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
Authoritarian fictions: The ideological novel as a literary genre
Political ideologies often informed early twentieth-century French novels, creating a hybrid genre that is both "realist" and didactic: the roman thse. In this ground-breaking and critically acclaimed work, Susan Suleiman looks beyond the politics of novels by such authors as Malraux, Mauriac, Sartre, and Aragon, and examines their shared formal and generic features. Although the genre itself is considered antimodern, the critical and interpretive problems it raises are central to an understanding of both realist and modernist writing. "The great virtue of [Suleiman's] book is its ability to synthesize a range of theoretical ideas--whether formalist, structuralist or "reader-response' in the service of a clear and compelling critical argument".--Christopher Norris, The London Review of Books "This book is certainly one of the best examples of semiotic theory put to use for interpretation of literature and its relation to culture".--Thas Morgan, Genre
“To those who choose to follow in our footsteps”: making women/LGBT+ soldiers (in)visible through feminist “her-story” theater
Building on Judith Butler ’ s understanding of visibility as “ the object of continuous regulation and contestation, ” art/aesthetics studies in international relations, and feminist theater studies, we identify feminist “ her-story ” theater as a unique site where Western “ gender-/sexuality-inclusive ” soldiering is visibilized, contested, and subverted. Drawing on ethnographic observations of two award-winning dramas, interviews with artists and military hosts, and ﬁ ndings from a wider research project on contemporary British military culture, we reveal the key role of heteronormative and patriarchal cultural discourses in reproducing the ambivalent positionalities of women/LGBT+ soldiers. We argue that the very visibility of women/LGBT+ soldiers on the stage paradoxically operates to make the complexities of – and struggles against – masculinized heteronormative military cultures invisible. Furthermore, despite artists ’ attempts to dissociate empowerment through soldiering from the problematic context of modern con ﬂ icts, “ her-story ” theater ultimately entrenches gendered/racialized hierarchies that normalize Western military interventions. We conclude that only through sustained feminist re ﬂ ection on the contours of “ imagined ” futures of female/ LGBT+ soldiering can this persistently problematic (in)visibility be productively disrupted.