The consolidation and popularization of the historical novel—a development often attributed to Walter Scott—quickly crossed the Atlantic and found fertile ground in the Americas. In the first half of the nineteenth century, as many Latin American countries broke colonial ties, historical fiction became an ally of emerging nationalisms. The genre helped shape each new nation’s imaginative landscape, producing narratives filled with cornerstone figures and defining events (Sommer 1991). This early entanglement between fiction and nation-building remains crucial for understanding the ways contemporary Latin American writers reinterpret and reimagine national pasts.

Foundational studies on Latin American historical fiction (Menton, Esteves) identify a decline in the genre from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth. Modernism and the avant-garde favored experimental, highly stylized aesthetics, leaving less room for traditional historical fiction. Scholars broadly agree (Menton; Aínsa; Pons; Baumgarten) that the genre experienced a major revitalization in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly from the 1970s onward. While some attribute this resurgence to revisionist impulses surrounding the 500th anniversary of the so‑called “discoveries,” it also aligns with the discursive turn in historiography, which encourages reflection on how History is written and on the power structures that legitimize certain narratives while marginalizing others. Out of this climate emerged what is now known as the “New Historical Novel,” a mode that relativizes historical knowledge and engages historiography with heightened skepticism (Aínsa). In this framework, fiction becomes less concerned with constructing national ideologies and more invested in interrogating them.

Critics have noted that the contemporary historical novel shares with the Boom novels of the 1960s features such as neo‑baroque experimentation, metafiction, intertextuality, parody, and others (Menton 14). The relationship between the Boom and today’s historical fiction remains an active field of inquiry (for example, in María Cristina Pons’s forthcoming MLA volume The Boom and the Contemporary Historical Novel: Continuities and Ruptures). At the same time, influential frameworks (including feminism, postcolonial theory, critical race studies, and scholarship on political violence) offer productive lenses through which contemporary historical novels revisit and reframe the past. It is at the intersection of these historiographic debates, Boom legacies, and contemporary critical perspectives that the texts analyzed in this panel situate themselves.

This session asks: From what perspectives does the contemporary historical novel rethink the past? Can we identify common threads across works from different Latin American countries? Which questions of our present shape the ways we interpret these fictionally reconstructed pasts? And crucially: Is there still room in the genre for the crafting—or dismantling—of national identities? The four papers selected for this session address these questions from distinct national and methodological angles, offering complementary insights into how contemporary Latin American fiction engages with national histories and collective memory.

The first presentation, by Alberto Fonseca, examines Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Familia Aragón series (2003), tracing the formation of Salvadoran national identity from 1932 to the present. Drawing on Dominick LaCapra’s trauma studies, Fonseca analyzes how the family becomes a site where political power and recurrent national violence leave enduring marks. His reading illuminates how contemporary Central American fiction rearticulates traumatic memory as a way of reassessing national identity.

Xana Furtado follows with an analysis of Angélica Lopes’s A maldição das flores (2019). Furtado explores how Lopes uses women’s experiences to interrogate collective memory and historical consciousness, challenging dominant Brazilian narratives that have long marginalized female perspectives. Her reading shows how contemporary Brazilian historical fiction destabilizes patriarchal frameworks at the heart of national storytelling.

Next, Viana Anette Hara discusses Justo Arroyo’s Vida que olvida (2002) and its reconstruction of Panamanian history. Hara highlights the novel’s visual and spatial dimensions, showing how the mixed‑race female protagonist embodies contradictions of mestizaje and imperial modernity. Her analysis reveals how Panamanian fiction interrogates the racial and spatial imaginaries that sustain national identity.

Finally, Daniel Carrillo‑Jara examines representations of the Incas in Peruvian literature. Comparing early twentieth‑century works to those of the past three decades, he employs Linda Hutcheon’s concept of historiographic metafiction to show how contemporary narratives use the figure of the Inca to question the foundations of national modernity and expose tensions between history, memory, and national identity.

As moderator, I will briefly introduce the presenters. Each will have 12–13 minutes, leaving approximately 20–25 minutes for discussion. Taken together, the four presentations demonstrate how contemporary Latin American historical fiction not only revisits the past but interrogates the very processes by which national identities are constructed, contested, and transmitted, inviting a comparative conversation across national traditions.