Resumen de The postmodern self of Julia Alvarez's KV: Identity, memory and community
In the late 1980s and 1990s in what has been termed the Post-Chicano Movement Period, the influence of theories of postmodernity and new understandings of multiculturalism have called into question stable concepts of identity. The Dominican-American writer Julia Alvarez exemplifies the hybrid identity of hyphenated Americans whose formation links them crucially to both the North and the South, and whose writing glides perpetually between these distinct geographic, cultural, and political spaces. Her 1997 novel il'o! engages in postmodern narrative experimentation to interrogate the non-complex concepts of identity and the self that were a crucial element of Movement politics. She links self-identity to the community through a trope that might be termed "the revenge of the characters," allowing the fictional testimonies of old and new characters to construct the central "I" of the novel, the authorial self. The interviewer now replaces the interviewee as the narrative subject, although the author ultimately remains in control, portraying herself in the third person the way she wishes to. Alvarez's engagement with issues and techniques of postmodernism in this book is not the unmotivated play of rhetorical tropes like the exotic images on the front cover, but rather a crucial means of recuperating and renewing the self-narrative of an exiled Latino community in the United States.
