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Historical Subversion and Violence of Representation in García Márquez and Ouologuem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Edna Aizenberg
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Abstract

The rediscovery of history, a recent literary-critical event, is problematic in its elision of the non-Western past and its subsumption of non-Western fictional works. Likewise, some new studies on the interplay of violence and representation, while offered as critiques of Western discourse, ignore significant earlier Third World theorizations. This essay, in focusing on Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Yambo Ouologuem's Bound to Violence, aims to reinstate the absent history: those Third World conditions and exigencies that link postcolonial novels and a desire to think historically. Both books adopt a violent narrative strategy that reflects their status as products of a ruptured history scarred by imperialization.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 107 , Issue 5 , October 1992 , pp. 1235 - 1252
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1992

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