Barataria by Juan López Bauzá: violence and political carnivalization in cervantine matrix

Abstract

Taking into account the novel Barataria by Juan López Bauzá (2012), the article examines the conditions of re-writing established between the classical text, the Quixote, and the contemporary text. It also wonders about the Latin American contexts that contribute to a political reading of Cervantes’s novel, and why, to write about a troubled identity as the Puerto Rican one, the author turns to the Barataria episode. In order to answer these questions, the text considers the Bajtinian concept of carnivalization and suggests that we should differentiate the characteristics of a festive violence from those of a repressive violence.