Chile in Transition: The Poetics and Politics of Memory (review)

Reviews  111 neoliberalism and to allude obliquely to the social upheaval wrought by the recent military dictatorships in the specific case of the River Plate novels. Nevertheless, like Kimberle S. López, Hernández acknowledges that the supposed ‘oppositional’ nature of these novels is substantially compromised by the fact that none of the novels presents an indigenous perspective on colonial history and that, for all their satire and parody, they re-assert the historical role of the conquistador as privileged speaking subject. In this respect, Hernández is especially critical of Eugenio Aguirre’s Gonzalo Guerrero as an example of how, in displacing the origins of Mexican mestizaje, the hegemony of European culture over Amerindian culture is still underscored rather than undermined. One wonders , however, if one can therefore continue to conceive of these novels as acts of ‘‘literary decolonization’’ (25) as the author maintains. By the same token, one might also wonder how these novels dismantle ‘‘the monologic discourse of Hispanidad’’ (140) if, by their very nature, they continue to simply obfuscate the heterogeneity of Latin American cultures. Furthermore, in addition to these objections, Hernández also acknowledges that these novels, albeit inadvertently, perpetuate the canonical status of the early colonial chronicles and naturalize their continued transmission as ‘‘foundational writings of Latin American literature ’’ (12). Nevertheless, Hernández’s overall thesis is that, in spite of these inherent contradictions, the novels of conquest can still be regarded as artistic attempts to deconstruct the rhetoric of empire, to reveal the fissures within colonial discourse, and to demystify accepted notions of the origins of national identity . Although a relatively slim volume, Figural Conquistadors provides readers with a wealth of information, copious notes, and a comprehensive bibliography. In that sense, it will be a welcome contribution for students and instructors of modern Latin American literature who have only a basic knowledge of colonial history and who are interested in how and why the quincenntenial was commemorated by Latin American novelists in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The book will also be welcome by those specialists in the colonial period who are concerned with the contemporary fictionalization of history, even if much of the background information (the rather dubious explanation of the distinction between ‘discovery’ and ‘encounter,’ for example) provided by the author may prove to be redundant for these readers. Finally, it is clear that, in general, this study is an impressively cogent point of departure for initiating in-depth discussions about the history/fiction binary, about the nature of both ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ history, and about how apparently radical forms of literature might actually reflect the hegemonic discourses they claim to oppose. DAVID ROJINSKY, University of Toronto lazzara, michael j. Chile in Transition: The Poetics and Politics of Memory. Gainesville : UP of Florida, 2006. 199 pages. Chile’s return to democracy after seventeen years of military rule has been a complicated and extended process. Beginning in 1990 with the first democrati- 112  Revista Hispánica Moderna 61.1 (2008) cally elected government since Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état against Salvador Allende’s presidency in 1973, the period known as the ‘‘transition’’ lasted well into the new millennium, and arguably continues to the present day. One of the most pressing tasks of the period has been to confront the violence perpetrated by Pinochet’s brutal regime and to understand its effects on the present. There is a plethora of analytical and creative works dedicated to this issue, written primarily in Spanish. In Chile in Transition: The Poetics and Politics of Memory, Michael Lazzara has produced an admirable study of this period—perhaps the best booklength study in English to date—focusing on the intersection between politics and aesthetics, and the diverse ways in which the transition and the legacy of the dictatorship have been represented in Chile. Lazzara enters the delicate terrain of memory politics with caution, thanks to his sensitivity to the contradictory impulses and stances that characterize the political, cultural, and intellectual spheres in Chile, and also to his wide readings in trauma theory and other works that deal with memory and representation in the wake of violence. The book begins with a series of difficult questions...