The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning (review)

Abstract

In a well-known formulation, Fredric Jameson characterizes postmodernity as an epochal shift coinciding with the total colonization of the planet by international capital. The postmodern moment signals that even those regions previously considered beyond its reach--nature and the unconscious--are found to have been assimilated into the logic of the market. The implications of this world historical transformation include the prospect that resistance to capital has itself become impossible to define. Not only have all existing alternatives to free-market capitalism been exhausted, but the ineluctability of the market also tends to ensure that any imagined project falling outside of a certain ideological sphere can only appear as absurd or illegible.