Resumen de Critique, utopia, and the remapping of the postcolonial historical novel in El largo atardecer del caminante and the moor’s account
In the 2019 monograph Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction, Greg Forter argues that a new and radically non-national form of historical fiction has emerged over the past fifty years.1 Studying a corpus of novels set largely in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Forter observes that while classical forms of the genre may have played a crucial role in defining national imaginaries, historical novels since the 1970s have gone fully global in their concerns, developing "critical cognitive maps" of the destructive spread of colonial capitalism across oceans and hemispheres at the same time that they rescue utopic "counterstories" of cross-national and cross-racial solidarity that offer conceptual models for a more just postcolonial future (5-6). Tracing the way these novels define anti-colonial, minoritized cosmopolitan visions alongside yet in tension with each other, this study suggests the strategic particularism of postcolonial novels' globality and the possibilities it offers a world caught between globalization and nativist backlash.3 Posse's and Lalami's novels are only two of many historical novels to depict Europe's first empire to achieve global scale, but they serve as particularly useful points of comparison for the texts Forter analyzes because they combine an overt critique of colonial capitalism with a depiction of the novels' writing as a self-conscious act of remapping. El largo atardecer del caminante, the final novel of a conquest trilogy that Posse finished while serving as Argentine ambassador to Czechoslovakia at the end of the Cold War, tells the story of the Spanish expedition from the point of view of an elderly, transculturated Cabeza de Vaca now living in reduced circumstances at the edge of the Jewish quarter in Seville.4 Shortly after the novel opens, Cabeza de Vaca is browsing in a library in the Torre de Fadrique when he comes upon the court's official new map of the Florida region, which is based on his Relación'. The essay calls out behaviors that are exacerbating intolerance and displacement: fear-stoked polarization, a double standard that holds Muslims (but not white mass shooters) collectively responsible for terrorism, and ignorant equation of 'Islam' with 'ISIS' and 'Muslim' with 'terrorist.'7 These concerns over the waves and riptides of colonial capitalism's spread appear in Posse's and Lalami's retellings of Cabeza de Vaca's story, at first glance looking much like the global cognitive mapping that Forter observes in his corpus.
