Forms of Memory

The Aesthetics of Ambivalent Agonism in «También la lluvia» and «Conquistadora»

Abstract

This article uses a comparative cultural studies approach to analyze two contemporary re-tellings of colonial history in the Americas: Spanish director Icíar Bollaín’s film, También la lluvia/Even the Rain (2010), and US-Puerto Rican author Esmeralda Santiago’s historical novel, Conquistadora (2011). También la lluvia and Conquistadora offer case studies in the aesthetics of the agonistic mode of remembering, although it is one that I qualify as ambivalent for the ways in which both texts’ goal of promoting individual and collective agency is mediated by narrative strategies that replicate colonial power dynamics. Through metanarrative, defamiliarization, multiple points and other strategies that question narrative cohesion and historical truth, the texts’ ambivalent agonism exposes the coloniality of power across spaces and time, including within the texts themselves.