J. P. Dabove, Nightmares of the Lettered City. Banditry and Literature in Latin America, 1816-1929
Juan Pablo Dabove
Nightmares of the Lettered City. Banditry and Literature in Latin America, 1816-1929
Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, coll. "Illuminations: Cultural Formations of the Americas", 2007, 392 p
- 9780822943310
- 9780822959564
Nightmares of the Lettered City presents an original study ofthe popular theme of banditry in works of literature, essays, poetry,and drama, and banditry's pivotal role during the conceptualization andformation of the Latin American nation-state.
Juan Pablo Dabove examines writings over a broad time period, from the early nineteenth century to the 1920s, and while Nightmares of the Lettered Cityfocuses on four crucial countries (Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, andVenezuela), it is the first book to address the depiction of banditryin Latin America as a whole. The work offers close reading of Facundo, Doña Bárbara, Os Sertões, and Martín Fierro,among other works, illuminating the ever-changing and oftencontradictory political agendas of the literary elite in theirportrayals of the forms of peasant insurgency labeled “banditry.”
Banditryhas haunted the Latin American literary imagination. As a culturaltrope, banditry has always been an uneasy compromise between desire andanxiety (a “nightmare”), and Dabove isolates three mainrepresentational strategies. He analyzes the bandit as radical other,a figure through which the elites depicted the threats posed to them byvarious sectors outside the lettered city. Further, he considers thebandit as a trope used in elite internecine struggles. In this case,rural insurgency was a means to legitimize or refute an opposing sectoror faction within the lettered city. Finally, Dabove shows how, incertain cases, the bandit was used as an image of the nonstate violencethat the nation state has to suppress as a historical force andsimultaneously exalt as a memory in order to achieve cultural coherenceand actual sovereignty.
As Dabove convincingly demonstrates,the elite's construction of the bandit is essential to ourunderstanding of the development of the Latin American nation in thenineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Pdf à télécharger: