Charles Colson

30 September 2009

Research Plan for Research Posts

     The colonial/postcolonial divide in mainland Latin America is not as clear as it is in the Caribbean, Africa, or the Indian subcontinent and followed a different progression of events.  Political independence arrived in the second quarter of the nineteenth century for most of the colonies, but the revolution was led by criollos, native-born people of European descent.  After almost three centuries of cultural and ethnic mestizaje, or mixture, the distinction between colonizers and colonized was not nearly as clear as in many other locations.  Cuban poet and essayist José Martí is credited with the dictum that the nation was born smothered by the colony.

The pervasiveness of dependency theory and subaltern studies approaches to Latin American history suggests that there are postcolonial influences to be found in the region’s literature.  During roughly the same time period that postcolonial literature was developing in other parts of the world, magic realism appeared in Latin America.  While there has been some scholarly frustration with pinning down exactly what magic realism is, I’d like to examine recent critical scholarship in my first research post to find out what—if any—characteristics magical realists share with other postcolonial writers.  A more recent Latin American genre is the testimonio, texts produced in collaboration with subaltern subjects such as Guatemalan human rights activist Rigoberta Menchú.  For the second research post, I’d like to analyze the genre for elements of postcolonialism.  Ideally, these goals can be related to course objectives 1, 2a, and 3a.