The Dictator Novel: Writers and Politics in the Global South by Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Dictator Novel: Writers and Politics in the Global South by Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra Lanie Millar Armillas-Tiseyra, Magalí. The Dictator Novel: Writers and Politics in the Global South. Northwestern UP, 2019. 240 pages. Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra’s fascinating study The Dictator Novel: Writers and Politics in the Global South traces how innovations in narrative form encode and reflect on the role of art in political transformation, through a wide-ranging comparative analysis of Latin American and African dictator novels. She shows that beyond the dictators themselves, these novels are explicitly concerned with the larger structural forces that create and sustain the conditions for dictatorship. These conditions are implicated in global politics of foreign intervention and political and economic marginalization that have characterized post-independence Latin America and Africa—the circumstances that make the “Global South” recognizable as a critical paradigm, and thus offer, according to Armillas-Tiseyra, the space where comparison becomes possible. Her case studies across five chapters range from mid-nineteenth-century portrayals of the Argentine caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas, to canonical examples of the genre from Latin Americans Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, Roa Bastos, and Africans Ousmane Sembène, Chinua Achebe, Aminata Sow Fall, Henri Lopès, Sony Labou Tansi, Ahmadou Kourouma, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Armillas-Tiseyra’s primary argument, laid out in the first chapter, is that these texts demonstrate key formal innovations and modifications of the genre—experiments with narrative perspective and point of view, metatextual awareness, etc.—which contain “the expression[s] of the analytic function of the dictator novel” and especially of the writers’ and the texts’ interrogations of the possibilities of commitment and political transformation (29). Her book contributes to the current conversations around the Global South as a critical paradigm, crucially, not just by performing a compelling example of South-South comparison, but by showing us how the criteria that make that paradigm visible and useful are developed and discussed in the texts themselves. The Dictator Novel revises canonical readings of the dictator novel genre in innovative ways. Critics have often understood the dictator novel as prototypically Latin American, whose best-known examples arise from the literary experiments associated with the mid-twentieth-century Boom. Features such as exaggeration and parody, a portrayal of the dictator as grotesque and obscene, and the incorporation of historical sources and depiction of historical figures [End Page 475] have comprised what critics see as the political core of such works, which reveal, denounce, and mock the figures at the center of repressive regimes. The Dictator Novel offers an illuminating revision of this critical history. First, Armillas-Tiseyra adds to the well-studied terrain of the Latin American texts a systematic consideration of two generations of Francophone and Anglophone African dictator novels. She thus points to how the genre becomes the repository for artists’ local, regional, and global concerns about the repetition of authoritarian regimes through time and across geographies. The works also archive their authors’ own views on the uneasy imbrication of art and politics, and their own implication, as members of the intellectual and often political elite, in systems in which dictatorship arises. Armillas-Tiseyra sees this discomfort expressed in these novels’ “self-reflexivity” (117), as well as the troubled proximity or even equivalence between the writer and the dictator in many works. In the chapter dedicated to nineteenth-century portrayals of Argentina’s caudillo Juan Manuel de Rosas, for example, José Mármol’s Amalia (1855) and Juana Manso’s Los misterios del Plata (1855) establish the “representative vocabulary” (57) for the dictator novel in their portrayals of Rosas himself. Mármol’s and Manso’s Rosas, as well as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s titular Facundo (1845) are both bodily grotesque and preoccupied with the written presentation of themselves and their enemies. These early dictator texts thus serve as repositories for cataloguing the dictator’s abuses and articulating the authors’ critiques, but also for suggesting political alternatives for the present and the future. Writing thus acquires a political charge. Second, The Dictator Novel shows how these texts increasingly prioritize the structural apparatus that maintains dictatorship over the primacy of the dictator. Armillas-Tiseyra...