Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Commons^™

Colonialism And Collective Trauma: The Development And Deterioration Of Macondo, Kaitlyn Tibbetts

Scholar Week 2016 - present

Through his works Leaf Storm and One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez explores the development and deterioration of the fictional town of Macondo to illuminate how colonialism infiltrated Latin America, causing detrimental damage to the integrity of its community. Márquez accomplishes this by illustrating the industrialization of Macondo, which embodies colonialism’s detrimental influence. These effects are undeniably ongoing, as seen through the domination of neo-colonialism in Macondo. In both texts, this neo-colonialism is primarily depicted through the arrival of the American banana industry in Macondo. In this, Márquez mirrors Latin American history by alluding to the Boston-based …

Goats Die, Butterflies Fly: Portrayals Of Dominican Dictator Rafael Trujillo (1891–1961) In Historical Fiction And Non-Fiction, Jocelyn R. Brown

Ramifications

The dictator novel has become a staple of Latin American literature in the 20th century. As the intersection of art, culture, and politics, these novels are interested in painting intimate pictures of their dictator to examine the psychology of power and the lure of authoritarianism. This project focuses on analyzing the the rise and fall of Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina (1891–1961) through literary lenses. This project compares the ways in which Trujillo and his regime (El Trujillato) are portrayed in both non-fiction and historical fiction. Trujillo was an excellent storyteller, known for his cult of personality …

Forum On “Conquest”: Past-Present Politics Of Coloniality In Cinema On Latin America, Stephen Jakob Turner

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

My dissertation analyzes the representation of Spanish “Conquest” in film as a critical commentary on the cultural present. Chapter 1, “Directorial Discord: The Cultural Politics of Representation in Apocalypto (USA/Mexico/UK, 2006) and Retorno a Aztlán (Return to Aztlán, Mexico, 1991)” focuses on the representation of the (im)possibility of Indigenous heroic protagonism and futurity in the origins of “Conquest.” Chapter 2, “‘The World is Thus’: Resistance and the Power of Ambivalent Conversion in Gabriel Retes’s Nuevo Mundo (The New World; Mexico, 1976) and Roland Joffé’s The Mission (USA/Paraguay, 1986)” posits that the “Conquest” problematizes the myth of …

Emil’ Keme. Le Maya Q’Atzij /Our Maya Word: Poetics Of Resistance In Guatemala. U Of Minnesota P, 2021., Rigoberto Guevara

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Emil’ Keme. Le Maya Q’atzij /Our Maya Word: Poetics of Resistance in Guatemala. U of Minnesota P, 2021. 248 pp.

La Tierra Que Pisamos: El Tercer Espacio En La Narrativa De Jesús Carrasco, Christina Ahmed

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Este estudio explora las diferentes manifestaciones del tercer espacio en la novela de Jesús Carrasco, La tierra que pisamos (2016), para mostrar cómo la narrativa es capaz de generar empatía en el lector. Un ejemplo de Historia alternativa, la novela narra la colonización de España por un Imperio imperialista. Los eventos se sitúan en un pueblo en Extremadura donde un indígena llamado Leva aparece en la finca de Eva, la esposa de un militar del Imperio. La interacción entre los dos personajes principales provoca un cambio en la mentalidad de Eva, ya que se hace consciente de cómo su país …

Undying (And Undead) Modern National Myths: Cannibalism And Racial Mixture In Contemporary Brazilian Vampire Fiction, Jacob C. Brown

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

Contemporary cultural media illustrates the vampire as an important symbolic figure in the Brazilian imaginary. For example, in twentieth and twenty-first century Brazilian fiction, television, and political discourse, vampires have risen from their supposedly European origins as expressions of urban decay, comic excess, and government corruption in Brazil. Beyond these representations, I focus on three contemporary novels in which the vampire also plays a starring role. O vampiro que descobriu o Brasil (1999) by Ivan Jaf, Aventuras do vampiro de Palmares (2014) by Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro, and Dom Pedro I Vampiro (2015) by Nazarethe Fonseca stand out from other creative reimaginings …

Monstrous Dolls: The Abject Body In Rosario Ferré’S Works, Mackenzie Fraser

Senior Theses

In this Honors Thesis project, I examine two literary texts, “The Youngest Doll” (1991) and The House on the Lagoon (1995), by Puerto Rican author Rosario Ferré (1938-2016) with attention to her depiction of the abject female body as a figure analyzed by both theories of gender and the subaltern. Using these critical frameworks as well as my own textual analysis, I argue that Ferré offers a postcolonial feminist critique of the double oppression—patriarchal and colonial— operating upon her female Puerto Rican characters. Yet these women also turn this abjection into transgression, allowing Ferré to expose the paradoxes of female …

Spanish And Cuban Politicians, Publicists And Reporters Facing The Cuban Crisis At The End Of The Nineteenth Century, Maria Aparicio-Torres

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In my dissertation, I study a selection of little known Spanish and Cuban texts published during the Cuban War of Independence at the end of the 19th century. In this project, I provide a transatlantic approach of literary texts in various genres and subgenres, and political messages exchanged between Cuba and Spain, which have been neglected by scholars in the field.

By analyzing the emergence of a colonial discourse in the works of novelists, politicians and thinkers who wrote about the Cuban-Spanish confrontation, I establish their ambiguous and frequently contradictory colonial messages. In doing so, this dissertation furthers our understanding …

Motherland, Melanie Joy Mignucci

Senior Projects Spring 2016

A novella about Puerto Rico.

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

The Amazon In Brazilian Speculative Fiction: Utopia And Trauma, M. Elizabeth Ginway

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

There are two key moments when the Amazon is used as the setting for Brazilian science fiction, both during periods of dictatorship in the twentieth century. The first takes place during the authoritarian government of Getúlio Vargas (1930-1945), the second after the decades-long push for modernization and technological change imposed by the military government from 1964 to 1985. My study shows that, for writers of the first half of the twentieth century, the Amazon is a place of adventure, a setting for stories whose imaginative events ignore the region’s anthropology, history and indigenous cultures. Among the early Brazilian Amazonian adventure …

Central American Enunciations From Us Zones Of Indifference, Or The Sentences Of Coloniality, Oriel María Siu

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay explores Central American diasporic experiences in the US as sites for the continued exertion and reproduction of coloniality. A longstanding matrix of power transgressing all forms of borders and permeating all aspects of life—an irreversible and transgressive disease—coloniality operates so forcefully that it upholds its own survival. In the process, we live its plural incongruity and even extend its most contemptuous signs. Surveying a series of narrative texts produced from within the Central American diaspora in cities like Los Angeles and New York—Roberto Quesada’s Big Banana, Oscar René Benitez’s Inmortales, Hector Tobar’s Tattooed Soldier, and …

Los Perros Del Paraíso De Abel Posse: Mito, Rebelión Y El Eterno Presente De La Historia Latinoamericana, Fernando Alfredo Aguirre Perez

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Humorous and sarcastic on every page, the historical novel Los perros del paraíso (1983) by Abel Posse, presents itself as an iconoclast and subversive response to the historical account of the so-called discovery of the New World and the role played in it by Christopher Columbus. In this post-Boom narrative, linear time collapses and events conflate to depict a fantastic world where anachronism makes almost anything possible. Comic and grotesque in their attributes, characters appear performing a colonial play in which the absurd is apparently the sole stable rule. However, underneath this joyful surface, a colonial reason flows to confirm …

Atlantic Nessologies: Image, Territory, Value , Francisco-]. Hernández Adrián

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay addresses the emerging field of Atlantic Studies and questions the status of "the Atlantic" as an object of study. Rather than assuming a self-evident grid where Atlantic cultural phenomena oscillate between such poles as "centers and peripheries," or "the colonizer and the colonized," I consider a different formulation of the Atlantic. Taking as a starting point an analysis of a poem by Tomás Morales, a modernista poet from the Canary Islands, my essay outlines the notion of "Atlantic nessologies." Three parallel departures are offered from this analysis: image (or the realm of the imaginary); territory (or spatial and …