Group identity in literature.

If mid-twentieth-century African-American authors based discussions of race in America on the theories of prominent Franco-African writers, African-American writers such as Richard Wright were also highly influential in discussions of race in the French literary context. Wright's novel Native Son focuses on protagonist Bigger Thomas, a young black man who accidentally commits murder. After realizing how the white community has interpreted his act, Bigger tries without success to break free of "double consciousness," or fragmented subjectivity, first articulated by W. E. B. DuBois. Boris Vian's text J'irai cracher sur vos tombes problematizes Wright's literary analysis of race through protagonist Lee Anderson, an explicit literary reworking of Bigger. Lee, in deliberately passing as white in order to murder two women, displays a more deliberate subjectivity. The act of passing erodes the legal foundation of black segregation and highlights a more active subjectivity, yet it also displays the limitations encoded in that act.

At the beginning of the 20th century, literary criollism emerged as Latin American nations struggled to achieve national unity and to differentiate themselves from Europe. In Argentina, the "gaucho" was the most autochthonous symbol to be used by the criollists. This thesis examines how two novels, Los caranchos de La Florida and El ingles de los guesos by the Argentinean writer Benito Lynch, in opposition to the exotic version introduced by his contemporaries such as Ricardo Guiraldes, denounce the real situation of the gaucho. The gauchos became the subject of abuse by the landowners and were forgotten by the nation, which excluded them from the national project of unification. I introduce the term "gauchista" literature, analogous to the "indigenista" movement, to characterize Lynch's voice of protest and vindication of the gaucho and his right to education and dignity.