Modernist Quick Characters: Translation as Anti-Colonial Action

Abstract

Literary critics to date read Américo Paredes’s modernist novel George Washington Gómez (1990) as the story of a failed male hero following the demise of the 1915 Seditionist Rebellion. The problem with such analyses is that they misread the novel’s modernism, its women characters, and peculiar linguistic dimensions. This essay argues for an updated role of women characters as a leadership collective vital to struggling against borderlands colonization. Ultimately, the novel’s women leaders foreground multilingual interpretive frameworks as the precursors necessary to anticolonial action. To support this claim, the essay performs an original context-based translation. At stake in the translation is demonstrating how habits of reading create shareable knowledge that in turn deepens the methods of intellectual popular resistance.