Insurgent Afterlife: Latin America, the Left, and Contemporary U.S. Multiethnic Literature

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores how a range of U.S. writers have generically, representationally, and linguistically engaged with radical left-wing social movements in the Global South. In staging their revolutions in Latin America and in employing insurgencies “from below” as a mode for imagining a political afterlife for the United States, these writers employ a deterritorialized and relational use of the term “Global South” to broadly refer to the kinds of “resistant political imaginaries” shared by persons of color and marginalized communities across the hemisphere and the world. However, this article argues the Global South in these multiethnic works is more than a simple device to connect to a collective memory shared by marginalized communities in the United States and populations who suffered under dictatorial regimes in Latin America. In fact, its deployment mimics the most effective counterinsurgency campaigns launched in the Global South. By taking the Global South as a dynamic framework for analyzing multiethnic U.S. literature, my essay prompts us to read the canon of U.S. multiethnic literature very differently and to see the long afterlife of the limits and failures of coopting Latin American social movements to imagine alternative futures in the United States.