Ficciones del origen y orígenes de la ficción en la obra de Juan José Nieto

Abstract

This essay approaches the ways in which Afro-Colombian intellectual, president and novelist, Juan José Nieto (1805–1866), represents Colombia as a new republic where education and personal merit, in contrast to lineage, are the sole purveyors of legitimacy to govern and write. In literary self-representations, Nieto erased his origins as a person of diverse racial origins and instead decided to represent himself as a “new republican notability” who made it to power through hard work. The present essay argues that Nieto, as the first writer of historical novels in Colombia, in his novel Ingermina o la hija de Calamar (1844), plots a new origin for the Republic – one akin to himself, mixed race, based on education and with popular support. As a new letrado in the midst of Romantic euphoria in the continent, Nieto would participate in debates about the origins of national literature for the new nations. As an outsider attacked because of his nonwhite origins, Nieto would contradictorily erase his own history and use the figure of French Romantic Alexandre Dumas, a novelist with Afro-Caribbean origins like himself, to legitimize his own public persona as a self-taught man and defender of republicanism. The essay concludes by suggesting that despite Nieto’s strategies to found a Republic that would erase racial origins as providing legitimacy to occupy positions of power, he was erased from literary and political Colombian history for over 150 years precisely because his antagonists could not accept a nation, and a national literature, without origins in Europe.