Teaching Central American Literature in a Global Context ed. by Gloria Elizabeth Chacón and Mónica Albizúrez Gil

Abstract

Reviewed by: Teaching Central American Literature in a Global Context ed. by Gloria Elizabeth Chacón and Mónica Albizúrez Gil Adrian Taylor Kane Chacón, Gloria Elizabeth, and Mónica Albizúrez Gil, editors. Teaching Central American Literature in a Global Context. MLA, 2022. Pp. 364. ISBN 978-1-60329-588-8. Gloria Elizabeth Chacón and Mónica Albizúrez Gil’s collection of essays Teaching Central American Literature in a Global Context contains twenty-eight essays by scholars teaching at universities in Central America, the United States, Canada, and Europe. The volume is well organized into seven sections. Part I: “Locating Central American Literature” situates Central American cultural production in a global context from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century by offering approaches to modernista and vanguardista cultural production and analyzing documentaries and crónicas as “imagetexts” that lend visibility to the history of Central America. Part II: “Visual Technologies and Understanding Central America” contains five essays that suggest specific films, shorts, photography, Google Maps, and travel as tools to provide deep context for Central American cultural production. Part III: “Mayan Literatures beyond the Local” emphasizes how indigenous literature engages with global issues such as colonialism, genocide, resistance, and migration by describing lessons on texts ranging from the Popol Wuj to the contemporary poetry of K’iche’ Mayan author Humberto Ak’abal. Part IV: “Black and Jewish Literatures from the Isthmus” contains lessons on works that treat the topic of Black experiences in Central America by authors such as Francisco Gavidia (El Salvador), Quince Duncan (Costa Rica), and Zee Edgell (Belize) as well as transnational Jewish Guatemalan authors Francisco Goldman, Eduardo Halfon, and Victor Perera. Part V: “Representations of Violence” examines cultural production centered on representations of and reflection on the theme of violence, with a primary focus on postwar literature such as that of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez. Part VI: “Diasporas, Memory, and Deterritorialization” includes descriptions of units on gender, sexuality, violence, and migration; the migrant journey through Mexico; the issues of intergenerational trauma, historical memory, and impunity in Central American diaspora communities; and teaching students to interrogate deficient journalism on Central American migration. The final section, “Environmental and Social Justice,” suggests theoretical approaches, classroom activities, and primary and secondary readings for incorporating social justice units and the environmental humanities into courses on Central America. Central historical figures in this section include Archbishop Óscar Romero and environmental activist Berta Cáceres, both of whom were murdered for their commitment to social and environmental justice issues. The focus on literature in the volume’s title does not do justice to the breadth of approaches described in many of the essays. For example, M. Emilia Barbosa’s chapter focuses on the political performance art of Guatemalan Regina José Galindo, while Rita M. Palacios and Margarita Hernández de Polaczyk propose approaches that incorporate analysis of visual art. The chapter “Many Central Americas: Approaches to the Films Ixcanul and El regreso” offers anthropological and linguistic concepts useful for teaching feature-length films. Similarly, Guadalupe Escobar’s essay discusses analytical approaches to the documentary films Children of the Diaspora and Finding Óscar, and Aaron Lacayo describes a lesson that incorporates two contemporary short [End Page 141] films to teach Nicaragua’s political and cultural history. Julio Quintero’s essay “Peace and Reconciliation: Decoding Belonging in Guatemalan Photography” suggests incorporating photography as a tool to understand how society constructs and contests notions of citizenship. The inclusion of such chapters provides readers with a multitude of resources for creating a culturally rich classroom that goes beyond the exclusive study of literary texts. One of the volume’s strengths is its wide variety of theoretical approaches such as feminism, postcolonialism, cultural studies, gender and queer studies, critical race theory, and ecocriticism, among others. Its attention to indigenous forms of cultural production and other marginalized communities reflects the heterogeneity of the isthmus and moves well beyond canonical authors. The inclusion of the US Central American diaspora follows the recent expansion of Central American studies beyond the confines of the isthmus and further underscores the volume’s focus on the region’s global interconnectedness. Another practical component of many of the chapters...