Panel 16- New Formations and the Politcs of Engagement

This panel displayed a series of papers analyzing social and political representation in literary works. Topics explored included exile, state violence, and political and social repression. Pablo Neruda's Residencia en la Tierra was used to explore issues of otherness and isolation. The subject of geographical exile, internal exile, feelings of displacement and fragmentation, and the violence of the Argentine dictatorship were explored through the novel 259 Saltos, Uno inmortal. This novel follows a young women in exile after being tortured as a political prisoner in Argentina in the 70's and 80's and displays what academic Diana Taylor terms as "Percepticide," or the coping mechanism of denying what one sees.
Representation of state oppression was discussed in the work of Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas expression of Cuba's "hidden history" in themes such as patriarchy, gender issues, marginalization, and memory and annihilation. Representation of another dictatorship, that of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, as well as the United States involvement there, was discussed in an analysis of Dominican literary works. This discussion brought up the second parallel I have heard this weekend between Latin America and the Middle East, as US relations with Santo Domingo were compared to those in modern-day Iraq. This paper also addressed the idea of memory, in questioning the absence of cultural and historical memory in the US of American involvement in the Dominican Republic. The novel represents the history of the Dominican Republic through the tragic history of a single family whose loyalties are divided between a mother's Haitian heritage and a father's support for the US, and eventually ends in an Oedipal event, with the son killing the father for his political position.