Unsettling World Literature

Abstract

Simultaneous But Distant Events in Collision: In 1981, New York University (NYU) Celebrated the 150th Anniversary of its founding with a series of notable speakers and events; in rural Guatemala that year, the military began to carry out a policy of genocide against the Mayan Indians. In New York, the much-awaited English translation of Roland Barthes's treatise on photography,La chambre claire, appeared asCamera Lucida;in Nicaragua, the CIA-backed contras waged war on the Sandinista government, which had passed the Agrarian Reform Law to redistribute land to thecampesinoswho labored on it. In the United States, leading physicists announced advances “toward a unified theory”: “an integral work of art” made up of “threads in a tapestry,” a scientific weaving with the almost phantasmagorical ability to replace all “the confusion of the past” with “a simple and elegant theory” (Glashow 494-95). Abroad, magical realism officially became what Homi Bhabha would later call “the literary language of the emergent post-colonial world” (7). An example of the genre,Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie, won the Booker Prize. In the United States, magical realism came to stand, “as surely as Carmen Miranda's fruity cornucopias,” for a reified, homogeneous, and consumable “Latin America” (Molloy 374) and served as Latin America's new entrée into the exclusive party held by comparative literature. Gabriel García Márquez received the Nobel the following year.