Lina Meruane Research Articles

Putting a Collective Finger on the Pulse: The New Cadre of Latin American Women Writers

Putting a Collective Finger on the PulseThe New Cadre of Latin American Women Writers Veronica Esposito (bio) Guadalupe Nettel, Samanta Schweblin, Mónica Ojeda, and other Latin American women writers are responding to themes that particularly speak to a younger, female audience—bodily autonomy, redefinition of gender, the internet's mediation of identity, and brushes with the existential—in common ways, embracing conventions of the horror and true crime genres and bending them toward literary aims. OVER THE PAST DECADE or so, a new cadre of female Latin American writers has emerged in English translation. Although each is distinctive in her own right, these writers share enough overlapping themes, approaches, and styles that we might refer to it as a "school," if not a "movement." On their common ground are the misogynistic violence that pervades the lives of Latin American women; bodily autonomy, especially around access to abortion; the ongoing definition and redefinition of gender; internet culture and how it mediates identity and personhood; and brushes with the existential. These writers have responded to such themes in common ways; most notably, by embracing conventions of the horror and true crime genres and bending them toward literary aims. Their literature speaks particularly to a younger, female audience, and these authors seem to have a collective finger on the pulse of their readers' lives. Although I cannot pretend to have an exhaustive list of the writers in this group, I can name off the ones that currently stand out to me in English translation. In no particular order, they include Guadalupe Nettel, Samanta Schweblin, Mónica Ojeda, Fernanda Melchor, Liliana Colanzi, Cristina Rivera Garza, Valeria Luiselli, Nona Fernández, and Lina Meruane. Certainly there are more currently at work in Spanish as well as others emerging in English translation. A good example of the prototypical novel of this group of writers is Ecuadorian Mónica Ojeda's 2018 novel Mandíbula, published in 2022 as Jawbone in Sarah Booker's translation. It tells the story of a schoolteacher for an elite preparatory school for upper-class girls who goes mad, kidnapping one of her students and subjecting her to experiences of body horror. On one level, the book captures many of the central concerns of Latin American writers like Ojeda—body autonomy, the socialization of girls within Latin American society, mental and physical horrors perpetrated against women of the continent—yet it also communicates on levels that are detached from a Latin American context, as it speaks in languages comprehensible to young women throughout the developed world. Specifically, Ojeda speaks in the language of true crime podcasts, streaming serials, creepypastas, and the world of therapy. Regarding some of her literary influences, Ojeda told me: "I have a thing for true crime documentaries. I don't like to like them because they really hurt me, but I keep going to them. And creepypastas, of course. Not all of them, but some are so very powerful." One of the striking things about Jawbone is how it comes across as something along the lines of a true crime podcast or a creepypasta—did you ever hear the one about the teacher who went mad and tortured her own student? It converses with the media resonating with young women across the globe, giving it a currency that transcends its Ecuadoran context. Yet even as Jawbone feels very of the moment, it also connects up with deep-rooted aspects of the Latin American tradition. For instance, the book includes chapters that read as though they are transcripts from one of the main character's therapy sessions, the speakers only denoted by a Q or an A, and the questions asked by Q not included in the transcript. This tracks back to the powerful psychoanalytical writing that was a core aspect of twentieth-century Latin American literature, [End Page 18] reminiscent of Manuel Puig, in particular. In addition, the suggestion that the controversial Catholic organization Opus Dei is involved in the school weaves in a political aspect, staying true to the propensity for Latin American authors to let politics infuse their narratives in subtle and unexpected ways. It also brings to mind canonical Latin American writers like...

El oscuro sótano de los cuentos infantiles de Lina Meruane

Las infantas by Lina Meruane proposes a new reading of the fairy tales that are part of the children's imaginary of European literature. Through the rupture and inversion, both of the canon and of roles and archetypes, the author formulates a multifocal approach to some characters who transit as marginal bodies through the textual and social space of exclusion and fracture. From them, Meruane develops discursive strategies of resistance that displace desire and sexuality, which inaugurate specular spaces of great symbolic force.

Cristina Rivera Garza, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, trans. Sarah Booker

Reviewed by: Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country by Cristina Rivera Garza Michael Jimenez (bio) Cristina Rivera Garza, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, trans. Sarah Booker. Feminist Press, 2020. Pp. 184. Cristina Rivera Garza's book of essays Grieving opens with violence in Mexico against journalists as a context to comprehend global horrors against the bodies of the most vulnerable. In this sense, Garza's book is another study of the horror in recent Mexican history that has led to a deeper analysis of femicide. The subtitle would make Mexico the wounded country. However, Garza does not isolate violence in Mexico but looks at its global connections. She asks: "Can writing keep us company—we, the broken ones still alive with rage and hope" (7)? This is a personal question for Garza, who lost her younger sister to domestic violence (8–9). As she comments, "the violence of our contemporary history has never been foreign to me" (72). The rage from this event, in light of the callous indifference and ignorance of elected officials toward our contemporary horrorism, fuels the essays of Garza's book. The forgetfulness toward violence comes with ignoring history. Garza declares: "Awake, history hungrily moves through the city streets or countryside. Sleepless jaws. History reminds us, as always, that we are mortal. That there are things left unresolved" (27). In a short poetic essay, "Horrorism," Garza builds off concrete history to espouse an "ontology of vulnerability" that does not allow [End Page 113] human beings to forget that we are beings-in-relation, charged with caring for one another (98–99). She continues this train of thought about vulnerability in an essay titled "Mourning," featuring the theoretical work of Judith Butler (135–38). The Other person can't help but change us, when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, questioning the stability of the individual self in the first place. For example, it is impossible to think that Garza would be the same after losing her sister to violence. Garza points out that this is especially relevant for women's history: "It was a world founded on women's silence. It was a world that required the most intimate silence from women—their demise—to keep functioning" (153). One way to deal with this forced silence is public mourning. The public nature of this event makes us "more vulnerable" and "more human" (138). Garza leans on the classic works on pain and horror by Elaine Scarry and Adriana Cavarero. The fact that these are not new studies reveals that the "frightening grind of femicide" has been around "for decades" (151). However, what differentiates Garza's book from others is the inclusion of literary and historical sources from Latin America. For example, one essay, "Writing in Migration: A Desedimentation with Chilean writer Lina Meruane," features a juxtaposition of Meruane's experience with Garza's (139–46). The comparison begins with both sets of grandparents and their migratory journeys; Meruane's traveled from Palestine to Chile and Garza's from Mexico to the United States. Garza utilizes this idea as a way to discuss how language, both bodily and verbal, carries over to their progeny. This is oftentimes an unconscious inheritance. Both Meruane and Garza physically return to the place of origins and attempt to retrace the steps. The closing section of this chapter has some of the best lines in the book. Here is just a sample: "There is always someone who has migrated before.… There is no tabula rasa. We are just guests on the surface of a land that we experience in common" (146). As in the Meruane chapter, Garza's work continually circles back to Mexico, yet many essays have a global scope. In "Writing against War," Garza links the violence in Mexico with the war in Bosnia, wondering if both stories of violence will ultimately be forgotten (147–50). In addition, Garza references the people disappeared during the Cold War with special focus on the mothers of the disappeared. In short, femicide and the grief that accompany it are a worldwide problem that should not be separated by fictitious borders. On the one hand, what I find compelling about Garza's method...

Las lenguas del animal. Fábulas de la pobreza y la vida precaria

This essay aims to inquire about the literary representation of the animal and the political imagination nowadays, as the “human life” paradigm represents a biopolitical boundary that states which lives deserve such status and which lives are left out of such symbolic and legal recognition. Starting with “Yzur” (1096) by Leopoldo Lugones, the essay shows how this “anthropological machine” works, which in its capture of the living imposes a logic of domination and exploitation. In contrast, it presents the short story “Como un leon” (1967) by Haroldo Conti, the collection of poems El duelo (2010) by Igor Barreto and “Hambre perra” (2009) by Lina Meruane as fictional spaces where the figure of the animal is not presented as the opposite of the human one but as a variation that blurs its boundaries and suspends the established biopolitical order of the distribution of the bodies.

Desplazamientos y apropiaciones: la construcción del Yo en Volverse palestina, de Lina Meruane

En el presente trabajo nos interesa indagar cómo se construye el yo del texto referencial Volverse Palestina, de la escritora chilena Lina Meruane, problematizando la relación entre migración y los temas de memoria e identidad. Nuestra propuesta de lectura se pregunta por el sentido que adquieren los géneros elegidos por la autora para llevar a cabo el ejercicio de memoria y el ejercicio testimonial. Se evidencia en el análisis el desplazamiento de los propósitos discursivos del formato árbol genealógico y del género crónica de viaje, la apropiación político-discursiva del mandato judío de hacer memoria y la emergencia de cartografías migrantes imaginadas

Disability in Spanish-speaking and US Chicano Contexts: Critical and Artistic Perspectives ed. by Dawn Slack, Karen L. Rauch

Reviewed by: Disability in Spanish-speaking and US Chicano Contexts: Critical and Artistic Perspectives ed. by Dawn Slack, Karen L. Rauch Laura Kanost Slack, Dawn, and Karen L. Rauch, editors. Disability in Spanish-speaking and US Chicano Contexts: Critical and Artistic Perspectives. Cambridge Scholars, 2019. Pp. 224. ISBN 978-1-52752-750-8. This sampling of essays examines representations of disability spanning some five centuries and three continents. Mixed-media visual and poetic works by Khédija Gadhoum are interwoven throughout the book, which is organized according to implicit thematic clusters. While the individual essays’ degree of engagement with the field of disability studies varies, unifying motifs include narrative prosthesis, subjectivity, normativity, social critique, and transgression. In the opening study of Disability in Spanish-speaking and US Chicano Contexts: Critical and Artistic Perspectives, Beth E. Jörgensen discusses the relationship between blindness and representation in “Blind Spot (Notes on Reading Blindness)” (trans. Jörgensen) and Seeing Red (trans. Megan McDowell) by contemporary New York-based Chilean writer Lina Meruane. María Esther Quintana Millamoto reads the portrayal of corporeal difference in contemporary Chicana novelist Ana Castillo’s Peel My Love Like an Onion as a challenge to societal expectations for Mexican American women. Jennifer Brady’s chapter addresses the interplay of impairment, language, and subjectivity in the novel La mujer loca by contemporary Spanish writer Juan José Millás. Dawn Slack highlights social criticism in the portrayal of characters with disabilities in short stories by contemporary Spanish American writers Cristina Pacheco, Fanny Buitrago, and Carmen Naranjo. Questions of biopolitics and prosthesis in the novel Perros héroes by contemporary Mexican-Peruvian writer Mario Bellatin are the focus of Jennifer Thorndike’s [End Page 432] chapter. Gloria Jeanne Bodtorf Clark explores the concept of body-shaming in portrayals of and works by seventeenth-century Spanish writer Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, highlighting the play Los favores del mundo. Carlos Rodríguez McGill’s contribution discusses Eduardo Gutiérrez’s El Jorobado series of detective novels within the context of xenophobic modernizing discourses in late nineteenth-century Argentina. Karen L. Rauch reads postcolonial themes in the stories “La pierna de M. Lavalette” and “Sand on the Sea” by contemporary Dominican writer Marco Veloz Maggiolo through the lens of narrative prosthesis. Lastly, Meredith L. Jeffers offers a close reading of two recent films from Spain that juxtapose autonomous protagonists’ disability with supporting characters’ “inability”: Yo, también (dir. Álvaro Pastor and Antonio Naharro) and El truco del manco (dir. Santiago Zannou). Brief concluding remarks by the editors signal shared and contrasting themes and link the book to existing scholarship (Jörgensen and Antebi, Fraser). The editors’ introduction provides an overview of key concepts such as the normate (Garland Thomson), passing (Siebers), narrative prosthesis (Mitchell and Snyder), and monstrosity (Antebi), making the book accessible to newcomers to disability studies. Likewise, the authors contextualize their discussions for a broad readership. Usage of terminology (able-bodied, impairment, incapacity, lameness, deformity, wheelchair-bound, etc.) is inconsistent across chapters, reflecting the book’s eclectic approach and perhaps owing in part to the influence of Spanish-language norms and connotations. Laura Kanost Kansas State University Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese, Inc

‘Blood in the Queer Eye’: Anomalous Bodies and Monsters in Lina Meruane’s Fictions

This essay focuses on the peculiar intersection which seems to explain unstable living forms – precarious ‘bodies in progress’ – that inhabit Lina Meruane’s ‘degenerated’ poetics, one where queer discourse mixes with fantastic and gothic features. Indeed, if, on the one hand, the Chilean author’s political agenda clings to the refusal of a disciplinating mould and objections to any request of identity accountability, on the other, she constantly counterbalances her revolutionary theoretical drive always flirting with narrative codes of the ominous, as illustrated by estranging, almost a ‘horror’ staging she intends for every one of her ambiguous, amorphous creatures.

‘Blood in the Queer Eye’: Anomalous Bodies and Monsters in Lina Meruane’s Fictions

This essay focuses on the peculiar intersection which seems to explain unstable living forms – precarious ‘bodies in progress’ – that inhabit Lina Meruane’s ‘degenerated’ poetics, one where queer discourse mixes with fantastic and gothic features. Indeed, if, on the one hand, the Chilean author’s political agenda clings to the refusal of a disciplinating mould and objections to any request of identity accountability, on the other, she constantly counterbalances her revolutionary theoretical drive always flirting with narrative codes of the ominous, as illustrated by estranging, almost a ‘horror’ staging she intends for every one of her ambiguous, amorphous creatures.

El viaje a la raí­z: un nuevo modelo de crónica en tres autoras chilenas contemporáneas

A partir de la lectura de Volverse Palestina (2013) de Lina Meruane, Poste restante (2016) de Cynthia Rimsky y Destinos errantes (2016) de Andrea Jeftanovic, se propone un nuevo modelo de la crónica de viajes latinoamericana contemporánea: el viaje a la raí­z. Partimos de la hipótesis de que, al narrar el viaje al lejano y difuso origen familiar de las escritoras, los tres textos se alejan de las familias textuales hasta ahora predominantes e inauguran una nueva genealogí­a. En este sentido, el objetivo de este trabajo es describir su poética, al contrastar sus propuestas con las caracterí­sticas tradicionales del género. El resultado permite reflexionar acerca de la inmigración en América Latina desde una nueva óptica y confirma la maleabilidad de un género en constante cambio.

The Queer and the Ominous. Lina Meruane's Poetics of 'Degeneration'

Abstract Since the adventures of her Infantas up to the ‘illness involountary trilogy’ (which is where her two major novels Fruta podrida and Sangre en el ojo are framed), Lina Meruane has developped a ‘degenerated’ poetics, charectarized by an insistence on ‘bodies in progress’, i.e. obsessively thematising a metamorfosis which works both as a disturbing element and as a platform for anarchy: an inscrutable source of both fear and pleasure. In fact, the body –which she inflects in a meticulous and hallucinatory inventory of variations, excesses and abjections– operates in her oeuvre like a ‘de-identifying machine’. This essay aims at focusing on the peculiar intersection which seems to explain effectively the unstable living forms that inhabit her texts, one where queer discourse (in all of its rhizomic ramifications) mixes with fantastic and gothic features. If, on the one hand, Meruane’s political agenda clings to the refusal of the disciplinating mould and the objection to any request of identity accountability, on the other, insouciantly flirting with the narrative codes of the ominous, the Chilean writer counterbalances her revolutionary theoric drive, as it is illustrated by the estranging, almost ‘horror’ staging she intends for every one of her ambiguous, amorphous creatures. Resumo Das andancas das suas Infantas a ‘trilogia involuntaria da doenca’ (da qual formam parte as suas duas novelas maiores: Fruta podrida e Sangre en el ojo ), Lina Meruane vem desenvolvendo uma escrita da deslocacao e da ‘degeneracao’ caracterizada pela tematizacao obsessiva de uma metamorfose que funciona quer como elemento perturbador, quer como estimulo para a anarquia, causador do medo e do prazer. De facto, nas suas descricoes, o corpo –visionaria e ambivalentemente observado atraves de um repertorio desconcertante de alteracoes, excessos e abjecoes– funciona como uma autentica ‘maquina para des-identificar’. Este estudo pretende concentrar-se na interseccao inedita que melhor parece dar conta das formas estranhas e instaveis que habitam cada uma das suas fabulas e, ao mesmo tempo, as definem fora do sistema dos generos: a que se produz entre o discurso ‘queer’ (com todas as suas ramificacoes e metaforas: o ‘aberto’, o ‘vulneravel’, o ‘pos-humano’...) e o discurso fantastico (banhado em humores goticos) que tambem as atravessa. Se, por um lado, a agenda politica dos textos de Meruane remete para a recusa da disciplina da forma e para a contestacao de tudo o que e identitariamente estabelecido, o jogo constante –aindaque ambiguo– com os codigos narrativos do funesto parece servir a escritora chilena de contrapeso, levando-a a apostar numa encenacao alheadora, sinistra, terrorifica ate dos resultados revolucionarios realizados ja desde a teoria. Palavras-chave: Identidade. Deslocacao. Lina Meruane. Queer. Fantastico.

“Ni ahora ni nunca”: diatriba y pensamiento positivo en Contra los hijos, de Lina Meruane

Through the idea of ‘positive thinking’ and its presence in the discourses of late capitalism, this article tries to demarcate a theoretical field from which to read texts like Contra los hijos (2018), by Lina Meruane, accentuating the tension between positivity and negativity. Far from offering a rhetorical reading, this paper revisits the origins of the modern diatribe to propose a reading in which diatribes cannot be understood outside a post-dictatorial context, in this case, marked by economic discourses around happiness and their willingness to hide or minimize social criticism. This approach allows us to understand how the politics of diatribe are articulated with a double critical potential: on the one hand, they point to an established target (the obligatory condition of motherhood, in this case) and, on the other, they question certain inflections of the discourses of late capitalism adopted by the Chilean transition that aim, in particular, to avoid and silence most of critical exercises.

Modos de resistencia en Fruta Podrida de Lina Meruane

Este trabajo propone una lectura de Fruta podrida de Lina Meruane que se despliega a partir de la pregunta por las tensiones entre discursos (im)productivos, por el lugar que ocupan los cuerpos y la poesía en relación con los discursos del saber y de lo útil. Para pensar en estas tensiones, utilizamos dos figuras teóricas: exforma (Bourriaud) y resto (Cragnolini). La pesquisa gira en torno a los distintos modos de resistencia presentes en la novela–el silencio, la poesía, la desubjetivación- frente al discurso de la institución médica y del mercado. La tensión entre el poder estabilizador de la Institución y la impugnación de este discurso propicia una resistencia en ese devenir de descomposición del discurso que permite que sobrevivan otros modos, lenguas o subjetividades como resto o exforma.

Crear o criar: Maternity and Choice Feminism in Meruane's Fruta podrida and Contra los hijos

Scholars of Latin American literature have long studied the topic of motherhood, but the paucity of literary representations of pregnancy itself has resulted in a tradition of what we might call postpartum criticism. Moreover, in most of this critical work, pronatalism (a hegemonic belief that human reproduction is always desirable) remains largely unquestioned. In this study of the antinatalist views in two works by awardwinning Chilean author Lina Meruane—Contra los hijos (2014) and Fruta podrida (2007)—I show how Meruane joins a growing cohort of writers who object to "choice feminism," a popular feminist philosophy that validates all women's choices on the basis of liberated individualism. Meruane's provocative representations of women who choose to procreate displace the sentimentality of childrearing and foreground the economic stakes of childbearing. This shift requires readers to consider the praxis of gestation, its value, and the corporal cost of production borne, always, by mothers.

Devenires de la corporalidad femenina en Fruta podrida (2007) de Lina Meruane: Toxicidad, memoria y exterminio

espanolRESUMEN: El presente articulo propone una lectura de la novela Fruta podrida (2007) de la escritora chilena Lina Meruane en terminos de su consistente exploracion de las potencialidades del cuerpo femenino. Dichas corporalidades se articulan a traves de imaginarios y practicas de contaminacion y toxicidad asentados tanto en la interpenetracion de lo humano, lo animal y lo vegetal como en estrategias y materialidades escriturales y de lectura. Los imaginarios toxicos habilitan multiples modos de ‘devenir’ que, a su vez, inauguran nuevos abordajes a la construccion contemporanea del cuerpo femenino en el contexto del campo chileno en estrecha conexion con complejos sistemas globales de produccion economica e identitaria. Asi, en esta novela la toxicidad visibiliza practicas y corporalidades implicitamente marcadas en terminos de genero, raza, clase social y origen geopolitico, asi como tambien sujetos, memorias e historias locales del campo chileno. EnglishABSTRACT: This article proposes a reading of the novel Fruta podrida (2007) by Chilean writer Lina Meruane in terms of its consistent exploration of the potentialities of the female body. Such corporalities are articulated through imaginaries and practices of contamination and toxicity based both on the interpenetration of the human and the non-human and on writing and reading strategies and materialities. Toxic imaginaries enable multiple modes of ‘becoming’ in the novel which, in turn, inaugurate new understandings of the contemporary articulation of the female body in the context of the Chilean countryside in close relation with complex global systems of economic and subjective production. Thus, in this novel toxicity operates to visibilize bodies and practices implicitly marked in terms of gender, race, social class and geopolitical origin, as well as the subjects, memories and local histories of the Chilean countryside.

<i>SANGRE EN EL OJO</i>: REFLECTIONS ON ILLNESS, (POST) MEMORY AND WRITING

In her texts, Lina Meruane presents transversal lines of reflection that constitute her principal literary and political concerns and that define the Weltanschauung of the new Chilean feminine fiction. These are, among others, illness, "(post) memory", and writing, which will be analyzed in relation to the novel Sangre en el ojo (2012). Those three central concepts are closely connected to dynamics of resistance and subversion against hegemony, and they design new forms of experience the body and the word, in a present time where the reconstruction of the historical past becomes an urgent ethical and aesthetic action.

The Spectrum of the Eyes and Its Transatlantic Travels

Based on the idea that the eyes are among the most vulnerable parts of the body and that the threat of losing them is a source of anxiety and fear, this essay discusses Hoffman’s famous tale «The Sandman». It also analyzes the Hoffmanian influence in two Spanish American tales from different times: the short story «Lina’s Eyes», published by the Peruvian Clemente Palma in 1901, and the novel «Blood in the Eye» by Chilean writer Lina Meruane, the first edition of which was published in 2012. A review of the Freudian concept of uncanny (das Unheimliche) and of interpretations of Hoffman’s text based on said concept is also made in parallel.

Palestine and Latin America: Lina Meruane’s Volverse Palestina and Nathalie Handal’s La Estrella Invisible

This article examines representations of Palestine through the literary, cultural and political landscapes between the Arab world and Latin America in which Palestine has figured in new ways. It examines the connections between Palestine and Latin America, focusing on Lina Meruane’s memoir Volverse Palestina (Becoming Palestine, 2013), where the Chilean writer of Palestinian descent looks back at or crosses into Palestine, and the imaginative intertwinings of Bethlehem, Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the poetry of Palestinian US-based writer Nathalie Handal. Drawing on growing scholarship on literary and cultural ties between Latin America and the Arab world, this article explores the role of Palestine in Latin American literature, not only as a representation of immigrant communities and a cultural heritage, but also as part of a perception of Palestine within a broader global context.

Arab and Latin American Literature: Mourid Barghouti, Najla Said, and Lina Meruane in Palestine

Over the past quarter-century, the production of memoirs on Palestine in Arabic, English, and, more recently, Spanish animated the genre. This article compares diasporic memoirs of return to Palestine: Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti’s Ra’aytu Ramallah (1996), Arab-American author Najla Said’s Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family (2013), and Chilean writer Lina Meruane’s Volverse Palestina (2013). Examining the narrative of return genre across three languages illuminates how Arab, Arab-American, and Latin American writers of Arab ancestry contribute to the rise of new memoirs in Arabic, English, and Spanish within a global cultural production on Palestine.

Libre Acceso: Latin American Literature and Film through Disability Studies eds. by Susan Antebi and Beth E. Jörgensen

Reviewed by: Libre Acceso: Latin American Literature and Film through Disability Studies eds. by Susan Antebi and Beth E. Jörgensen Benjamin Fraser Antebi, Susan, and Beth E. Jörgensen, eds. Libre Acceso: Latin American Literature and Film through Disability Studies. Albany: SUNY P, 2016. Pp. 290. ISBN 978-1-43845-967-7. EDITORIAL POLICY: Hispania publishes reviews of selected books and electronic media in the following categories: Pan-Hispanic/Luso-Brazilian Literary and Cultural Studies; Linguistics, Language, and Media; and Fiction and Film. Publishers and authors should submit their materials for possible selection to the Book/Media Review Editor, Domnita Dumitrescu, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, California State University, Los Angeles, 5151 State University Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90032. Submitted materials will not be returned to publishers or authors, even if they are not selected for review. Members of the AATSP who wish to be considered as reviewers should upload their information at mc.manuscriptcentral.com/hispan and send their CV to the Book/Media Review Editor at ddumitrescu@aatsp.org. Hispania will not accept unsolicited reviews and does not publish journal numbers, book notices, or reviews of works more than two years old. Due to the number of works that correspond to Hispania’s broad scope, not all requests to review specific items can be granted. We especially encourage, however, requests to review film and other media resources. An invitation to review does not guarantee publication. All reviews are evaluated by anonymous readers and publication decisions are based upon their comments and the discretion of the editors. A volume quite aware of its unique positioning, Libre Acceso is a major contribution to the interdisciplinary field of Latin American disability studies. The importance of this positioning cannot be understated. The collection succeeds by staging an “encounter between two complex and vigorously debated disciplines: Latin American literary, film and cultural studies, and disability studies” (9). Wonderfully, it performs a “decolonization of disability studies” that is quite necessary (19) and opens “an interdisciplinary and transregional dialogue on disability studies” (20). The division of the edited volume into four sections suggests a thematic coherence that, in all honesty, is at odds with the true originality of the individual chapters, each of which might otherwise stand alone in any number of top-tier journal publications. But then again, if these essays were scattered throughout the disciplinary landscape of the wider field of Hispanic studies—where disability studies perspectives still do not receive the attention they deserve—readers would be unlikely to find them. Libre Acceso is a powerful call to Hispanist scholars to explore disability studies themes, but given its publication in English, it is simultaneously a call to disability studies scholars to see that the ‘global turn’ called for by the likes of Stuart Murray and Clare Barker—among others—is well underway. The contributions that bookend the volume illustrate its unique position at the intersection of two fields. The first chapter after the introduction, “Blind Spot: Notes on Reading Blindness” is written by Lina Meruane, an acclaimed Chilean novelist who here self-reflexively considers her own approach to writing. The epilogue titled “#YoSoy” is written by Robert McRuer, a renowned disability studies scholar rooted in an English department who here revisits the book’s contents in light of an expanding Latin American and ultimately global perspective on disability. The chapters in-between take on cultural production from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Peru, but do so dialoguing with what often seems to be required reading for disability studies scholars: not only McRuer, but also Michel Bérubé, David Bolt, Thomas Couser, Lennard Davis, Nirmala Erevelles, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Rod Michalko, David T. Mitchell, Michael Oliver, Jasbir Puar, Ato Quayson, Carrie Sandahl, Tom Shakespeare, [End Page 137] Tobin Siebers, Sharon L. Snyder, Tanya Titchkosky and more. The contributions deftly navigate this disciplinary combination in their own way, incorporating the work of well-known and lesser-known names (Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Elena Poniatowska, Gabriela Brimmer, Ekiwah Adler-Beléndez, Roberto Bolaño, João Guimarães Rosa, Reinaldo Arenas, Antonio José Ponte, Miriam Alves, Mario Bellatin and Carmen Boullosa), and also a selection of recent...

Fruta podrida: La reivindicación de la vida y de la muerte desde un cuerpo enfermo, desechado

Enfrentada a la desmemoria y al olvido, Lina Meruane recrea en la novela Fruta podrida, el drama vivido en Chile con la implementación salvaje de la economía de mercado, sistema que atacó, de manera siniestra, los campos y los cuerpos de los chilenos. En esta obra Meruane desmonta los dispositivos violentos y coercitivos sobre los cuerpos, reivindicando el derecho a la vida y a la muerte, conjetura desde la que se explora esta novela, a partir de las perspectivas teóricas de Michel Foucault y Judith Butler sobre el poder y la desigual valoración de los cuerpos. Crítica de la memoria oficial que absolvió a los culpables de la deScomposición de la sociedad chilena, Meruane se atreve a decir lo indecible desde un cuerpo enfermo que denuncia la red de poderes deshumanizantes del sistema neoliberal-dictatorial-patriarcal, red que controla el territorio y los cuerpos, haciendo de Chile un gran galpón desmemoriado.