Discursive Spaces And The Representation Of Experience

Discursive Spaces and the Representation of Experience

Spaces of Representation

Spaces of Representation: The Struggle for Social Justice in Postwar Guatemala juxtaposes a variety of contemporary Guatemalan discourses - literary fiction, testimonio, historical and political documents, and popular drama - calling into question such notions as truth, clarification, memory, and storytelling in the representation of human experience. It analyzes these texts in an effort to further a broader understanding of the dynamic social tensions that continue to exist in Guatemala despite the signing of the 1996 Peace Accords. This book illuminates the contemporary cultural production of Guatemala by highlighting peace and social justice - not as accomplished political and economic goals, but as perpetual motives for social transformation in Central America.

Conflict and Its Discursive Representations: Sustaining Support for War

This project seeks to demonstrate how multiple sites of discursive production (political elite, media, and popular culture) interact to construct truths about a conflict that condition political possibility. Through breaking down the interaction between multiple sites of production within moments of discursive stability and by tracing major themes across multiple sites of discursive production this work will illuminate the processes by which the ‘truth’ for a conflict is produced, sustained, and challenged. Specifically, this project will be contesting two historical moments of ‘naturalness’ wherein a dominant discourse established a representational stability within American foreign policy in order to display how multiple sites of production work to produce, sustain, and challenge the political realities of military interventions. In doing so, the processes which impact the production of policy and public acceptance/condemnation for military interventions will be demonstrated.