How do novels formally represent dictatorial structures and power relations?

Jennifer Harford Vargas will discuss how Latina/o authors are producing what she theorizes as the Latina/o dictatorship novel, a genre with roots in the Latin American dictator (or dictatorship) novel.  Demonstrating the generative possibilities of socioformalism, Harford Vargas will discuss how Latina/o writers mobilize the genre of the novel and formal techniques to stage power dynamics. Her talk will explore the relationship between different forms of power and the power of narrative form— that is, between various instantiations of repressive power structures and the ways in which different narrative structures can
reproduce and resist repressive power.

Jennifer Harford Vargas (PhD, Stanford University) is Associate
Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College. She researches Latina/o/x
cultural production, hemispheric American studies, theories of the
novel, narratives of undocumented migration, and testimonio forms
in the Americas. She is the author of Forms of Dictatorship: Power,
Narrative, and Authoritarianism in the Latina/o Novel (Oxford University
Press, 2017) and the co-editor of Junot Díaz and the Decolonial
Imagination (Duke University Press, 2016). She is also on the Board
of Directors of Juntos, a community-led Latinx organization in South
Philadelphia that fights for migrant rights.

Co-sponsored by the Department of English and ASE Commons.