Dialogism and Historiographics Texts from Guatemala

Abstract

In its first part, the article discusses some of the implications of
the operativity of Mikhail Bakhtin’s proposals for the study
of historical texts. Dialogism, as a category that emphasizes the
complex relationships between times, spaces and dissimilar
processes that converge in different levels of culture, permits us
to situate the practice of historiography and its texts in that space.
The proximity of these abovementioned categories with others
that have been produced from Latin American cultural criticism
increases their capacity to give an account of the particular
societies in the region where narrative provides an answer to
their problems by emphasizing precisely those relationships and
convergences. In the second part, the article analyzes two
emblematic texts of Guatemalan historiography from the second
half of the twentieth century following Bakthtin’s suggestive
theoretical proposals and Latin American criticism. The result
is a reading that modernizes those legacies by confirming in the
analysis what can also be observed in the analyzed texts:
complex societies like that of Guatemala or those of other Latin
American countries understand each other and explain in
conflicting articulations between the past, and the present that
is already affected by it.