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Abstract
This dissertation is concerned with the representations of youth political culture in contemporary Dominican literature. It examines the literary figurations of youth's political defeat as constructed in four novels: Pedro Vergés' Solo cenizas hallarás (bolero) (1980), Nosotras, las de entonces (2019) by Margarita Cordero, Charamicos (2003) by Ángela Hernández, and Rita Indiana's La estrategia de Chochueca (2003). The study focuses on the failure of the youth's revolutionary utopias and traces the ways in which they negotiate their political praxis, identity, and possibilities within a context shaped by the afterlives of dictatorship. My understanding of "afterlife" draws from the work of Achille Mbembe. It is a necropolitics, which he describes as a political order ruled by "paranoid dispositions, hysterical violence, and procedures to annihilate all those that democracy will have constituted as enemies of state" (41). This oppressive setting, I argue, forms the basis for the youth's militancy.
The study traces a historical arc of youth political activism, encompassing the period from 1961 to the late 1990s. Each chapter approaches youth's political practices through a distinct theoretical lens. Chapter 1 analyzes Solo cenizas hallarás (bolero) and mobilizes the concept of the ruin, drawing from Diana Taylor's work, to conceptualize the post-dictatorial context as a tiempo muerto that hinders the youth's political development. This leads to the search for catharsis through the bolero milieu and, ultimately, to migration. Chapter 2 centers on Nosotras, las de entonces and engages the complex history of the epistolary form to position its activation in the novel as enabling the articulation of a feminine authorial voice and the demystification of the civil war female combatant. Chapter 3 studies Charamicos and draws from the bildungsroman and what Rita Felski describes as "the novel of female self-discovery" to examine the political and personal coming-of-age of the protagonist, Trinidad, who enacts a new paradigm of existence through her sorority with Ercira and her introspective practices. Finally, Chapter 4 focuses on La estrategia de Chochueca and engages in a more direct manner with Mbembe's necropolitics and Jean Baudrillard's order of the hyperreal to suggest the youth's social reality as a necrological hyperreality that prompts the assumption of alternative political strategies in order to dismantle the legacy of death.
Ultimately, this dissertation suggests that, even as they underscore their political failure and disillusionment, these narratives also represent youth as agents that problematize the oppressive regimes' legacies and mythologies through the articulation of new forms of political practice. It particularly reads migration, epistolary writing, sorority and introspection, hedonism and necropolitical defiance as political gestures that allow the development of new subjectivities and new relationships to themselves, each other, the social space, and the political past.