Connecting September 11’s: Hemispheric Historical Ambiguity in Ariel Dorfman’s <em>Americanos: Los pasos de Murieta</em>

Authors

  • John Riofrio The College of William and Mary

Keywords:

Ariel Dorfman, Murieta, Generación del 72

Abstract

In his chapter on Ariel Dorfman’s recent novel Americanos: Los pasos de Murieta, John Riofrio makes the compelling and innovative argument that in the Generation of ’72, and Dorfman’s work specifically, we witness a unique form of Latin American realism, one that sidesteps the post-modern naval-gazing and cynicism associated with the generations on either side of them.  Neither uninitiated in the cerebral dicta of the post-1968 intellectual world nor the experiential reality of actually lived globalization, the Generation of ’72, for Riofrio, writes new foundational fictions, calling on allegory, long a tool in Latin American political collectives, to negotiate the tension between the national and the global, the regional and the Pan-American, the psychologically stabilizing and the traumatic.

Author Biography

John Riofrio, The College of William and Mary

John Riofrio, or “Rio” as he is called by just about everyone besides his parents, earned his PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The son of Ecuadorian migrants, Rio teaches courses in Latino studies at the College of William and Mary where he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. Rio has published on the confluence of Latin American and Latino studies in MELUS and LALR, is at work on a book-length manuscript entitled “Continental Shifts: Hemispheric Migrations and the Struggles over Latino/a Identity in the Americas”, and occasionally finds the time and emotional energy to publish opinion pieces in Huffington Post on topics ranging from Arizona’s ban in Ethnic Studies, to a media review of CNN’s Latino in America, to cable television’s obsession with big, white families.

Published

2012-10-15

How to Cite

Riofrio, J. (2012). Connecting September 11’s: Hemispheric Historical Ambiguity in Ariel Dorfman’s <em>Americanos: Los pasos de Murieta</em>. A Contracorriente: Una Revista De Estudios Latinoamericanos, 10(1), 37–58. Retrieved from https://acontracorriente.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/acontracorriente/article/view/620

Issue

Section

Dossier: Poesía e imagen