Unauthorized Storytelling: Reevaluating Racial Politics in Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies

Abstract

This article revisits Julia Alvarez’s critically acclaimed historical novel In the Time of the Butterflies (1994). While much scholarship has paid attention to the novel as historiographic metafiction, its depiction of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s regime (1930-61), and its feminist perspective on the Dominican Republic, its racial politics are under-studied. In particular, scholars have overlooked Fela, the Afra-Dominican servant, spirit medium, and storyteller. I argue that studying Fela’s presence in the text as an unauthorized and unauthored voice not only adds complexity to the production of historiography and storytelling but also provides new insight into postcolonial feminist critiques of voice/lessness, narrative, and marginalized identities in the novel and criticism on it. Closely analyzing Fela’s voice—as it intersects with storytelling, historical slave narratives, Vodou, the maternal, and Haiti’s contribution to the Dominican Republic’s history—makes visible the unacknowledged yet essential role of the Afra-Dominican not only in this novel specifically but also to the Dominican Republic more generally.

Feminist Narrativization of trauma in Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies

“…Further, Tegan Zimmerman (2020) in his article "Unauthorized Storytelling: Reevaluating Racial Politics in Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies" revisits Julia Alvarez's critically acclaimed historical novel as "historiographic metafiction and its depiction of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo's regime (1930-61)" (p. 96). Zimmerman's way of analyzing the novel is appreciable but he has overlooked the real voices of pain and exploitation raised by the female characters in his study.…”