UC Davis

The Haitian Revolution won national independence through ardent battle with successive European colonial powers, simultaneously sparking a wave of slave abolition and aligning with the most radical sectors of the French Revolution. Against that standard, the states then detaching from Spain like Bolívar’s Gran Colombia appear as deeply ambiguous victories, dangling abolition cynically before the slaves in part to reduce their numbers as cannon fodder, repressing the persistent attempts at state-formation by the descendents of Inca, and preserving the economic and political power of a narrow national bourgeoisie.

This dissertation analyzes the role of independence in Latin America, beginning with a close reading of a key narrative of the region’s genesis, Alejo Carpentier’s El siglo de las luces. I focus on Carpentier’s concept of Latin American reality as a bridge connecting the elite structure of the Creole Republics in the 1820s to what ensues: an idiosyncratic mix of endogenous vanguard movements with unextinguished tracts of pre-colonial ecosystems, and an ethnically heterodox mestizaje reflecting histories of migration, African chattel slavery, and extant indigenous nations – all in perennial antagonism under the United States’ regional hegemony.

Aiming to retrieve Carpentier from the staid tomb of a reputation determined by the Yale Lit Crit of González Echevarría, I track the continuity of his fiction, and folkloric studies like La música en Cuba, with landmark works on the continent’s liberation struggle like The Black Jacobins and Las venas abiertas de América latina. Applying the framework of his musicology in the Caribbean to case studies on Chile and the U.S., the second chapter sketches a genealogy of national-popular aesthetics in the Americas through artists such as Violeta Parra and Woody Guthrie.

The Latin American reality that developed out of the colonial and pre-Columbian periods is also given a surprisingly insightful description in writings by Karl Marx. My third chapter is an exposition of those little-known texts and their reception by thinkers like Álvaro García Linera. I argue that the historical materialism of Latin American independence that they articulate finds a complementary narrative form in Carpentier’s realism.

In these three long-form chapters, I articulate the historical, cultural, and political valences of the reality represented in Carpentier. Key issues raised include abolition, reification, folklore, the capitalist unconscious, the indigenous peasantry, ecology and the national-popular. The central thinkers considered include C.L.R. James, García Linera, Violeta Parra, Marx, Fredric Jameson, and Eduardo Galeano.