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- Title
Unauthorized Storytelling: Reevaluating Racial Politics in Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies.
- Authors
Zimmerman, Tegan
- Abstract
This article revisits Julia Alvarez's critically acclaimed historical novel In the Time of the Butterflies (1994). While much scholarship has paid attention to the novel as historiographic metafiction, its depiction of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo's regime (1930-61), and its feminist perspective on the Dominican Republic, its racial politics are under-studied. In particular, scholars have overlooked Fela, the Afra-Dominican servant, spirit medium, and storyteller. I argue that studying Fela's presence in the text as an unauthorized and unauthored voice not only adds complexity to the production of historiography and storytelling but also provides new insight into postcolonial feminist critiques of voice/lessness, narrative, and marginalized identities in the novel and criticism on it. Closely analyzing Fela's voice—as it intersects with storytelling, historical slave narratives, Vodou, the maternal, and Haiti's contribution to the Dominican Republic's history—makes visible the unacknowledged yet essential role of the Afra-Dominican not only in this novel specifically but also to the Dominican Republic more generally.
- Subjects
IN the Time of the Butterflies (Book); ALVAREZ, Julia, 1950-; HISTORICAL fiction -- History &; criticism; SLAVERY in literature; STORYTELLING; RACE &; politics; HISTORIOGRAPHY; FEMINISM
- Publication
MELUS, 2020, Vol 45, Issue 1, p95
- ISSN
0163-755X
- Publication type
Literary Criticism
- DOI
10.1093/melus/mlz067