Planet Earth Strikes Back: Landscapes of Toxicity in Latin American Fiction

This essay discusses how contemporary Latin American literature (Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia) employs the discourse of toxicity—condensed in the metaphor of bio-engineering and mutation—to process and interrogate what Jason Moore has called the “Capitolecene.” Moore proposes to understand the “accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power, and the co-production of nature in dialectical unity.” This essay considers how the co-production of nature, impelled by greed (a recurring allegory of capitalism) goes terribly wrong by generating toxic biomes. As such, these texts function as ecocritical allegories of the Capitolecene (specifically in its iteration as biocapitalism) and its human and environmental consequences.

The late 19th century archive in contemporary Latin American literature

Late 20th and early 21st century Latin American literature rereads and problematizes late 19th-century Latin American Modernism. This article examines some of these genealogies in order to analyze the significance of this literary dialogue in our present time.

The Tropical Gothic and Beyond: El Grupo de Cali’s Legacies for Contemporary Latin American Literature, Cinema, and Culture

The creation and development of a tropical gothic is arguably the most important legacy of El Grupo de Cali, an interdisciplinary collective led by writer and film critic Andrés Caicedo Estela, and filmmakers Carlos Mayolo and Luis Ospina, during the 1970s in Colombia. In El Grupo’s tropical gothic, the conventions of the literary and cinematic gothic undergo a process of transculturation and tropicalization. With this transformation, Caicedo, Mayolo and Ospina postulate a dark reality that is urban and violent, and in which youth have protagonist roles both as agents and victims of violence. The revival of the monster within this tropical gothic reveals itself as intrinsically linked not only to the influence of cinematic tropes such as Hollywood B-series vampire films, but also to the connections between local myths and legends and forms of structural violence rooted in socioeconomic, political, racial and sexual oppression. Beyond the development of a tropical gothic aesthetic, the innovations of Caicedo’s literary writing include the insistence in locating youthful characters in urban, countercultural scenarios defined by elements of popular culture such as film, popular music, or drugs. These characteristics effectively locate his writings on the flip side of magical realism and act as complements to the Grupo’s tropical gothic in their efforts to narrate the experience of the modern tropical Latin American city.

Il corpo malato e la crisi dell'identità unitaria

Illness seems to be a central theme for contemporary Latin-American literature. It is not only the object of the observation, but also a critical instrument to debilitate strong categories and binomes (such as male/female, sane/sick, alive/dead, human/non-human). This essay analyses the processes of hybridisation and metamorphosis related to illness in El huésped by Guadalupe Nettel and Fruta podrida by Lina Meruane. This examples show two different possibilities to embody the pathological experience: living against it and living with it. Illness could be an unpleasant partner, and there is no way to identify ourself with her, or a part of a wider us, opening to non-unitarian identity such as complexes and transforming organism. This consideration shows how Latin-American literature reflects on identity in a queer and posthuman way trough the metaphors that illness bring to the table.

Error de cálculo. Vida y enfermedad en la literatura latinoamericana / Miscalculation. Life and illness in Latin American literature

Resumen: A partir de una pregunta por las enfermedades y desórdenes de los cuerpos y los saberes sobre la vida, las novelas A céu aberto (1996) de João Gilberto Noll, Impuesto a la carne (2010) de Diamela Eltit y Fruta podrida (2007) de Lina Meruane exploran las transformaciones que atraviesan las antiguas instituciones disciplinarias bajo las condiciones de un nuevo dispositivo de poder que aspira a la gestión de la población como capital humano. Contra cualquier imperativo de eficiencia, las novelas hallan en la enfermedad la potencia de invención de lenguajes y modos de vida común que exceden los cálculos del Estado y el mercado. Palabras clave: Biopolítica, enfermedad, afecto, lo común, literatura latinoamericana contemporánea. Abstract: Through the interrogation of illness and knowledges about life, the novels A céu aberto (1996) by João Gilberto Noll, Impuesto a la carne (2010) by Diamela Eltit and Fruta podrida (2007) by Lina Meruane explore the transformations undergone by former disciplinary institutions under the conditions of a new apparatus of power which aspires to manage the population as human capital. Against any imperative of efficiency, these novels find in illness the potential of invention of languages and modes of common life that exceed the calculations of the state and the market. Keywords: Biopolitics, illness, affect, the common, contemporary Latin American literature.

Voluntary Exiles, New Identities, and the Emergence of a Postnational Sensibility in Contemporary Latin American Literature

Brignole explores the question of postnational identity by proposing a reading of three novels that signal a transition point in the literature of exile and displacement in Latin America. The characters portrayed in El síndrome de Ulises (2005) by Santiago Gamboa, Travesuras de la niña mala(2006) by Mario Vargas Llosa, and El exilio voluntario (2009) by Claudio Ferrufino-Coqueugniot are the fictional counterparts of a new generation of voluntary exiles that has started to replace, in diachronic progression, the traditional figures of leftist revolutionaries and political exiles. The typical voluntary exile is not fixated on an attempt to recover a lost identity, like the traditional exile, nor does he attempt to assimilate into the cultural make-up of the new countries he inhabits, like the immigrant. Instead, he remains in an indefinite state of “foreignness” by adopting an interstitial position, located somewhere between those of the exile and the immigrant. Instead of assigning unwarranted importance to a nation, an ideology, or a race, the protagonists of these novels project a new postnational sensibility. They emphasize the shared experience of all exiles, draw attention to the futility of borders, and forge productive fraternal bonds with individuals coming from different cultural heritages.