Situating María (1867) in its historical and political context, as well as in the context of Jorge Isaacs' own life, my reading notes again the small part that these events play in the novel itself and coincides with the views of others that the text itself evidences strategies of 'evasion' and 'displacement'. As with these earlier readings the current reading looks to find what is 'evaded' and 'displaced' in the intercalated Nay and Sinar story. What it proposes, as previous readings have not,

more »

... is that in the account of the Ashanti state which is the setting for the Nay and Sinar story we have something more than an 'exotic' interlude and even more than a 'repressed' history of the blacks and slavery. For what we have in the intercalated account of the Ashanti state is not only a detailed projected mapping of the historical and political events left out of María but also the model of the political and social institutions that might constitute a successful nation state: the very project that faced Colombia in 1867 and which it so singularly failed to realize.