The Humanities Center welcomes Magali Armillas-Tiseyra (Penn State University, Comparative Literature). 

Former Humanities Center Early Career Fellow Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra returns to discuss her recently published book, The Dictator Novel. She has circulated the first two chapters of that work for discussion here. A copy of the entire text is available electronically from the library here. Susan Andrade (English) and Felix Germain (Africana Studies) will also offer responses

Where there are dictators, there are novels about dictators. But “dictator novels” do not simply respond to the reality of dictatorship. While these works may take a particular historical referent as starting point, I argue that they are as much about the existing conventions for thinking and speaking about dictatorship as they are about dictatorship itself. 

Primarily identified with Latin America--where writing about dictatorship stretches back to the founding of independent republics in the nineteenth century--the dictator novel also has under-acknowledged importance in the postcolonial literatures of francophone and anglophone Africa. A juxtaposition of these different iterations of the dictator novel illuminates the internal dynamics of the dictator novel as a literary genre that cuts across time and place. As this genre cohered, it  acquired a self-generating force distinct from its historical referents. The dictator novel has become a space in which writers consider the difficulties of national consolidation, explore the role of external and global forces in sustaining dictatorship, and even interrogate the political functions of writing itself. Literary representations of the dictator, therefore, provide ground for a self-conscious and self-critical theorization of the relationship between writing and politics