Forms of Dictatorship: Power, Narrative, and Authoritarianism in the Latina/o Novel by Jennifer Harford Vargas (review)

In the past thirty years, dictatorship has been both a central and peripheral presence in the works of well-known Latina/o authors such as Junot Díaz, Julia Alvarez, and Cristina García. While critics have analyzed the specter of dictatorship in Latina/o novels in various articles and book chapters, until recently, no critics have given full attention to this subject in a book-length study, despite the history of scholarship surrounding the Spanish and Latin American novela de dictador genre. Jennifer Harford Vargas fills this gap with her monograph Forms of Dictatorship: Power, Narrative, and Authoritarianism in the Latina/o Novel. Weaving together discourses from Latina/o, postdictatorship, postmemory, and decolonial studies, Harford Vargas defines the "Latina/o dictatorship novel" and makes a compelling case for its consideration as a literary genre. Across five chapters, Harford Vargas defines "the Latina/o counter-dictatorial imaginary," a literary style that places dictatorship on a continuum that includes authoritarianism, US imperialism, and systems of gender, class, and racial oppression. Through a convincing analysis of the formal structures of five different Latina/o novels, she argues that the novels draw a connection between US imperialism abroad and domestic power structures in the United States.

Four of the five chapters of Forms of Dictatorship begin with a brief analysis of a Latin American dictatorship novel to demonstrate how Latina/o dictatorship novels build on and depart from their Latin American counterparts. The introduction to the first chapter uses El señor presidente to underscore Miguel Ángel Asturias and Junot Díaz's shared concern about the troubling capacity for both author and dictator to build foundational narratives and produce meaning. Harford Vargas argues that two of the major themes of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, fukú (curse) and zafa (counter-spell), represent the two extremes of dictating: "dictating as dominating … and dictating as recounting or writing back" (37). The narrative techniques and formal structures of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, such as foregrounding Oscar and primarily marginalizing Trujillo to footnotes, function as a zafa that challenges dictatorial power. In this chapter, Harford Vargas provides a delightfully original reading of the novel's acclaimed footnotes, suggesting that they textually represent the clandestine dissemination of information during dictatorships.

While the first chapter focuses on a literary representation of the lasting impacts of a historical dictator, the second chapter turns to the metafictional novel The People of Paper, in which the writer is the dictator. In one of the most powerful analyses of Forms of Dictatorship, Harford Vargas puns on authoritarianism to investigate authoritarianism: the troubled relationship between author, authority, and authoritarianism. Given the trend of reading Latina/o novels as resisting dominant US cultural narratives, this chapter is a potent reminder to scholars that writers and novels are also products of systems of power and domination. Here, the author's attentiveness to Latina/o and Latin American literature is particularly helpful, as she reminds us of the link between writing and violence in the Americas that began during colonization. She argues that through its metafictional structure, The People of Paper critiques literature that profits from the crises and misery of Latina/o people. Although the novel thematically emphasizes the resistance of its main characters, its formal structure and its positioning of the writer as dictator push readers toward an awareness of the novel's status as a commodity in the global literary marketplace.

This attention to neoliberal literary markets extends into a larger interrogation of the relationship between dictatorships and neoliberalism in the third chapter of Forms of Dictatorship. This chapter analyzes the tropes of ships and shipwrecks in Francisco Goldman's The Ordinary Seaman as representative of the relationship between systems of slavery, dictatorship, and modern neoliberal markets. Harford Vargas posits that the ship in the novel operates as a floating authoritarian space in which the captain functions as dictator, and the shipwreck...