Latin American Narrative Research Articles

The phenomenon of the New Right in European and Latin American narrative literature

The workshop “The phenomenon of the New Right in European and Latin American narrative literature: New perpetrators – old patterns of thinking?” organised by Dr. Lena Seauve took place on 13 October 2023 at the Institute for Latin American Studies (Lateinamerika-Institut) of the Freie Universität Berlin (Boltzmannstraße 1, 14195 Berlin). Far-right ideology has transcended national boundaries and now holds a global presence. This perspective served as the focal point for the workshop, providing a basis to examine the movement on a global scale. The workshop aimed to showcase this diverse phenomenon, connecting perspectives from European nations like France, Italy, and the United Kingdom, as well as South American countries, including Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. Its goal was to highlight commonalities among these nations and their literary landscapes, exploring figures, texts, and modes of thought related to the far-right ideology.

404 Utopia Not Found: Cyberpunk Avatars in Samanta Schweblin's Kentukis

AbstractScience fiction criticism has long attended the relationship between form and utopian thought. However, increased study of Latin American narratives has allowed for a return to foundational science fiction theories with renewed perspective. While critics have recognized the tendency of Latin American science fiction to slip between genres, a trend termed the “slipstream phenomenon,” there has been little analysis of its impact on utopian imagination. As a result, we miss one of the region's most unique contributions to broader science fiction traditions. In response, this article locates Samanta Schweblin's Kentukis (2018) within the legacies of cyberpunk and argues that the novel uses slipstream to establish and dismantle a series of classic utopian horizons by shifting its genre identity. In doing so, this work identifies a turn in recent Latin American science fiction that metacritically questions the ability of science fiction form itself to imagine a utopian horizon beyond global capitalism.

Narrativas estético-políticas críticas durante a Guerra Fria: o caso de Raquel Tibol

The article offers an account of Raquel Tibol’s art criticism in the context of Latin American narratives during the 1960s and 1970s. The study examines the political and aesthetic shifts, the tensions between form and content, and the importance of the political in the visual interpretations of the period. The aim is to place Raquel Tibol’s art criticism in dialogue with her contemporaries in light of the emergence of the new Latin American left in order to determine the discursive nuances that emerged between theory and practice, and thus to approach the dimension of the local as a place of decolonial enunciation that gave rise to a field of resistance through countercultural action from different points of view.

El cuerpo como territorio de violencia en la novela Rosario Tijeras de Jorge Franco

Literature as a cultural product refracts socio-historical and political conjunctures. Therefore, the political and social crises that began in Latin America in the 20th century, which printed a new cartography of cities, is reflected in the Latin American narrative from the mid-twentieth century to contemporary literature. It is important to highlight that in this new social cartography emerge minorities and marginalized groups, which are being focused in order to show that they are characters crossed by surreptitious violence, which has accompanied the Colombian nation since the 40’s. A violence towards that different other, who becomes the target of a society that establishes borders in the face of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity. The goal of this paper is to show how in the novel Rosario Tijeras by Jorge Franco, published in 1999, the urban space – Medellín – represents a body territorialized by the violence of drug trafficking, and the protagonist – Rosario Tijeras – constitutes a body crossed by the violence of the hitman and the violence of the masculine.

Hybridity and Constitutional Taxonomy in Latin America

Abstract This article focuses on Latin American constitutionalism with two goals in mind. The first goal is to identify narratives of constitutional mixity or hybridity that have been influential in Latin America, something that habilitates a comparative analysis with references to mixed or hybrid constitutionalism in other scenarios. One narrative underlines the combination of U.S.-inspired constitutionalism with background civil law systems. Another narrative highlights the way classic regional constitutional designs feature a liberal-conservative hybridation that, some claim, continue to influence constitutional dynamics up to this day. And the third narrative is associated with the establishment in regional countries of hybrid or mixed systems of judicial review. The second goal of the article, more methodological in kind, is to explore what do Latin American narratives on mixity teach in the way to clarifying the nature and implications of exercises constitutional taxonomy. As it emerges, constitutional taxonomy is a way of organizing and generating knowledge which is useful to describe, but most meaningful when addressed to provide an explanation, which is often just an antechamber to normative evaluation. Whether a particular exercise of constitutional taxonomy makes sense in a particular scenario, however, is a different matter, and the article suggests that describing, explaining and evaluating Latin American constitutions as hybrid is illuminating but also problematic in a number of ways.

Contemporary Latin American narrative

Contemporary Latin American narrative

Cultural nomadism and the representation of otherness in Santiago Gamboa’s El síndrome de Ulises (2005)

Fernando Aínsa maintains that contemporary Latin American narrative has been marked by the nomadic condition. In light of this observation, this article examines the figure of the cultural nomad in Colombian author Santiago Gamboa’s El síndrome de Ulises, to analyse the ways in which this subject negotiates and reconfigures their identity as a consequence of relocating to Paris. It argues that the traditional notions of nationality, origin, and personal history have been superseded by the concepts of work, relationships, and consumerism as key factors in the creation of identity and a sense of subjectivity. Moreover, it explores the culturally nomadic narrator’s engagement with current debates surrounding the ability of the ‘lettered’ intellectual to represent and encapsulate otherness in discourse, not only on an individual level but also in relation to the Europe-Latin America paradigm.

The travel chronicle in Latin American narrative journalism from two authors: Alma Guillermoprieto and Rubén Darío

The travel chronicle in Latin American narrative journalism from two authors: Alma Guillermoprieto and Rubén Darío

The Fusion of History and Fiction in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Latin American Narrative

This article reaches beyond the normal boundaries of the history of humanities disciplines to exemplify how interaction between history and literature—and especially the employment of the former by the latter—has played out in a modern context, that of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American fiction. The analysis focuses on three major uses of historical sources and documents: First, history is used to create a dialogue on important historical figures, such as Simón Bolívar, sometimes presenting a revisionist perspective of them. Second, history is examined from the perspective of memory, in terms of individual and collective trauma. Third, the article shows how novels attempt to fill in the gaps of history using historical facts to portray forgotten figures largely omitted from history. Finally, the article examines magical realist fiction as a variant of historical fiction and concludes with a consideration of the role of historical fiction in Latin America.

Yo el Supremo como crítica al discurso del poder

Given the scarcity of contextual analyzes that point to the understanding of power in the Latin American environment from the region’s own literary subgenres, the present research studies this conception in the work Yo el Supremo, an outstanding piece of Latin American narrative and cusp of Dictator Novel. For this purpose, the literary and historical records that contextualize the narrative are analyzed. After the hermeneutical analysis of both records, power is determined as the ability to generate historical-discursive realities in the construction of historical characters, in this case the dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia. The reading of I the Supreme warns us about the complexity involved in the study of power in Latin American dictatorial figures within the social tissue and political life of its nations.

Transnationalism and Testimonio in Contemporary Central American Migrant Literature

This article explores contemporary Central American literature dealing with transnationalism in migrant narratives from the region within the framework of testimonio. The transnational elements in literary texts read as testimonio were also present in previous Latin American narratives but were ignored in critical writing about this genre. These elements often included two countries, and involved transmission of, as well as continuous negotiation between, different languages. Moreover, the immediate translation of these texts into English made them available more to an international audience than to the citizens of the countries in which they were mostly set. Taking Odyssey to the North by Mario Bencastro, and The Tattooed Soldier by Hector Tobar as my point of reference, I will argue that these and several other contemporary Central American works of fiction can be read as testimonio. These works, by focusing attention on the repercussions of the civil war in a new context, depict migration to the United States

Antillano, Laura (compiladora). Relato, viaje e infancia; sobre la antología de cuentos venezolanos de la infancia.

Convocar voces desde la infancia es reunir un sinfín de escritores, así como estilos y épocas. Esta antología revisita esos espacios relegados por las diversas corrientes de la narrativa latinoamericana contemporánea. Si bien este libro permite las miradas en torno a un discurso soslayado, acaso marginado, de igual manera instaura una nueva forma de acercarse al discurso estético literario destinado a niños, no sin antes ofrecer un diverso y mágico panorama no solo de los ya conocidos textos y autores venezolanos que han escrito para los niños, sino de las recientes experiencias narrativas infantiles.

Some Orientations in the Latin American Narrative of the XXI Century

First of all, in a general statement we can say that in a significant part of the Latin American novel at the initial decades...

AARTI SMITH MADAN. Lines of Geography in Latin American Narrative: National Territory, National Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 291 pp.

Review of Lines of Geography in Latin American Narrative: National Territory, National Literature by AARTI SMITH MADAN.

Transatlantic Literary Networks during the Cold War: Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Reader for Gallimard

Author(s): Gras, Dunia | Abstract: In this paper, I propose to address the issue of transatlantic networks and the circulation of literary paradigms between Latin America and Europe. I will focus on a relevant actor from the time of the well-known and still controversial “boom” of Latin American narrative, within the context of the Cold War (Franco 2002, Sorensen 2007, Alburquerque 2010). This was a key moment in the internationalization of Latin American writers, as Jose Donoso underlined in Historia personal del ‘boom’ (1972, 1983). Donoso highlighted some names that served as nodes, such as Carlos Fuentes, who played an important role, thanks to his extraordinary and natural handling of informal networks (Gras 2015). Among these names that had a specific weight in the process of international recognition of the “boom”, Donoso also highlights the figure of the Uruguayan critic Emir Rodriguez Monegal (1921–1985), to whom I will devote these pages.n I will present a very specific—and even anecdotal—example: the reading reports that Rodriguez Monegal wrote for the prestigious French publishing house Gallimard over a single year, 1967. I will also analyze the relative influence of a recognized critic in the configuration of a publisher’s catalog. This exemplifies his ability to direct, in some way, the attention of the French public to a handful of Latin American writers, based on his suggestions and proposals for translation. In doing this, I also contribute to an understanding of the decision-making mechanisms of a publisher of the magnitude of Gallimard, which led to undertaking (or not) an expensive and risky translation process.

El entenado, de Juan José Saer: “nueva crónica de Indias”, “nueva novela histórica”, “metaficción historiográfica”, “ficción y de archivo” y “novela neobarroca”

Desde los distintos marcos interpretativos que se han propuesto para una aproximación crítica a la marcada eclosión de lo histórico en la última narrativa latinoamericana, el artículo que sigue propone una serie de notas para la lectura de la obra de Juan José Saer, El entenado (1983), atendiendo, de un modo especial, aunque no excluyente, al componente metafictivo e intertextual de la obra, en tanto patrones narrativos concomitantes y subyacentes a todos los programas analíticos considerados.

Finitud y episteme en la narrativa latinoamericana: Jorge Volpi y la Trilogía del siglo XX

ABSTRACT The essay analyses the sense of finiteness and episteme in the Trilogía del siglo XX, a set of three novels, En busca de Klingsor (1999), El fin de la locura (2003) and No será la tierra (2006), by the Mexican author Jorge Volpi (1968—). To this end, it formally grounds the term ‘truth’ as good judgement or proposition and demonstrates that the search for knowledge and the fascination for total wisdom are integral to the human condition. The study links these novels’ ideological lines with contemporary discourses and with Latin American narrative. Finiteness and episteme are explained subsequently as key elements in our understanding of Volpi’s transtemporal search for knowledge. We conclude that truth is an impossible project and that the lives of human beings are simply narrations.

Una tarde con campanas de Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez: El despertar de la literatura migrante hispanoamericana en España

Venezuelan writer Juan Carlos Mendez Guedez’s novel Una tarde con campanas (2004) narrates the circumstances that led an undocumented Venezuelan fam-ily to move to Spain. Through the analysis of the novel, this article explores the creation of a subaltern, reterritorialized, and transcultural new urban space, a consequence of a large migrant presence in Madrid. My article identifies existing bridges and literary interrelations between both shores of the Atlantic Ocean and acknowledges migrant literature as a growing genre in Spain. This transatlantic investigation also addresses some fundamental concepts of migrant literature such as multiple representations of the Atlantic subject; the (re)construction of the colonial scene; the hybridization of the Spanish language and its cultures; the effects of deterritorialization and reterritorialization as a consequence of migration, diaspora, exiles and avant-gardes; and the significance of writing from abroad. Identifying a series of commonalities among novels written after Una tarde con campanas, I consider this novel to be the precursor of a migrant literature subgenre written by Latin American authors living in Spain. This article aims to contribute to the current literary dialogue that establishes Latin American narrative within a globalized context.

Pos-Bolaño y Piglia: la nueva narrativa latinoamericana del siglo XXI

¿Cómo se ha articulado la literatura latinoamericana después de Ricardo Piglia y Roberto Bolaño? En el siglo XXI, una nueva generación de escritores apareció, renovando formas literarias y reflexionando sobre los cambios estructurales en sus países a partir del derrumbe de la izquierda (simbolizada en la caída del muro de Berlín, y en la consolidación del neoliberalismo en América Latina). Partiendo de la dialéctica Bolaño / Piglia, es decir del escritor en el exilio y/ o en la Academia, revisaré la nueva narrativa latinoamericana en Argentina, Chile, Perú y México que discute acerca de los restos de una ideología de izquierda y que, al mismo tiempo, propone una experimentación formal para su propia escritura. Desde la fetichización y nostalgia de la ideología de la izquierda hasta la reconstrucción de una clase media posdictadura, la nueva narrativa reflexiona desde la ficción y ensayo las posibilidades /los alcances de la literatura latinoamericana en el siglo XXI.

Aarti Smith Madan. Lines of Geography in Latin American Narrative. National Territory, National Literature.

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