Gender and History in Nineteenth-Century Latin america: The Didactic Discourses of Soledad Acosta de Samper
Faced with the task of articulating the relationships among national identity, citizenship, and the individual at a time when the idea of "nation" itself was still in flux, nineteenth-century Latin American authors frequently turned towards historiography and historical narratives as appropriate and useful vehicles for their statements about the process by which (semi)arbitrary geographical boundaries could come to signify nations with distinct identities. Many nineteenth-century authors decisively rejected the Spanish colonial past and envisioned the post-Independence period as a new epoch of history whose existence depended on the violent and complete break with Spain represented by the Wars of Independence (1810-1824).1 But other authors, while recognizing the importance of the rupture with Spain and with the colonial past, created historical narratives about the Conquest, about colonial Latin America, and about the Wars of Independence in order to justify their ideas about national identities, to comment upon contemporary political and social situations, and to elucidate the historical roots of current problems. They explored the past in order to make the present comprehensible to themselves and to their readers, who were meant to learn how to be exemplary citizens of the new Latin American nations through their consumption of these narratives. The historical novel afforded authors the opportunity to explore questions about nationality and identity in a popular format and to reach a wider potential audience. The deployment of the genre, however, was a problematic device for the majority of historical novelists in nineteenth-century Latin America, since they had to contend with a conflicted attitude towards
The feminine characters in Soledad Acosta’s Una holandesa en América and the construction of a new national model
In the novel Una holandesa en América (A Dutchwoman in America), Soledad Acosta (1833‐1913, Bogota, Colombia) traces the journey of a young woman, Lucía, to America. Acosta uses literary models such as the Bildungsroman and the chronicles of European travelers to explore women’s place in society of her time and the question of European modernity against American “barbarism” in the context of national construction. As most of the speeches around this topic are from men, Acosta offers a different point of view in the debate and puts into question‐established ideas.
‘There is no race so wretched that there is not something out there that cares for them’: Multiculturalism, understanding, empathy and prejudice in Discworld
Multiculturalism is at the heart of Mel Gibson’s chapter. Arguing that stories situated in Ankh-Morpork, Discworld’s major capital and the focal point of many Discworld stories, in particular deal with the opportunities, problems and, sometimes, sheer craziness associated with multi- and cross-cultural debates and realities, Gibson draws on European models of multiculturalism. She analyses how, alongside debating the nature of prejudice and oppression, the City Watch stories in particular explore ways in which a multicultural space may work.