship, we have a work of fiction that, by memorializing the struggle of a father in search of his disappeared daughter, brings the crimes committed by the military back into the political discourse.

Rethinking the Independence of Cuba from Miguel Barnet’s Biography of a Runaway Slave

The testimonial novel Biography of a Runaway Slave by Miguel Barnet is one of the pioneers of the narrative genre and has attracted the attention of critics from the moment of its publication. Scholars see the testimonial novel as a text that allows the reader access to a "genuine" episteme, safeguarded by a witness of historical events. The main objective of this article is to demonstrate that the narrative of the maroon and former mambí Esteban Montejo opens new ways of reading and analyzing historical events. In particular, I will focus on Montejo’s statements on the Cuban War of Independence. For this purpose, I will use the theory of the Subaltern Studies as a methodological tool. The analysis will show the denial of Afro-Cuban agency in the official history of independence in Cuba, and will offer a reading of the events that recognizes the important Afro-descendant contribution.

Desterritorializado, híbrido y fragmentado: el protagonista en la novela centroamericana de posguerra

La novela centroamericana se escribe desde las referencias históricas, políticas y culturales de la denominada etapa de posguerra. A diferencia de etapas previas se trata de una propuesta discursiva con rasgos particulares bien identificables. En este estudio se analiza un corpus de novelas de Guatemala, El Salvador y Nicaragua, publicadas entre 1990 y 2002. Se concentra en la configuración del personaje protagonista, y se señalan los procedimientos de una elaboración novelística, procedimientos que se apartan de otras manifestaciones anteriores, especialmente de la literatura testimonial. The Central American novel is based on historical, political and cultural references of the so-called postwar stage. Different from earlier stages, this discourse option has easily identifiable features. A corpus of Guatemalan, Salvadoran and Nicaraguan novels published between 1990 and 2002 has been analyzed here. The focus is on the configuration of the main character and procedures used when writing these novels, procedures which differ from those used previously, in particular those of the testimonial novel.