Fables of globalization: race, sex and money in nineteenth-century Latin America

Abstract

This article argues that nineteenth-century Latin American literary texts should be read not only as allegories of nation-building projects, but also as allegories of the global market, named “fables of globalization.” The texts studied include the Argentine-born Juana Manuela Gorriti's 1869 novella about Peruvians in gold-rush era California; a set of Argentine novels inspired by the calamitous stock market crash of 1890; and a virtually unknown science-fiction story by the Peruvian author Clemente Palma, written in the midst of national experiments with the gold standard. While these texts remain for the most part forgotten, their resurrection as fables of globalization allows us to begin to excavate the global market and its unstable regimes of value as a potent imaginary source for nineteenth-century literature.