While the materialist inklings of this book are my sole responsibility, an assemblage of hospitable institutions and bighearted people made them possible. The former include, decisively, a 2012–13 Internal Faculty Fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center; a spring 2014 Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) Faculty Research Visit Grant at Freie Universität (FU), Berlin; and an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers for the summers of 2015 and 2016, also at FU. I am appreciative of fellow travelers and mentors in Iberian and Latin American Cultures (ILAC), the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages (DLCL), the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS), Modern Thought and Literature (MTL), and Science, Technology and Society (STS), among other provinces of Stanford’s acronym heaven and alphabet soup. The latter include, unwaveringly, Dan Edelstein, Lanier Anderson, Debra Satz, Sepp Gumbrecht, Joachim Küpper, and Susanne Zepp. Intellectual sustenance—un caldo de cultivo—was provided by materia, the research group on Latin Americanist and comparative postanthropocentrisms at Stanford, as well as its co-chairs, guest speakers, regular participants, and cognate courses.
Since 2013, I have presented on sections of this book by invitation of esteemed colleagues and graduate research groups at Urbana-Champaign, Bern, Complutense, Javeriana, Duke, Yale, Copenhagen, Harvard, Instituto Cervantes in Tokyo, Brown, Tulane, Köln, Utah, Northwestern, Santa Cruz, Princeton, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Universidad de Santiago de Chile, Paris 8, Berkeley, Penn State, and Konstanz. A ruefully incomplete list of interlocutors includes Ximena Briceño (to whom this book is indebted in more ways than one), Ericka Beckman, Florencia Garramuño, Bruno Bosteels, Aníbal González, Patricia Valderrama, Richard Rosa, Nancy Armstrong, Mariano Siskind, Michelle Clayton, Idelber Avelar, Thomas Mullaney, Carlos Rincón (†), Alejandro Quin, José Luis Villacañas, Ellen Spielmann, Valeria de los Ríos, Matías Ayala, Jorge Coronado, Fred Turner, Otavio Leonidio Ribero, Gabriella Nouzeilles, Javier Guerrero, Julio Premat, Gabriel Giorgi, Lea Pao, Natalia Brizuela, Ewa Domańska, Eduardo Halfon, Álvaro Fernández Bravo, David Stentiford, María del Rosario Acosta, Virginia Walbot, David Damrosch, Ignacio Sánchez Prado, Antonio José Ponte, Rodolfo Dirzo, Mario Bellatin, Camilo Malagón, Bonnie Honig, María Evany Nascimento, Vicky Googasian, Craig Epplin, Eric Santner, Bill Brown, Dierdra Reber, Anna Castillo, Jacques Lezra, Orlando Bentancor, Marisol de la Cadena, Donna Haraway, and the formidable Francine Masiello.
Sections of this volume have appeared elsewhere in modified form. Part of the introduction appeared as “A Tale of Two Materialisms,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 51, no. 1 (May 2018): 101–16; to appear in translation as “Historia de dos materialismos,” in the forthcoming Naturaleza, literatura y modernidad en América Latina, edited by Jeffrey Cedeño for Fondo de Cultura Económica, Chile. A portion of chapter 1 appeared as “Materia prima e historia en Muñecas,” Cuadernos de literatura 40 (2016): 453–64; translated as “History and Raw Material in Muñecas,” Review: Literature and Art of the Americas 96 (Spring 2018). Excerpts from chapter 3 will appear as “Bolaño: Solar Anus of World Literature,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to World Literature, vol. 5, edited by Venkat Mani (in production); and appeared as “Corpse Narratives and the Teleology of World Literary History,” Journal of World Literature 2 (2017): 63–79, edited by Nora Catelli, Annalisa Mirizio, and Marta Puxan-Oliva. Passages from chapter 5 appeared as “The Tell-Tale Computer: Obsolescence and Nostalgia in Chile after Alejandro Zambra,” in Technology, Literature, and Digital Culture in Latin America, edited by Matthew Bush and Tania Gentic (New York: Routledge, 2015), 109–24. Pages from the concluding section appeared as “Global Supply Chain Literature vs. Extractivism,” in Re-Mapping World Literature, edited by Gesine Müller, Jorge Locane, and Benjamin Loy (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 33–44. A word of thanks goes to the rights holders and editors.
For their keen eye, I am grateful to Philip Leventhal and to the anonymous readers at Columbia University Press. Romina Wainberg and Patric Di Dio Di Marco kindly assisted in preparing the manuscript for publication, as did Michael Rendón. Cristian Soler provided additional image editing.
My greatest debt is to family and friends in California, Bogotá, Medellín, and Berlin for keeping things scattered and life collected while the present study was taking shape.
I dedicate this book to my students.