Overview

False Documents: Inter-American Cultural History, Literature, and the Lost Decade (1975-1992) examines the ""return of history"" that swept across the Americas during the final two decades of the Cold War as Latin American nations redemocratized and US multiculturalism responded to the conservative bicentennial backlash. Revising the predominantly economic and isolationist accounts of the era, Frans Weiser examines the work of journalists and academics from Hispanic America, Brazil, and the United States who adopted fiction to document recent national discord, repositioning challenges to self-determination in a postnational context. After deconstructing economic accounts of the ""two Americas"" model of the hemisphere, including the lost decade (1981-1992) and the ""end of history"" (1975-1992), Weiser considers six case studies during the same period that reach very different conclusions by drawing on cultural history, including works by Tomás Eloy Martínez, Laura Antillano, Ana Maria Machado, Silviano Santiago, John Updike, and Jay Cantor. In order to expose how governments controlled and misrepresented recent events, these writers created false documents, or fake historical texts, that presented themselves as legitimate eyewitness accounts or archival documents. Weiser establishes how this alternative to postmodern irony more effectively galvanized citizen responses. As the first book to contextualize the parallel, hemispheric evolutions of postwar literary criticism and cultural historiography, False Documents responds to the methodological impasse between Latin American and American studies as well as the antagonism between history and literature, arguing that collaboration and synthesis are particularly vital at a moment when the humanities is increasingly under attack.

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9780814214367

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Reviews

By incorporating inter-American theories that came to the fore during the 'lost decades' of the '70s and '80s, when those societies underwent sweeping political traumas, Weiser's thesis explains how the novels freely re-create historical figures recognized by their foundational role in the formation of cultural symbolic traditions. The works mine recent interpretations as well as the past, concentrating on blind spots and ambiguities, insisting on completing unfinished memoirs, and testing the borders between literature and journalism....Summing up: Recommended. --O. B. Gonzalez, CHOICE In False Documents, Frans Weiser vividly demonstrates the value of the comparative inter-American project, which is rapidly changing how we see ourselves and each other here in the Americas. Weiser makes a significant contribution to both our better understanding of what the inter-American project entails and of how much, our differences notwithstanding, we have in common as various forms of American nation states. --Earl E. Fitz

In False Documents, Frans Weiser vividly demonstrates the value of the comparative inter-American project, which is rapidly changing how we see ourselves and each other here in the Americas. Weiser makes a significant contribution to both our better understanding of what the inter-American project entails and of how much, our differences notwithstanding, we have in common as various forms of American nation states. --Earl E. Fitz

"""By incorporating inter-American theories that came to the fore during the 'lost decades' of the '70s and '80s, when those societies underwent sweeping political traumas, Weiser's thesis explains how the novels freely re-create historical figures recognized by their foundational role in the formation of cultural symbolic traditions. The works mine recent interpretations as well as the past, concentrating on blind spots and ambiguities, insisting on completing unfinished memoirs, and testing the borders between literature and journalism....Summing up: Recommended."" --O. B. González, CHOICE ""In False Documents, Frans Weiser vividly demonstrates the value of the comparative inter-American project, which is rapidly changing how we see ourselves and each other here in the Americas. Weiser makes a significant contribution to both our better understanding of what the inter-American project entails and of how much, our differences notwithstanding, we have in common as various forms of American nation states."" --Earl E. Fitz"

Author Information

Frans Weiser is Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia.

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