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This introduction lays out the book’s key terms and methodologies. First it asserts that there is a subgenre of Latina/o fiction that depicts the aftermath of Latin American authoritarian regimes alongside authoritarian structures and discourses of power that minorities and migrants face in the United States and that these novels dramatize these linkages at the levels of both content and form. It then outlines how these novels broaden the thematic concerns, character types, and stylistic features of this subgenre through their development of a Latina/o counter-dictatorial imaginary and deployment of narrative form to critically represent forms of dictatorial power. Furthermore, it positions these novels as postdictatorship and postmemory novels to mark their geographic, historical, generational, thematic, and conceptual distance and difference from Latin American political regimes and novels. It ends by laying out the conceptual utility of its pan-ethnic and transnational Latina/o literary analyses. It thus demonstrates how genre provides a means to understanding shared formal strategies and political concerns across Latina/o groups, at the same time demonstrating how to unpack hemispheric relations through the aesthetic forms and transnational subjectivities that constitute the imaginative horizon of the Latina/o dictatorship novel.

This book explores the strategies that allow Latin American authors to reflect upon the experience of globalization and to situate themselves beyond the boundaries of national literatures. To this end, it analyzes a corpus of what it calls “the global Latin American novel”: novels by Chileans, Argentines, Colombians, Brazilians, and Mexicans. The focus is on the works of Roberto Bolaño, César Aira, Fernando Vallejo, Diamela Eltit, Chico Buarque, and Mario Bellatin. The book considers how these works cultivate the tension between the particular and the general, or the local and the global, as their art. Chapters tackle plots of impossible escapism, the trope of Nazism, supermarkets as representation of global capitalism, the confluence of the global networks of Christianity and drug trafficking, and the concerns and methods of contemporary art as a strategy for global inscription.

This chapter tries to provide the readers new to the field or region a sense of the possibilities for ecocritical analysis in contemporary Latin American letters. In the process it explores natural settings within Latin American novels that illustrate important moments of environmental change in the region extending from nineteenth-century imperialism to the present. The book expresses concerns with the way contemporary Latin American fiction portrays the economic, cultural, and historical roots of ecological transformations in the Americas. This chapter also sheds light on the different ways through which Latin American novels and texts appropriate the rhetoric of nature to depict social and environmental justice concerns as the foreground of historical debates.

This book has aimed to be an exercise in potentiating, within literary and cultural criticism, the multipolarity promised by the epochal transformations of 1989. It has done this by investigating the Latin American novel's attempts to represent the totality of the world or the intensified interconnection of globalization. It began with the two, connected premises. The first premise led to a valuation of the maladjustment between the world and the work—a call to explore the negativity of this relationship. The second premise led to an appraisal of the historical specificity of post-1989 works, particularly ones from Latin America. The two strands of world and globalization converge in the notion of multipolarism. Many of the arguments that have been put forward in this volume can be synthesized in art: Shibboleth (2007), by Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo.

This chapter examines Latin American novels dedicated to the trope of Nazism by focusing on Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996), In Search of Klingsor (1999) by Jorge Volpi, and Shadow Without a Name (2000) by Ignacio Padilla. In particular, it considers how Latin American stories of Nazism call to question any attempt to construct a purely literary, teleological historiography of world literature, and how they transform the international, marginal phenomenon of neo-Nazism into a displaced figure of globalization. By claiming the centrality of Nazism in global imagination, the chapter argues that such narratives position Latin American literature within contemporary discussions on the legacy of World War II, raising provocative questions about the proprietary relations of local historical memory in globalized times.

This chapter explores the iconocracy and political theology of narconovelas by focusing on a recurrent theme in several Latin American novels from the last two decades: the confluence of the global networks of Christianity and drug trafficking. It considers how Christianity and drug trade situate practitioners, on the one hand, and consumers and producers, on the other, within larger social structures. It is common to depict drug lords as patron saints or demons, or drug enforcement as a righteous crusade. A short explanation as to why religion and narcotrafficking so often go together in contemporary fiction is that any realist novel would pick up on the religiosity of daily life in Latin America. The chapter offers a reading of Our Lady of the Assassins (La Virgen de los sicarios, 1994), by Fernando Vallejo and La Santa Muerte (Holy Death, 2004) by Homero Aridjis. It argues that, instead of hastening to adopt the apparent world-literary genre of narconovela, we can use it as a springboard to critique the hegemonic global order that underwrites narcotrafficking.

This chapter examines the supermarket as a representation of global capitalism by offering a reading of Mano de obra (Labor, 2002) by the Chilean avant-gardist Diamela Eltit. Mano de obra is an experimental narrative where it is no longer the case that “all the world is a stage,” but rather, the world is now a supermarket. The chapter explores the novel's allusions to Chile's labor history within the context of international worker solidarity and to its paradoxical documentation of the cultural specificity of a non-place such as a supermarket. It situates Mano de obra both in regard to the experience of neoliberalism in Chile and to the present situation of literary practices within late capitalism. It also compares Mano de obra to another Latin American novel, Mala onda (1991) by Alberto Fuguet.