Undiscovered: A Novel - Gabriela Wiener
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Undiscovered: A Novel

by
Language
English
Published in
Publisher
HarperVia
Pages
192
ISBN
9780063256705
A woman walks into a Paris museum and comes face to face with her inheritance: an exhibition dedicated to her great-great-grandfather, a celebrated European explorer. But his legacy is one of plunder, having taken thousands of pre-Hispanic artifacts from her homeland of Peru. This discovery launches a journey into a fractured past, confronting the fact that she is a descendant of both the colonizer and the colonized. The name Wiener gave her a connection to whiteness, yet the faces on the stolen pottery, the huaco portraits, reflect another part of her lineage.

This autofictional novel dismantles the comfortable myths of family history to explore the lingering wounds of colonialism. It is an unflinching examination of identity, racism, migration, and the complexities of desire, all traced back to a single, shared origin of perpetrator and victim. The narrative navigates the space between two worlds, questioning what it means to carry a history of appropriation within your own blood. It is a deeply personal and intellectually sharp story about deconstructing a painful legacy in order to understand oneself.

Subjects

Original edition details

Huaco retrato / Huaco Portrait Originally published in 2022
Original language
Spanish
Original publisher National Geographic Books

Other editions (5)