Academic literature on the topic 'Honduran fiction'

Brian K. Vaughan’s and Marcos Martin’s science fiction comics series, Barrier (2015‐18), is a five-issue story set on the US-Mexican border and contributing to the continuing public discourse surrounding undocumented immigration in the United States. First appearing as a webcomic on Vaughan’s Panel Syndicate website and later published in comic book form by Image Comics, Barrier’s story of two characters, a Honduran refugee and a Texas rancher who struggle with and eventually come to rely on one another, depicts linguistic and cultural boundaries and borders, as well as the frustration and hostility they can generate. As comics, Barrier’s very medium works by means of crossing boundaries and borders: binaries (like word and image) are complicated if not subverted, and the borders of each panel remain closed yet open for sequential art to function as a medium for narrative. Moreover, as a bilingual webcomic crossing into print yet all but encouraging an ongoing virtual engagement through web searches and Google Translate, the series demands further creative energy from the reader in reimaging various barriers, borders and positions of liminality. Although stories that represent various kinds of borders (social, cultural and geopolitical) and various ways of establishing, challenging, crossing or deconstructing borders are frequently found in graphic narratives, Barrier demonstrates the south-west border to be one the medium of comics is especially suited to explore. Barrier is a work that takes as its very subject, to borrow a phrase from Ramzi Fawaz, ‘spatially drawn analogies’ in order to engage graphically matters of genuine political import. In doing so, Barrier not only reflects obliquely on its own form, but also engages creatively with one of the most politically and culturally contested spaces in contemporary US culture.

À partir de la mémoire individuelle et collective, Roberto Castillo, dans La guerra mortal de los sentidos (2002), montre comment les modes de vie sont conservés, d’une part, et comment ils sont reconfigurés, d’autre part, à travers les événements historiques et la manière de concevoir et de dire. Nous sommes témoins ici d’un passé mémoriel qui a la vertu de ne pas avoir disparu. Castillo s’approprie des faits historiques pour créer une fiction autour de l’un des groupes ethniques les plus importants du Honduras : les lencas. L’objectif est d’explorer des thèmes allant de la vie quotidienne aux événements les plus improbables, en les extrayant d’un corpus d’éléments référentiels qui accompagnent le langage : mythico-religieux, politiques et socioculturels, tous dépositaires d’événements collectifs attachés à la mémoire et à l’identité du peuple. Les éléments qui composent le tissu social collectif à travers l’utilisation du langage narratif par Castillo rendent compte de l’être et de l’appartenance à un groupe social au-delà de la pratique de la connaissance scientifique ou de l’existence d’une langue propre : par le biais de la mémoire vivante. Sur fond de recherche du dernier locuteur de la langue lenca, les utopies sont revitalisées et l’on retrouve la connexion avec les lieux, les liens sociaux, le sentiment d’appartenance et le respect du tissu culturel.

We can always look upon the intersection of history and events as an exciting façade, full of deceptions, half-baked truths, and awkward reconciliations in the framework of cultural studies. The Mexican author Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends (2017) attempts to trace the evolution of a set of social, political, and cultural circumstances that are pregnant with significance in the traumatic past of millions of Latin-American children refugees in the United States. First, the article will unpack how Luiselli’s impalpable domain tries to connect the unresolved experiences of the violent wounds of those children’s deportation and dislocation from Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico with their unfortunate encounters in the foreign land. Second, it will attempt to dismantle, disrupt, and deconstruct the construction of America as a heteroglossic space around the challenges of those displaced children by displaying some questions addressed to them at the immigrant court. Finally, the proposed paper will critically scrutinise how this non-fictional work follows the creeping imperialist approaches of the United States through the hazes of childhood recollections, making a heartfelt appeal to everyone to halt discrimination, racial hatred, and poisonous ignorance. Applying Agamben’s idea of the homo sacer, such a study will bring to the fore the dialectics of postcoloniality in the United States, where undocumented children’s claims to identity formation and self-determination processes would be at odds with the more comprehensive national identity in contemporary times.

In August of 1992, Hurricane Andrew battered south-eastern Florida, causing fifty-eight deaths, and more than $27 billion in property losses (National Climatic Data Center 1999). The following year, widespread flooding occurred within the Upper Mississippi River basin, inundating 5.3 million hectares during the worst flood to affect much of the region in this century. The Northridge earthquake (magnitude 6.7) led to sixty-one deaths and more than $20 billion in property damage and loss in 1994. A year later, Kobe, Japan, experienced a magnitude 6.9 earthquake. Despite massive efforts to prepare for such events, more than 6,000 lives were lost, and $150–200 billion in property damage was experienced. In 1998, Hurricane Mitch devastated Honduras, Nicaragua, and other parts of Central America. More than 5,600 people died in Honduras alone and approximately 70,000 homes were damaged. In Nicaragua, more than 850,000 people were affected, with approximately 2,860 deaths. Estimates of losses in agriculture, housing, transportation and other infrastructure are in excess of $1.3 billion dollars (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs 1998). These are just a few, albeit particularly devastating, events that continued to focus our attention in the 1990s on hazards and disasters. The widespread news media coverage of these disaster events provided a backdrop for fictional portrayals as Hollywood rediscovered the disaster movie genre. With enhanced special effects and big-named stars, popular films such as Twister, Volcano, Dante’s Peak, Armageddon, Deep Impact, Titanic, and A Civil Action added a different slant to the media coverage of disasters and the public’s perception of hazards throughout the decade. The public’s interest and fascination in actual disasters also propelled several books to the bestseller list (Barry 1997; Junger 1997; Larson 1999). Both the fictional representations and the consequences of real disasters illustrate the shift in our understanding of the forces at work in such events. Some of the damage in Hurricane Andrew, for example, is attributed to inadequate enforcement of building standards. In Kobe, structures engineered to withstand seismic activity failed, prompting concern about just how safe infrastructure is in tectonically active areas. And Hurricane Mitch’s devastating toll cannot be explained solely by the storm. Decades of land abuse and a combination of social, political, and economic factors combined with the storm to cause the severe losses.