Scott Henkel, Direct Democracy: Collective Power, the Swarm, and the Literatures of the Americas , (Jackson, MS, University Press of Mississippi, 2017), 224pp., $65.00

Review of Direct Democracy: Collective Power, the Swarm, and the Literatures of the Americas by Scott Henkel.

El discurso factual y ficcional en la narrativa colonial hispanoamericana: Naufragios [1542] de Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca e Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez [1690] de Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora

This paper is based on the assumption that narratives are ongoing experiences, actions and processes that take place during the Colonial period. On these grounds, two narrative texts from the beginnings of the colonial formation period will be discussed. Narratives during this period when a vernacular, creole consciousness was being shaped are coherent with the narrations found in travel journals, relaciones and chronicles. A synthesis of factual and fictional discourses arises in these texts that represent not only the identity transformations of the Indian Spanish individual but also the emerging local, creole subjectivity that defines the new culture and its relations with indigenous world. We suggest a first stage in this cultural synthesis that includes two texts that have not been addressed literary and historiographic studies: Naufragios [1542] by Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez [1690] by Carlos de Sigüenza. These two founding narratives used a factual discourse that masked the fictional strategies that were later included in the textual practices that characterize the literatures of the Americas.

Epilogue: After Bolaño

Since the posthumous publication of 2666 in Spanish in 2004 and of the English translations of Distant Star (2004), The Savage Detectives (2007), and 2666 (2008), the novels of Roberto Bolaño—and their central figure, the reader-experiencer—have provided one of the most important models for writers in both the English- and Spanish-speaking worlds. As US authors are reading more Latin American literature than ever, Latin American authors are increasingly writing about their “experience” of the United States. After analyzing contemporary works by Latina/o writers composing in English in the United States, including Francisco Goldman, Ana Menéndez, and Junot Díaz; by non-Latina/o US writers such as Ben Lerner and Kenneth Goldsmith; and by Spanish-language writers such as Mexican-born novelist Valeria Luiselli and Puerto Rican poet Mara Pastor, the book ends by considering how recent works in the literatures of the Americas might point toward new literary possibilities in the future.