Publication Type
Journal Article
Book Title/Conference/Journal
Journal of International and Intercultural Communication
Year
7-2012
Abstract
In Latin America, collective remembering is shaped by stories of colonizers whose voracious ambitions left an indelible mark on the landscape and its people. This essay examines a set of narratives about a legendary colonizer, Lope de Aguirre, that continue to be invoked in the collective imagination on the island of Margarita, in Venezuela. Drawing on Bormann’s Symbolic Convergence Theory and Bakhtin’s work on cultural discourse, this analysis shows that on the one hand, the narratives converge to support official records of Aguirre as an archetype of colonial brutality. Yet on the other, alternate versions of the stories reveal a more discordant picture, one that complicates Aguirre’s character and reevaluates his influence on the island and in the wider context of Latin America.
Keywords
Collective Memory, Postcolonial Latin America, Symbolic Convergence, Cultural Discourse, Heteroglossia
Disciplines
Communication | Critical and Cultural Studies | International and Intercultural Communication
ISSN/ISBN
1751-3057
DOI
10.1080/17513057.2012.705311
Language
eng
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Format
application\pdf
Citation
ESTAVA DAVIS, Jennifer Kate.
Lope de Aguirre, the Tyrant, and the Prince: Convergence and Divergence in Postcolonial Collective Memory. (2012). Journal of International and Intercultural Communication. 5, (4), 291-308. Research Collection Centre for English Communication.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cec_research/4
Included in
Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, International and Intercultural Communication Commons