Américanas, Autocracy, and Autobiographical Innovation

Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle (PhD, English, Wayne State University, 2000) is Professor of English at The College of New Jersey. Her work appears in European Journal of Life Writing , a/b: Auto/Biography Studies , Life Writing Annual ,and Life Writing . Her research also appears in critical collections and anthologies, including Inhabiting La Patria : Identity, Agency, and Antojo in the Work of Julia Alvarez , edited by Emily Hipchen and Rebecca Harrison (2014). She was recently awarded the annual Hogan Prize (2018) by the editors of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies for recognition of an outstanding essay published in the journal. She has been a summer fellow at the Cornell School of Criticism and Theory (1998) and a visiting scholar in the Center for Biographical Research at the University of Hawai’i, at Manoa (summer 2018) and in the Departments of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies and English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Edmonton (2020). She currently serves as Book Reviews Editor for a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

• Introduction: "Impossible Autobiography: Women’s Life Writing and Twentieth Century Latin American Dictatorships"Chapter 1: "I Remember Trujillo: Trujillo en Mis Memorias Denial, Shame, Martyrdom, and Nostalgia in Dominican Women’s Memoir"Remembering Trujillo: The Memoir BoomDictator as Tragic Hero: Aída Trujillo and the Shadow of Third-Person Memoir The Daughter and the Demi-God: Fugitive Acts in Flor de Oro Trujillo’s Memoir Exposé Memoir as "Casa-Museo": Dédé Mirabal’s Ritual Memorial and the Transmission of MemoryPatremoir as Post-Dictatorial Counter-tour: Angelita Trujillo’s Publicly Private Nostalgia ¿Seguiré a Caballo?: Trujillo in the Twenty-first Century Imagination Chapter 2: "Dueña y Señora de Su Canto": Autobiographical Depictions of the New Nicaraguan WomanPoetic Interiorismo and "The Six": Why This Is Not TestimonioMilk Poems and Blood Poems: Womanhood, Embodiment, and the New Nicaraguan WomanThe Mirror Poems: Refractory and Reciprocal RecognitionChapter 3: "‘Distinguished Ladies’ and the Doctrine of Chilean Womanhood: The ‘Anti-manuals’ of Diamela Eltit, Isabel Allende and Marjorie Agosín"The Distinguished WomanAuto-surveillance and Auto-performance in Diamela Eltit’s E. Luminata"Only a Woman Could Imagine a Story Like This": Desire and Patriotism in Isabel Allende’s Aphrodite and My Invented CountryMarjorie Agosín’s Filial Narrative: Producing Genres of Liberation in the Next GenerationMatremoir: A Cross and A StarPatremoir: Always from Somewhere ElseChapter 4: "Exile Memory and The Paradigmatic Before-and-After in Post-1959 Cuban Women’s Life Writing"Overwriting Fidel: Zoe Valdés on How a Leftist Dictator is Still a DictatorRevisionary Exile Memory "Salida Definitiva / Definitive Departure": Ruth Behar’s Autoethnographic Memory and the Impossibility of ReturnReconciling the IrreconcilableChapter 5: "‘There is No Need for Us to Speak of Eva Perón’: Evita’s Caudillagrafia"Caudillagrafia: Autobiography as Perónist Manifesto Doctrinary Overwriting: How to Hide a DictatorShadow and LightThe Condor and the SparrowEl Simulacro: Not Even the Peróns were the PerónsOld Eva / New EvitaThe "Benefactress"La Presidenta / La ResentidaThe Heart and the Womb of ArgentinaConclusion: Self-less Self-representationConclusion: "Common Denominators: Impossible Autobiographies"

"Throughout the work, Ortiz-Vilarelle articulates her analyses with a number of scholars in autobiography studies, such as Paul John Eakin, Leigh Gilmore, Marianne Hirsch, and Sidonie Smith. The text succeeds in laying out the myriad strategies women writers use to bypass the impossibility of writing the self in autocratic environments."- Renata Lucena Dalmaso, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly