%0 Book %D 1984 %T One Master for Another: Populism as Patriarchal Rhetoric in Dominican Novels %A Doris Sommer %X

One Master for Another: Populism as Patriarchal Rhetoric in Dominican Novels (1984) develops a theory of patriotic narrative in response to quandaries about the nature of populism. Historians and social scientists know that it is not exactly an ideology, or a movement, or a political position. But they don't say what it is. My reading of a range of novels that follow the nation-building period shows that populism is a culture, a set of symbolic relationships that translates national crises and projects into the language of family crises: the struggle of a legitimate husband/people to recover the wife/land from the usurper. The patriarchal culture operates left and right of political and ideological differences. Either way, it blocks fundamental change, by reducing the woman (along with other sectors of the non-active citizenry) to a prize, an object of desire and struggle, instead of imagining anyone but the masculine "pueblo" as an agent.

%I University Press of America %C Lanham, MD %G eng %U http://www.amazon.com/One-Master-Another-Patriarchal-Dominican/dp/0819136069