Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies, “The Other Question” by Homi K. Bhabha, and “Dictatorships in Latin America” by J. Fred Rippy all explore the effects of dictatorships on the lives of the people who live beneath them, but they do so in very different ways.

Alvarez’s book is a novelization of the Mirabal sisters of the Dominican Republic. These women lived in the time of the dictator Rafael Trujillo, and some of them entered into the resistance movement to try to improve life in their country. Several of the sisters died in the process, murdered because of their efforts to overthrow Trujillo, and the sister that is left tells their story as a tribute to their courage.

In “The Other Question,” Bhabha explores the concept of “fixity” in order to better understand the force of colonialism and how people can be controlled by rulers. Fixity refers to the representation of differences between people as rigid and unchanging. Those in control advocate it in terms of order, but really it causes disorder and degeneracy. We can see the idea of fixity in the dictatorship of Trujillo in Alvarez’s book and how it led to the horrors that the Mirabal sisters strove against.

Finally, “Dictatorships in Latin America” by J. Fred Rippy explores the nature of dictatorships in Latin America through a critical and historical lens, observing the phenomenon and its changes throughout the years. Rippy provides a scholarly account where Alvarez dramatizes the issue and Bhabha theorizes.

What do In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez, “The Other Question” by Homi K. Bhabha, and “Dictatorships in Latin America” by J. Fred Rippy all have in common?

One common thread running through Julia Alvarez’s novel, Homi Bhabha’s essay, and J. Fred Rippy’s essay is concern with the ways that power and rulership shape people’s character and the ways that others perceive it. "The Other Question” and "Dictatorships in Latin America" both offer useful insights that can help the reader understand the fictionalized postcolonial society that Alvarez portrays in In the Time of the Butterflies. Bhabha’s views on the ways in which stereotypes are perpetuated and challenged can be applied to the ideas about masculine authority and supposed female passivity that Alvarez explores. The characters and events in her novel, which explores the Dominican Republic during the Trujillo regime, can be correlated with Rippy’s analysis of dictatorships.

Alvarez presents Trujillo as a strongman ruler who embraces the dominant machista culture, a vision of social order that assumes male dominance and female subordination. Rippy shows how dictatorship depends on “imperious personalities.” Bhabha notes how colonial relationships form and perpetuate stereotypes about personalities based on the existing power structure, effectively dehumanizing the subordinated people who are seen as representatives of those stereotypes rather than individuals. The resistance in which the Mirabals become leaders in Alvarez’s novel becomes effective in part because El Jefe mistakenly assumes that women are weak and suited to the domestic sphere. An example in Chapter 6 is his opposition to women attending university.

What do In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez, “The Other Question” by Homi K. Bhabha, and “Dictatorships in Latin America” by J. Fred Rippy all have in common other than dictatorship?

In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez, “The Other Question” by Homi K. Bhabha, and “Dictatorships in Latin America” by J. Fred Rippy all have a focus on stereotypes and representation in common.

In Julia Alvarez's work of historical fiction, In the Time of the Butterflies, she traces the revolutionary Mirabal sisters and the work they did to fight the dictatorial regime of Rafael Trujillo. The narrative confronts various stereotypes about women. Minerva defies stereotypes by going to law school even though her dad doesn’t what her to. She then becomes involved in the revolutionary movement. “It’s about time we women had a voice in running our country,” she declares. In the story, the sisters, through their actions, deconstruct stereotypes that portray women as passive, weak, domesticated, and unequal to men.

In “The Other Question,” Bhabha scrutinizes how stereotypes function within colonial discourse and media. For Bhabha, stereotypes are “more ambivalent” and allow for “projection and introjection” on behalf of the colonizer. Bhabha defines stereotypical racial discourse as a multi-prong process that provides identity and justification for colonizers and their “fantasies.” Put in conversation with In the Time of the Butterflies, it’s possible to argue that Alvarez’s portrayal of the Mirabal sisters functions as a kind of a stereotype, as it speaks to a specific Western notion of female empowerment and liberation.

Finally, Rippy’s “Dictatorships in Latin America” takes apart stereotypes surrounding dictators and the settings that produce them. According to Rippy, dictators have been “represented either as Olympic heroes or Satanic villains.” As with Alvarez and Bhabha, Rippy demonstrates the complexity of colonialism and colonized nations. He discusses how the “influences of the physical environment, colonial heritage, and racial composition are closely related.” He, too, presents the intricacies of oppressed subjects and nations.