| "Dictates of Authority" is the first extensive comparative study of novels about dictators in Spanish American and African literatures. Writing about dictators, common in literatures of the Global South, represents the writer's incursion onto the terrain of politics, pushing the boundary between aesthetics and politics. While the writer offers an appealing opponent to the dictator, reading these texts solely in terms of their political intent or significance ignores the more complicated elements of these narratives: we risk overlooking the fact that the aesthetic itself provides a critique of authoritarianism independent of its political referents.;This dissertation reframes critical understanding of the dictator-novel by bringing together texts that are geographically and historically diverse, putting two distinct critical traditions into conversation. I demonstrate how these novels work to unseat the epistemological logic of authoritarianism, making visible the ways in which the dictator controls the production of meaning. But, in their metafictional dimension, these texts struggle with the political and aesthetic implications of their possible investment in the authoritarian practices they denounce. Dictator-novels self-consciously draw attention to their status as literary texts; they pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality, unsettling notions of historical truth, and reflect on the nature of writing itself. I argue that the dictator-novel is not a document of the writer's political engagement but rather the space in which writers explore, challenge, and articulate new forms of commitment. These novels do not programmatically imagine political alternatives: they are sites of crisis.;The texts discussed include: Jorge Zalamea's El gran Burundun-Burunda ha muerto (1952), Henri Lopes's Le Pleurer-rire (1982), Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Facundo o civilizacion y barbarie (1845), Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Murogi wa Kagogo (Wizard of the Crow; 2004-2007), Augusto Roa Bastos's Yo el Supremo (1974), and Ahmadou Kourouma's En Attendant le vote des betes sauvages (1998). |
