Catedral Tomada: Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana (Jan 2022)

Multiculturalism in 19th Century Chilean Folletines of "Indian" Filiation

  • Eduardo Barraza

DOI
https://doi.org/10.5195/ct/2021.538
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 9, no. 17
pp. 252 – 267

Abstract

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A singular corpus of the Chilean narrative of the nineteenth century develops the topic of prevented love between Spaniards and Mapuche, according to which the happy ending only be possible through the civilization of the indigenous or thanks to their submission to Christian doctrine. For this reason, these are texts nor alien to the debate that is currently present in the theses regarding categories such as multiculturalism, interculturality, cultural plurality, among other approaches and exposes interculturality as “conflictivity” (Fornet-Betancourt, 1998, Dussel, 2005; García Canclini, 2011) according to the hybrid, precarious and inharmonious condition. It is, in fact, a “culturizing” narrative that gives way to paroxysmal outcomes typical of the folletin which at the time were called as typical of an “indian novel” by Zorobabel Rodriguez (1873). Our working hypothesis proposes that these transgressions end up being transferred from the melodramatic imaginary to a historiographical and cultural condition that does not attend to the conflictive but to the hegemonic with respect the conformation of our national identity.

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