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In analyzing the works of Manuel Zapata Olivella, Afro-Colombian scholar and author, it can be stated definitively that his works of fiction purposely construct a historical reality that is often not represented in canonical Latin American fiction. From his first published work Tierra mojada (1947), a novel, to his most recent La rebelion de los genes (1997), a collection of essays, this author thematically "centers" the socio-political literary "realities" that exist within Latin America as well as other geographical spaces encompassing the African Diaspora.
However, of his many novels, one fictional piece in particular merits a postmodernist reading. That work is his most ambitious, Chango, el gran Putas (1983) cited hereafter as Chango. Chango is, in my estimation, a work that can be analyzed using aspects of Linda Hutcheon's theories regarding the postmodern A major conceptual element of her ascription of a denotative signifier to post-modernism and the postmodern text is that of "historiographic metafiction" and the author's ability to subversively manipulate fiction by means of literary de- centering, chronological disruption and de- mythification. To this end, Chango emerges as a fictional work that fulfills and exceeds the expectations of a postmodern text as articulated by Hutcheon. Chango is a novel that is self-reflexive in that the work represents a palimpsest of "fictions" that have a defined historical base. As a postmodern text, Chango de-centers, disrupts and de-mythifies Eurocentric accounts of the literary representations presented in the work while focusing attention on the fictionalization of actual social, political and historical realities in an "Africanized" context.
Linda Hutcheon is viewed by many literary critics as a leading authority on postmodernism in literary criticism as a result of her acclaimed, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988). Critics and scholars of Latin American literature regard this seminal work as a fundamental reference on the explication of postmodernist theory largely due to the author's comprehensive presentation. In this theoretical work, the applicability of postmodernism to literature is presented in its broadest scope, facilitating an approximation to most world literatures. Interestingly, as Hutcheon expands her definition in order to give a more pluralistic approach, she also recognizes the inherent problems of such an undertaking. A disclaimer that Hutcheon makes at the outset of her analysis is the convoluted,...