UC Riverside

This dissertation takes up questions incited by encounters with novels by Tim Z. Hernandez, Emma Pérez, Edward P. Jones, Colson Whitehead, Carmen Boullosa, Luis Alberto Urrea, Toni Morrison, and other contemporary authors of historical fiction. While contemporary historical novels frequently receive critical recognition as well as literary prizes, few studies examine the formal aspects of historical fiction as a genre, and those genre-oriented studies that exist tend to ignore works by writers of color. I posit that the absence of an analysis of how Latina/o studies, Black studies, biopolitical theory and its historiography, and historical fiction as a genre intersect makes it difficult for us to perceive how these historical fictions operate. Invested in both the study of contemporary historical fiction as a form and in Latina/o studies, Black studies, and biopolitical theory, my dissertation produces such a synthesis. My project examines how these authors play with genre conventions, particularly through the rejection of realism and the frequent use of experimental literary forms to critique dominant modes of writing history. These authors also emphasize a face-to-face encounter with lost individuals and events of the past. I argue that their works are not antiquarian depictions of how things really were; rather, their speculative and often deliberately anachronistic historical fictions attempt to reframe the past from the perspective of the present. They do so in order to challenge nationalist accounts of U.S. history, read archival documents against the grain, and give voice to individuals and groups who have been erased, forgotten, or otherwise elided by dominant historical narratives. I term these novels and works like them “presentist historical fictions” because they situate analyses or critiques of the past in terms of the present. For these works, anachronism and a “presentist” orientation is not an error due to a faulty understanding of history but a strategy for drawing the past imaginatively into the present, for disrupting readers’ received ideas about what took place in the past, and for retroactively correcting historical erasures through encountering figures of the past face-to-face.