Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

During the short but drastic period of time that was between his first crime short stories gathered in Variaciones en rojo (1953) and his famous testimonial novel, Operación masacre (OM, 1957), an evolution occurred, starting with the respect for the norms of a gender and ending with their transformation through the inauguration of the non-fiction. Being the fruit of a journalistic campaign, the novel abandons the artistic categories of bourgeois art, while the author makes an ideological turn and becomes a committed writer. As the critics identified, thanks to the aesthetic configuration of the verbal material, the real and the fictional are intertwined in a dialectical way, causing the truth to emerge with the value of historical proof. This article, also based on the uncertain generic attribution of the testimony, propose that OM can be considered as the first testimonial novel of Latin American literature, since it contains insipiently the three models that this gender would develop throughout its history: the paradigms of subversion, subalternity and subjectivity. Second, it analyses how OM drives the testimony through a precise form of textual work that, far from untying knots with its police texts, feeds on its narrative matrices.

The article examines the dramas Bello futuro (2013) and La Victoria (2014) by Gerardo Oettinger. These works portray a realistic representation at a time when such aesthetic trend was not dominant within Chile’s dramatic production, with the purpose of mapping the microspaces where Pinochet’s military-civic dictatorship exercised its power. This form of representation would resort to a phenomenology of hunger as a distinctive feature of the deployment of dictatorial power in Chilean history. For doing this, the dramas focus on the representation of the daily life of the subjects who experience economic, political and gender marginality produced by the dictatorship, and on how it seeks the ideological indoctrination of women in order to keep the exercise intact of his power. The interest in reviewing the expressions of violence and marginalization that the dictatorship produced in Oettinger’s dramas is based on the need to build an image of the origin of Chile’s characteristic contemporary cultural violence.

This text proposes a reading of Vargas Llosa’s political-cultural essays on Latin America. First, his notions of Democracy, Legality, and Modernity are identified, classified, and thus defined to understand which are the conditions of a real democracy according to Vargas Llosa. Then, his evaluations about Latin American societies are summarized, contraposing these evaluations with his notions of those keywords. Then, three critical categories are set to understand the obstacles to reach Latin American modernity. These categories allow to understand and, at the same time, make the point against Vargas Llosa’s defense of the current modern–“neoliberal”–regimes in Latin America. These categories are: patriarchalist capitalism, patriarchalist habitus, and casuistry as prestidigitation of social order.

This article examines changes in the representation of dictatorial violence and female victims of human rights violations in Carlos Franz’s novel El desierto (2005). In order to do so, it first examines how notions of victimhood, gendered violence and justice challenge the idea of women as the sacrificial victims of state-led violence or their communities. It also shows how images of victimised women, as mournful subjects, are replaced by more reflective victims, who attempt to understand violence and patriarchal oppression, rather than merely remembering it in a grieving fashion. This article also explores some of the problems that emerge when a male author writes a story of a female victim of human rights violations. Finally, this study focuses on content and form to show how some of the elements in the texts might reinforce patriarchal male fantasies and the co-option of women’s voices in the aftermath of conflict.

This analysis focuses on postmemory novels, by Chilean authors born between 1967 and 1983, ascribed to three modulations: postmemory of confrontation, recomposition and conformity. These subcategories of postmemory imply the need to assume that the violence experienced in the country intervened materially and symbolically in the family structure. However, they also allow us to consider that we are facing a type of narrative that privileges a bourgeois subject, collectively disjointed, that rejects the non-conservative family structure. Regarding the notion of memory, it appears as a burden that would even be desirable to ignore. For this reason, there is a clear desire to cut with all referents since in their present/adult the referent operates as a restatement of pain. These narratives present, lastly, a subject without utopias, hopes, desires for change or for rereading the political history of the country. They are oriented to oblivion, the enthronement of individualism, the annulment of the social context, focused on the autonomy of the subjectivity, thus registering in what I can call neoliberal literature, which also highlights the absence of any desire for reparation.

This essay presents a discussion about the different perspectives of Latinamericanism: the metropolitan and the vernacular, which have shaped it as a subject to study. We consider an alternative named “latinamericanism on decay” that explains the invalidity of the latinamericanist conciliatory and homogeneous discourse; for that purpose, we read critically the work of four contemporary essayists: Julio Ramos, Josefina Ludmer, Silviano Santiago y Nelly Richard, in order to show their works as elaborations of the fragmentary discourse that exhibits the crisis of latinamericanist discourses.

In 2011 Bernardo Kucinski published his novel K., in which the lead character is a father whose daughter is missing, as a victim of the State violence during Brazil’s military dictatorship. Eight years later, in 2019, he published A nova ordem, a narrative in which the country is ruled by a totalitarian regime. The purpose of this essay is to compare both works, discuss differences between the two books, and thus understand their specific approaches to authoritarianism they offer.