Muerte de Utopía — Wolfenzon Niego

By Carolyn Wolfenzon NiegoAssociate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures Muerte de Utopía: historia, antihistoria e insularidad en la novela latinoamericana, analyzes the representation of the colonial period (16th-18th centuries) and its literal and metaphorical islands in seven contemporary Latin American novels. The central hypothesis is that, in representing the colonial world, writers often depict current social and political problems reflective of their own time, rendering visible the permanence of colonial structures in postcolonial Latin America over a period of roughly 40 years. The book explores the relationship between the colonial past and the present in four different Latin American countries (Argentina, Cuba, Mexico and Peru) and how the times in which the novels were written maintain a permanent dialogue with the colonial past, producing the sensation that time does not move forward, but has stopped, and that History is not a continuum but rather, moves circul