Race, class, and colony: Re-presentations in the modern Latin American narrative.

Abstract

This dissertation examines race, class, and colonialism in the literary works of modern authors from Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Brazil. It first identifies and traces several of the significant influences on the concept of race in Latin America in order to show how colonialism mediated the construct of an Occidental hierarchy in Latin America, resulting in the formation of a rhetoric of inequality based on the racist notions of an Other which legitimized the continued colonization of Latin America. Various Occidental ideologies, such as Aristotle and the early Greeks' conceptions, and the 19th are 20th century philosophies of Positivism and Social Darwinism are explored, especially concerning their influence on the formation of Latin American thought and discourse regarding the notion of race. While the first chapter partly examines the evolution of racial ideologies from the beginning of the conquest, most of my focus is centered on their impact on the post-independence, nation-building era. These ideologies form the basis for some of the overarching structures of race which are analyzed throughout the dissertation such as: the erasure and denial of racist tendencies, the construction of idealized racial identities, mestizaje as a tool for whitening and the conflation of race and class. The body of the dissertation focuses mainly on literary texts from Puerto Rico, Mexico and Brazil, but still includes seminal texts from other countries, as well as an examination of relevant critical or theoretical analyses. The final aim is to show how several modern-era authors and texts, such as Rosario Ferre's Maldito amor, Francisco Arrivi's Medusas en la bahia, Maria Luisa Puga's Las posibilidades del odio, and Jorge Amado's Tent of Miracles, have initiated the exploration of territory previously considered inviolable. They articulate a counterdiscourse which challenges previous cultural and nationalist hegemonies. By creating a space where they can write against the racial paradigms of the past, they re-present them in a new light, de-stabilizing prior ideologies of race and class stratification.