“Taming the Social by Visualizing Society: The Politics of Exclusion and Representation in Latin American ‘Realista’ and ‘Costumbrista’ Literature”
This working paper explores the role played by realista and costumbrista literature in the construction of Latin American social imaginaries during the second half of the 19th century. Some specific devices will be analyzed through which this literary production conceived the “society” as an object to be seen, and therefore known and acted upon. Interrogating a corpus of texts produced in the heyday of liberalism mainly in Central America, but also in Chile and Argentina, will show how the politics of representation of a visually ordered society intersected with the policies of classification of different social groups, and with the practices of exclusion from citizenship of entire sections of the population.
Patricia Arroyo-Calderón is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She has MAs in History, Latin American Studies, and Translation Studies from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, which has just published her thesis, Sentimientos morales y virtud en la construcción de la ciudadanía en América Central. She is writing a dissertation about the role of women's writing in Central American nation-building in the nineteenth century.
For a copy of the paper to be discussed at the workshop, please email Molly Farrell (farrell.73@osu.edu) or Lisa Voigt (voigt.25@osu.edu).
Sponsored by the Americas Before 1900 Working Group.
