Women's stories: The politics of memory in Latin America

Women's Stories: The Politics of Memory in Latin America examines testimonial texts and contemporary critical fictions written by Latin American women to propose a radical rehistorization of the past. Applying an interdisciplinary approach to the study of fiction, it asserts that women's self-reflective historiographic fiction awakens the reader's critical imagination about her obligation to remember and her role in the transformation of history.; It contrasts the traditional patriarchal construction of history with the storytelling tradition of keeping the collective memory. After defining the terms History, story, (hi)story , and untangling the relationship between history and fiction in Latin America, it presents Hayden White's arguments from the philosophy of history, South African and Guatemalan Truth Commissions' clarification of the storied nature of truth, Theodore Iser's concept of plurivocity , and theories from social anthropology and storytelling scholarship to show that critical fiction are interactive texts of collective memory and texts of a new historiography.; Using the figure of Scheherezade, and theories on oral storytelling of Walter Benjamin, Ruth Behar, Thomas Hale and others, the paper explains that the discourse of the storyteller in fiction is a narrative event in which the storyteller enters into a special pact with the listener/reader to share counsel, confirm identity and retell history. Exploring the storytelling woman's defiance of women's traditional silencing in Latin America, the paper presents the woman storyteller as sage and the bearer of traditional wisdom about the construction of identity in Silent Dancing by Ortiz Cofer and Balún Canán by Castellanos. Then the analysis focuses on the storyteller as griotte and keeper of the social conscience in Eva Luna by Allende. To clarify this empowering process of re-historization, the fictional storyteller is revealed as both witness and historian in In the Time of the Butterflies by Alvarez. The paper concludes the discussion of strategies of literary rebellion in reconstructing women's history with an analysis of four novels of historiographic metafiction: Como agua para chocolate by Esquivel, Estaba la pájara pinta sentada en el verde limón by Angel, La casa de la laguna by Ferré and The Lost Chronicles of Terra Firma by Aguilar.