Los Perros del Paraíso de Abel Posse: Mito, Rebelión y el Eterno Presente de la Historia Latinoamericana

Aguirre Perez, Fernando Alfredo

Publication:
Los Perros del Paraíso de Abel Posse: Mito, Rebelión y el Eterno Presente de la Historia Latinoamericana

dc.contributor.advisor	Luis A. Marentes
dc.contributor.author	Aguirre Perez, Fernando Alfredo
dc.contributor.department	University of Massachusetts Amherst
dc.contributor.department	Hispanic Literatures & Linguistics
dc.date	2023-09-23T03:05:40.000
dc.date.accessioned	2024-04-26T21:12:01Z
dc.date.available	2010-12-29T00:00:00Z
dc.date.issued	2011-01-01
dc.date.submitted	February
dc.description.abstract	Humorous and sarcastic on every page, the historical novel Los perros del paraíso (1983) by Abel Posse, presents itself as an iconoclast and subversive response to the historical account of the so-called discovery of the New World and the role played in it by Christopher Columbus. In this post-Boom narrative, linear time collapses and events conflate to depict a fantastic world where anachronism makes almost anything possible. Comic and grotesque in their attributes, characters appear performing a colonial play in which the absurd is apparently the sole stable rule. However, underneath this joyful surface, a colonial reason flows to confirm European Self and Indigenous Other in their classical division of ideological labor: master and slave, superior and inferior. A mystic Columbus, convinced he has finally found the Earthly Paradise and naïve Caribbeans, who believe conquerors are their returned gods reshape the myths of Latin American history not only as a total non-sense, but even worse, as an eternal condemnation of continuing its present condition of subordination. This process of mythification of history implies what I call its dehistorization, which means its epistemological cancellation as an explanatory discourse of human events. The ontological degradation of Columbus to an ape self-exiled from social life, and of indigenous as both cannibals and the perros del paraíso deprived from having a voice and having the will to rebell is the most eloquent proof that debasement of history is a consequence of the survival of a colonial point of view, which structures this novel as a whole.
dc.description.degree	Master of Arts (M.A.)
dc.identifier.doi	https://doi.org/10.7275/1713448
dc.identifier.uri	https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14394/47470
dc.relation.url	https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1663&context=theses&unstamped=1
dc.source.status	published
dc.subject	Historical novel
dc.subject	Colonialism
dc.subject	Myth
dc.subject	Dehistorization
dc.subject	Postcolonial
dc.subject	Latin American Literature
dc.subject	Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature
dc.title	Los Perros del Paraíso de Abel Posse: Mito, Rebelión y el Eterno Presente de la Historia Latinoamericana
dc.type	open
dc.type	article
dc.type	thesis
digcom.contributor.author	isAuthorOfPublication\|email:faguirreperez@gmail.com\|institution:University of Massachusetts Amherst\|Aguirre Perez, Fernando Alfredo
digcom.date.embargo	2010-12-29T00:00:00-08:00
digcom.identifier	theses/572
digcom.identifier.contextkey	1713448
digcom.identifier.submissionpath	theses/572
dspace.entity.type	Publication