Central American Rivers as Sites of Colonial Contestation

In the introduction to Troubled Waters: Rivers in Latin American Imagination (2013), Elizabeth Pettinaroli and Ana María Mutis have argued that rivers in Latin American literature constitute a “locus for the literary exploration of questions of power, identity, resistance, and discontent.” Many works of testimonial literature and literature of resistance written during and about the Central American civil wars of the 1970s and 1980s as a means of denouncing and resisting various forms of oppression would support their thesis. In the 2004 film Innocent Voices, directed by Luis Mandoki, Mario Bencastro’s 1997 story “Había una vez un río,” and Claribel Alegría’s 1983 poem “La mujer del Río Sumpul,” the traumatic events in the protagonists’ lives that occur in and near rivers create an inversion of the conventional use of rivers as symbols of life, purity, innocence, and re-creation by associating them with violence, death, and destruction. At the same time, the river often becomes a metaphor for the wounds of trauma, which allude to the psychological suffering not only of the protagonists, but to the collective pain of their countries torn asunder by war. Arturo Arias’s 2015 novel El precio del consuelo also features a river as the site of state-sponsored violence against rural citizens during the civil war period. In contrast with Bencastro’s and Alegria’s texts, however, Arias’s novel highlights issues of environmental justice related to the use of rivers in Central America that continue to plague the region to date. In the present essay, I argue that these works are compelling representations of the ways in which rivers have become sites of contestation between colonial and decolonial forces in Central America.

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Sobre Ileana Rodríguez, House/Garden/Nation: Space, Gender, and Ethnicity in Postcolonial Latin American Literature by Women y Women, Guerrillas, and Love. Understanding War in Central America

Revista Iberoamericana ◽

10.5195/reviberoamer.1997.6216 ◽

1997 ◽

Vol 63 (180) ◽

pp. 554-557

Author(s):

John Beverley

Keyword(s):

American Literature ◽

Central America ◽

Latin American ◽

Latin American Literature ◽

Literature By Women

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Transvestism, Masculinity, and Latin American Literature

10.1057/9780230107281 ◽

2002 ◽

Cited By ~ 34

Author(s):

Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui

Keyword(s):

American Literature ◽

Latin American ◽

Latin American Literature

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Surrealism in Latin American Literature

10.1057/9781137317612 ◽

2013 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Melanie Nicholson

Keyword(s):

American Literature ◽

Latin American ◽

Latin American Literature

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Uncommon Grounds

10.1093/oso/9780190690205.003.0004 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Jeffrey Lawrence

Keyword(s):

American Literature ◽

Latin American ◽

Historical Novel ◽

Latin American Literature ◽

Historical Account ◽

American Novel ◽

Song Of Solomon ◽

The Past ◽

The North ◽

The Us

This chapter turns from a historical account of the development of the US literature of experience and the Latin American literature of reading to a textual analysis of the US and Latin American historical novel. Hemispheric/inter-American scholars often cite William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) as exemplifying instances of literary borrowing across the North–South divide. As I demonstrate, however, each of the later texts also realigns its predecessor’s historical imaginary according to the dominant logics of the US and Latin American literary fields. Whereas the American works foreground experiential models of reconstructing the past and conveying knowledge across generations, García Márquez’s Latin American novel presents reading as the fundamental mode of comprehending and transmitting history.

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Anxieties of Experience

10.1093/oso/9780190690205.001.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Jeffrey Lawrence

Keyword(s):

American Literature ◽

Latin American ◽

World Literature ◽

Latin American Literature ◽

First Century ◽

Comparative Approach ◽

Leaves Of Grass ◽

Literary Authority ◽

The Us ◽

New Interpretation

Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño offers a new interpretation of US and Latin American literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Revisiting longstanding debates in the hemisphere about whether the source of authority for New World literature derives from an author’s first-hand contact with American places and peoples or from a creative (mis)reading of existing traditions, the book charts a widening gap in how modern US and Latin American writers defined their literary authority. In the process, it traces the development of two distinct literary strains in the Americas: the “US literature of experience” and the “Latin American literature of the reader.” Reinterpreting a range of canonical works from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, Anxieties of Experience shows how this hemispheric literary divide fueled a series of anxieties, misunderstandings, and “misencounters” between US and Latin American authors. In the wake of recent calls to rethink the “common grounds” approach to literature across the Americas, the book advocates a comparative approach that highlights the distinct logics of production and legitimation in the US and Latin American literary fields. Anxieties of Experience closes by exploring the convergence of the literature of experience and the literature of the reader in the first decades of the twenty-first century, arguing that the post-Bolaño moment has produced the strongest signs of a truly reciprocal literature of the Americas in more than a hundred years.

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