Collisions with History: Latin American Fiction and Social Science from El Boom to the New World Order

Latin American intellectuals have traditionally debated their region’s history, never with so much agreement than in the fiction, commentary, and scholarship of the late twentieth-century. Collisions with History shows how fictional histories of discovery and conquest, independence and early nationhood, and the recent authoritarian past were purposeful revisionist collisions with received national versions. These collisions occurred only because of El Boom, thus making Latin America’s greatest literary movement a historical phenomenon as well. Frederick M. Nunn discusses the cataclysmic view of history conveyed in Boom novels, examining the thought and self-perception of selected authors whose political activism enhanced the appeal of their works-historical and otherwise: Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Augusto Roa Bastos; Julio Cortazar, Isabel Allende, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Darcy Ribeiro. Collisions with History demonstrates how their commentary on history, literature, politics, and international affairs reveals a conscious sense of purpose. From between the lines of their nonfiction emerges a consensus that outside forces have controlled and defined Latin America’s history. Professor Nunn also suggest’s that with novelists now no longer very interested in colliding with history, it may fall to social scientists to speak for what remains of the region’s past in the New World Order.