Against Against Literature: Histories of Fiction, Fictions of History

Abstract

This section combines several threads of discussion from previous sections, including bringing Alvarez more directly into conversation with Danticat, introducing work in the philosophy of history by Michel-Rolphe Touillot to deepen the earlier analysis of Hayden White, and returning to John Beverley’s work on literature, testimonio, and cultural studies, to describe literature’s, and literary studies’, historical resilience in the face of especially Beverley’s important critiques from the nineteen nineties. The section concludes by turning briefly to Alvarez’s novel Salomé and Danticat’s literary memoir Brother, I’m Dying, in order to describe how each text deploys literary resources to cut across and even to merge the mimetic registers of fiction and history.