Foundational Fictions explores the close relationship between statemaking and literary production in nineteenth-century Latin America. Working backward from the Boom novels of the 1960s and 1970s (whose revolutionary implications have gained them a place in many a history syllabus), Doris Sommer turns her attention to the books the Boom reacted against, “the national novels of Latin America— the ones that governments institutionalized in the schools and that are by now indistinguishable from patriotic histories” (p. 30). She finds them no less riddled with politics, though of a very different sort. Her study opens new doors to our understanding of how national identities were imagined into existence in Latin America.
With few exceptions, the protagonists of these romances are star-crossed lovers separated by class, race, or regional ties—exactly the same divisive obstacles faced by postcolonial political projects. Some of the books have happy endings, “pretty lies” for a readership faced with daunting social and political problems; but even tearful endings offered the hope of some kind of spiritual transcendence. In her nuanced and carefully contextualized readings of more than a dozen of these books, Sommer shows the nature of their appeal and makes a convincing argument for the centrality of what she calls the “erotics of politics” in nineteenth-century Latin America. Where else, after all, has interracial sex been a more important source of national identities?
The first section of Foundational Fictions sets up an interpretive framework for the subsequent discussions of individual novels. Sommer relates the erotics of politics to the ideas of Benedict Anderson, Michel Foucault, and Antonio Gramsci, showing how Latin America’s national romances configured political relations in gendered terms. She also provides links with the model of elite family power proposed by Diana Balmori, Stuart F. Voss, and Miles Wortman in Notable Family Networks in Latin America (1984). Once they were established in national educational curriculums of course, the influence of these foundational fictions reached far beyond the elite. Sommer notes that a more rigid patriarchal discourse emerged as populism threatened the familiar social hierarchy in the twentieth century.
Though grounded in history, Sommer’s is a work of literary criticism, and historians will notice differing conventions immediately. To begin with, critics assume “that literature has the capacity to intervene in history, to help construct it” (p. 10), while historians usually want to see the intervention demonstrated for each case. In addition, Sommer’s prose is playful, irreverent, and personal in a way we dour historians never allow ourselves to be. Such differences only add to the appeal of this superbly written and pathbreaking book.
