Jennifer Harford Vargas's Forms of Dictatorship: Power, Narrative, and Authoritarianism in the Latina/o Novel explores representations of dictatorial power in Latinx writings. Harford Vargas investigates texts that deal with historical dictatorships and that use dictatorship as a literary trope. This book effectively analyses how authoritarianism – in both the political and the literary sense – is represented in texts by Latinx writers from national-origin groups in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central and South America. This encourages the plural perspective of the collective Americas, and uncovers the trans-American production of dictatorship novels as well as highlighting the central contributions being made by Latinx writers.

Hardford Vargas's conceptualization of the Latinx involvement in the dictatorship-novel tradition is original in its approach and imaginatively connects this canonical Latin American literary tradition with contemporary Latinx writers. She does so by underlining the importance of the migration of the dictatorship novel to the United States. Using the example of Carolina de Robertis's novel The Invisible Mountain (2010), she homes in on the central role of memory, genealogy, writing, and the violent history of dictatorships that on the one hand separate families and on the other link Latinxs and Latin Americans. The “haunting afterlives” (4) of dictatorships are a recurring trope used throughout Forms of Dictatorship to underpin the transnational migratory nature of the effects of living under authoritarian regimes. She argues that although the novels she examines are rooted in differing local and national histories – moving, for example, between New Jersey and the Dominican Republic, Los Angeles and Guatemala, Miami and Cuba – they are all “haunted by the specter of dictatorship” (5).

To tie these ideas together Harford Vargas employs the theory of the “Latina/o counter-dictatorial imaginary” (6), which accounts for many and varied manifestations of authoritarian power and hierarchies of privilege and oppression. This original theory is rooted in what scholars have termed variously the “social imaginary,” the “trans-American imaginary,” and the “Latino imaginary” and provides an additional strand to this academic area of inquiry. She successfully argues that this is part of a larger Américan tradition, tracing its history from 1845 (Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Facundo: Civilización y barbarie), through the 1970s boom generation of writers (Augusto Roa Bastos's Yo el supremo (1974), Alejo Carpentier's El recurso del método (1975), and Gabriel García Márquez's El otoño del patriarca (1975)), to more recent Latin American writers such as Roberto Bolaño, Luisa Valenzuela, and Mario Vargas Llosa. While giving due diligence to the lineage of the dictatorship novel in the Latin American tradition, Harford Vargas encourages us to look beyond geopolitical boundaries and linguistic boundaries and follow “the other forking paths of the dictatorship novel in the Americas” (9).

As literary analysis, one of the strengths of this book is its consideration of the importance of form and its discussion of how Latinx authors manage their critiques of dictatorial power by deploying innovative narrative techniques. Looking at devices such as footnotes, metafiction, focalization, and analepsis, this book unearths the mechanisms through which the novels conceptualize authoritarian power. This attention to form and genre places Harford Vargas within a group of contemporary scholars interested in formalist criticism, particularly among Latinx critics such as Mary Pat Brady, Marcial González, Ernesto Javier Martínez, Paula M. L. Moya, and Ramón Saldívar. As the title of the book suggests, Forms of Dictatorship centralizes the power of form and the form of power in these texts by discussing the many ways that Latinx novels represent, trouble, reinforce, and topple dictatorial hierarchies of power (17). In her discussion of Junot Díaz's Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), for instance, she discussion how the novel's footnotes structurally embody coded modes of communication. She argues that, since footnotes are positioned below the main text and these paratexts most often narrate a counterhistory of Trujillo's dictatorship, they can be understood as a type of under-the-radar communication.

One of the most powerful perceptions offered by Harford Vargas is the recognition that, like its southern neighbours, the United States is also site of authoritarianism with its own dictatorial power systems. In the current climate of overt, institutional, and presidentially ratified racism against Latinx communities, the argument that authoritarian power should be viewed on a continuum and the United States be viewed not only as a site of freedom but also as a perpetrator of oppression is particularly pertinent (7). This book illuminates the ways in which Latinx writings highlight more pervasive modes of domination and expand the ways that dictatorial power is conceptualized. By tying together Latinx novels it is possible to trace linked memories of disparate kinds of systematic violence in the Americas. Yet Harford-Vargas's theory of the counterdictatorial imaginary reveals the productive possibilities of transnational relationships that collectively resist authoritarian power. Ultimately, this book uncovers the ways that Latinx writers connect and contest various forms of authoritarian power in the Americas through the power of fiction.