Transcultural materialism is a remediation of human and natural history. It’s both found object and method. “Transcultural,” per my revision and extension of Ortiz’s argument, signals a materialist approach that is always already natural-cultural. I have associated it with ways of reading that expose underlying assumptions about human-nonhuman coexistence and reveal literature’s potential, qua literature, to provide insight into political ecology. As the chapters of this book have demonstrated, there is an undercurrent in contemporary Latin American fiction and in selected historical precedents that deploys it. As the present general conclusions seek to establish, one can further it into a mode of intervention. Its telos is to carry out a critique of extractivism, in language, onto the world.
Works written in this vein do not merely represent human and natural history, in the manner of an ecologically capacious realist novel—think Tolstoy with climate change—but interrogate its underexamined scaffoldings in language: say, the subject/object divide implicit in calling something “nature,” “animal,” or “thing,” as if we weren’t ourselves all of the above, however not reducible to any one of them. Words like these easily turn distinction into separation; for the ecologically minded, they are also relatively easy to spot as potential pitfalls, or markers, of “speciesism”—the assertion of the preeminence of our species over everything else. But there is more to language than nouns. Verbs often render nature passive and man active (“hunt,” “mine”); narratives, more broadly, separate human from natural history as if they weren’t always already intertwined. It takes careful work with language (interpretation, close reading) to even aspire to undo what centuries of anthropocentrism and Cartesianism have done. Given its complexity and richness, literary fiction is a good place to start.
It’s important to keep in mind that, while the transcultural materialist works studied in this volume blur the line between nature and culture, defamiliarize objectifying language, interrogate the power dynamics that affect human-nonhuman interaction, and so forth, most literature actually contributes to, rather than critiques, the status quo. The good news is that novels waver, explore counterfactuals, allow one to think in the recesses. Part I of this book analyzed works that revolve around basic objects. A case in point, examined in chapter 1, “Raw Stuff Disavowed,” is José Eustasio Rivera’s The Vortex. Ultimately, that rubber-boom novel expresses deep frustration over the inability to effectively extend human dominion—if only with less brutality to the enslaved—over the Amazon basin. Nature is a femme fatale that, at the end of the day, prevails. Recall its telegrammatic punchline: “The jungle devoured them!”1 The net effect is like a call to arms, which indeed the Colombian state and other actors have heeded, to desertify, cultivate, and colonize wilderness in practice while admiring it in theory. And yet the novel, despite its prevailing narrative, features rich counternarratives and a thought-provoking use of language to delve into. Materialist interpretation unleashes their potential.
Language is the key. I have focused on how novels—and, to a lesser extent, other genre and media—conceptualize the role of humans among nonhumans and vice versa. Some do so explicitly, as in the case of Blanca Wiethüchter’s El jardín de Nora, discussed in chapter 2, “Of Rocks and Particles,” which narrates the planting of an Austrian garden in the Bolivian highlands. But thematization and emplotment only go so far. Ditto for authorial intent. The main agent of this book is textuality, from the integrity of the novel form to the timely use of an interjection. Storytelling and authors have a role, of course, but it is the power of words themselves I have paid the most attention to. Novelists and poets just happen to be very keen at putting them to work.
Implications for World Literature as critical paradigm, as discussed in detail in chapter 3, “Corpse Narratives as Literary History,” include an orientation toward the corpse—that is, a reappraisal of the role of the abject in literary history. With discussions of Roberto Bolaño and others, I have explored how the abject communicates humans and their nonhuman counterparts, surroundings, kin. We are beings that ingest, excrete, and die, even when fiction and the arts often cast us as disembodied, angelic, immortal. Recovering that suppurating, radically earthly dimension serves us well when thinking about phenomena, literature included, on a planetary scale. It leads to a different realization of the ethical, political, and ecological relevance of working with words. In one way or another, to greater or lesser degrees, literature participates in and responds to, rather than just reflects, processes as vast as climate change or industrialization. One instantiation of this idea would be to blur the line between textual and book history. (Literature is also dead trees.) The study of the book object is not exactly a new trend, but neither is it as central to literary studies as it should be if, indeed, we are materialists. Actor-network theories of literature can be fascinating provided one does not assume, with naive positivism, that suspicion has no role, or that everything that literature does is inherently benign.
Clearly, I don’t think critique is, per Bruno Latour’s dictum, “running out of steam.”2 I do find that World Literature is losing momentum, however, and will continue to do so unless we ground it in a manner consistent with the findings of this book. “Material World Literature” is too unfortunate a coinage to put forward, however aptly it would emphasize engagement with the planetary in all its nonhuman glory, as in Ursula Heise’s eco-critical model, or with the ethico-political dimension of literature, as in Pheng Cheah’s deconstructionist model.3 Mine has been a kindred intervention with a foothold in Latin Americanism. (As I have previously argued, I find it less productive to model Latin American literature after World literature than to attempt to do the opposite.) The other foothold is in critical theory, a natural traveling companion to a literary tradition that often reflects on issues pertaining to power.
Speaking of critical theory, there are implications worth considering in this domain as well. With speculative exegeses of rubber novels, I have suggested that the category of “raw material” is for Marx something of a leap of faith, or an outright faulty premise. As theoretically informed as the present monograph has strived to be, it is not a work of theory as such. Others have made similar claims in a different fashion: Jason Moore’s Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (2015) comes to mind.4 Moore shows how modernization created a separation of nature and humans to better exploit both; in so doing, he ushers in a revision of Marx’s own modern, unavoidably eschewed premises. With regard to Marxist literary criticism—a tall edifice that ultimately stands on shaky ground—recognizing that nature never is “raw” gives another reason to revise findings and approaches. Ecological thought that reinforces the separation of nature and culture may be a contradiction in terms, and yet it is not uncommon in society at large and in eco-critical literary criticism in particular. Historians like Moore, versed as they are in natural and social history, cannot, for reasons of disciplinary specificity, concern themselves with language to the extent that literary critics can. Transcultural materialism, as a method for the study of literature, reveals the traces of successive material paradigms in language, and intervenes therein to change them. Put differently, this approach complements emerging, natural-cultural approaches to critical theory.
Conversely, Latin American novels of extractivism make the case for the politicization of new materialism. An exacerbated variant of what happens in other places of the world, Latin America has been subject and object of extractivism, plundered and plunderer. Its colonial exploitation predates that of the African continent and continues through the present through various forms of neocolonialism; its criollo elites benefit from modern mining operations that destroy the environment and affect the livelihood of the poor, much like their European or American counterparts do. Novels and cognate cultural products benefit from a rich tradition of experimentation and aesthetic risk. They offer, not surprisingly, a privileged site to reflect about the language of extractivism, which is part and parcel with the phenomenon itself. Part 2 of this book addressed it more comprehensively. Chapter 4, “Politics and Praxis of Hyperfetishism,” considered the flipside of extraction, which is conspicuous consumption. The works I analyzed there, by authors such as Margo Glantz and Fernando Vallejo, take the prevalent and acritical celebration of luxury goods—“magical, clean” objects somehow removed from “prosaic, dirty” production—and turn it on its head. They don’t necessarily do so programmatically, for works and authors alike may very well participate in the glee of consumerism. However, their engagement with, on the one hand, the cycle of production and consumption and, on the other, the effects of this cycle on literary form, make for thought-provoking fiction.
Note that extractivism is not new, nor does it belong to the realm of fiction alone. It does have a very specific Latin American configuration. A classical source to understand this is el Libertador Simón Bolívar’s “Letter from Jamaica” (1815). At the time of writing, the visionary, authoritarian leader credited with quite literally spearheading the end of Spanish colonial rule in the Americas is looking for allies in England. He criticizes Spanish rule for reducing locals to being either “serfs” or “consumers” when it comes to commerce: “O, you wish to know what our future held?,” he asks his addressee, Henry Cullen. He then dramatizes an answer: “Simply the cultivation of the fields of indigo, grain, coffee, sugar cane, cacao, and cotton; cattle raising on the broad plains; hunting wild game in the jungles; digging in the earth to mine its gold—but even these limitations could never satisfy the greed of Spain.”5 In Marxist terms, Bolívar is bemoaning the colonial status quo, whereby raw stuff and consumption are within the reach of americanos, but added value is not. At the same time, he is defending the extractivist model and reducing nature to mere economic resource, advocating for changes in management rather than for structural reform. (In the letter, indigenous cultures are cast as something from a heroic past.) Bolívar’s ideas were, of course, plenty radical as they were—it’s astounding, to begin with, that he no longer sees himself as a Spanish subject. What is interesting here is his symptomatic identification of extractivism as a staple of Latin America at the time the region was only recently coming into its own.
Brought to bear upon the present, Bolívar’s prescient lament—which can and has been read both from the left and from the right—reads either like a poignant critique or a call to creolize neo-extractivism. In chapter 5, “Digitalia from the Margins,” I mentioned how, with the exception of a handful of plutocrats, Mexican mogul Carlos Slim among them, few Latin Americans truly reap the benefits of added value in today’s technologically driven economy. Those who do arguably do so thanks to the exploitation of the region’s nature and people. Leaders of the receding Pink Tide—Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, Brazil’s Dilma Roussef, Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner—all gingerly embraced modern mining, despite its toll on the ecology and social equality of their lands. As the region swings to the right, this is unlikely to change.6 The shift from extractivism to neo-extractivism is qualitative, for new technology is literally built from differentials of added value and reinforces them in turn. This is part of a virtuous circle for those who profit and a vicious one for those, nonhumans included, who are profited upon. We have replaced “the cultivation of the fields of indigo” for the mining of coltan, but the underlying logic continues. So does the thrust of literary language, equally present in Bolívar’s eye-opening enumeration and in Zambra’s invocation of love and computers, to offer whatever counterweight it can.
This can happen in unforeseen ways. Explicitly, this book has close-read works of literature that showcase how historical materialism enriches new materialist approaches. Implicitly, some of its findings contribute to the opposite: infusing critical theory methods with the findings of new materialism. Take Bruno Bosteels’s The Actuality of Communism (2011), a thoughtful study that achieves many important things.7 It uncouples Marxism from communism, as there are more communisms than those informed directly or indirectly by Karl Marx, and avoids the unsalutary—indeed, complementary—extremes of ignoring altogether the bloodshed that has occurred in the name of and against communism, on the one hand, and dismissing communism entirely because of it, on the other. More broadly, Bosteels demonstrates, as the title of his book suggests, the actuality—Wirklichkeit, also “effectiveness” and, paradoxically, “potency”—of communism. However, there are aspects of this actuality that the author’s conceptual framework cannot account for. In the context of a discussion of the dialectical inversion of actuality and possibility, a theme he derives from Žižek, Bosteels notes, “The point is somehow to perceive communism not as a utopian not-yet for which reality will always fail to offer an adequate match, but as something that is always already here, in every moment of refusal of private appropriation and in every act of collective reappropriation.”8 At the very least, anthropodecentric thought contributes to this “somehow” by revealing the force of the signifier “communism”: an actant in its own right, a word-deed. Just voice it aloud at the next faculty meeting for corroboration. The effects far exceed the utterer’s intentions, the word itself being a nonhuman agent that—in a modified, less than semantic take on speech-act theory—quite simply stirs the humans in the room.
My methodology has revisited and repurposed particular concepts in Marx it finds especially compelling, such as primitive accumulation or commodity fetishism, rather than attempt to address Marxism or communism as a whole. I would be surprised if, in the eyes of the reader, this colors the book as Marxist, let alone communist—a matter about which I have little control. I do envisage a horizon where, rather than have critical thinking engulf and override new materialism, or vice versa, these poles continue to build upon each other, contrapuntally. This is consonant with two other themes Bosteels develops, namely, the ontological turn in speculative leftism and its neo-Spinozist instantiation.
The former refers to a renewed interest—see Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, Alain Badiou, and others—in the ontology of the political, as opposed to the straightforward practice of politics.9 The inquiry into what constitutes the political has its own politics, to be sure, but it happens at a metalevel; nothing prevents subtle philosophers from also engaging with straightforward partisan issues. Still, in a caricature, the question of speculative leftism is “What is an event?” rather than “Where do we stand on the issue of subsidized transportation in our city?” Here too, recent approaches lend a hand. For a quick illustration, consider electrons as part of the political. An interdisciplinary approach grounded in science and technology studies (STS) has much to contribute to the study of actual power—“power grid” and “electric power” being more than naturalized metaphors—but also to political theory writ large, speculative leftism included. For materialists of any persuasion practicing in our technological era, thinking about ideology solely in abstract terms is, at best, shortsighted; at worst, it is misleading. Thinking about ideology in this day and age, as explored in chapter 5, benefits from considering what Sheila Jasanoff calls “sociotechnical imaginaries.”10 Understanding totality, as Lukács might put it, calls for a different kind of awareness. For a more or less banal example: posting radical claims on Facebook about housing costs in the San Francisco Bay Area (The rich must pay!), on aggregate, raises rent prices by funneling money into the pockets of a notorious real estate hoarder: Facebook. Because we live and signify in a corporate-designed world, a priori exercises in political ontology simply have to turn a posteriori.
Neo-Spinozism provides a common platform across critical paradigms. Bosteels laments that, in speculative leftism, the Heideggerian-Lacanian framework often overrides neo-Spinozist or Deleuzian ontologies of substance. Bosteels is thinking primarily of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, who put forward a famous argument about the multitude: “the living alternative that grows within empire,” a composition of the “diverse figures of social production,” similar to the internet in being a distributed network.11 To their credit, they formulate an original political ontology, distinct from more familiar categories like “the masses,” “the people,” or “the working class.” As Bosteels notes, however, critics find Negri and Hardt’s notions too ghostly (Where does the multitude begin or end?) or not ghostly enough (What’s the multitude’s conceptual purchase?). The way forward in this impasse is anthropodecentric Spinozism. When Hardt and Negri evoke Saint Paul’s “power of the flesh,” we should at the same time think of its cognate, “meat”: a single substance that humans and animals share (see chapter 1). A different political ontology emerges then. Speculative leftism could take stock of the various ways in which new materialism has advanced Spinozist thinking. Take Rosi Braidotti’s “zoe-centered egalitarianism”: “a materialist, secular, grounded and unsentimental response to the opportunistic trans-species commodification of Life that is the logic of advanced capitalism.”12 As she goes on to note, her work draws from Deleuze and Guattari’s neo-Spinozism “reworked” with feminist and postcolonial theories.
New materialism also invites reconsiderations of the historical materialist archive.13 In the context of a lengthy rebuttal of Trotsky and Bukharin, Lenin writes in 1921:
A tumbler is assuredly both a glass cylinder and a drinking vessel. But there are more than these two properties, qualities or facets to it; there are an infinite number of them, an infinite number of “mediacies” and inter-relation-ships with the rest of the world. A tumbler is a heavy object which can be used as a missile; it can serve as a paper-weight, a receptacle for a captive butterfly, or a valuable object with an artistic engraving or design, and this has nothing at all to do with whether or not it can be used for drinking, is made of glass, is cylindrical or not quite, and so on and so forth.14
The literary value of this enumeration is, in a manner of speaking, crystal clear. We can almost see the revolutionary leader feeling the object in his hand, noticing its heft, pondering what to do next. The passage conjures the mundane and the exceptional, action and philosophy—the missile and the paperweight—beauty and violence—the captive butterfly, twice over. On one level, the point is that dialectical thinking has to consider all possibilities, and not the modest dichotomy that narrow-minded, scholastic Bukharin had used as an example in an earlier dispute: glass cylinder and drinking vessel. But then there is the implicit political ontology, which becomes graspable only in hindsight, where the very locus of revolutionary action lies in a multimodal human-nonhuman assemblage. The literary qualities of the passage, it bears noting, contribute to this realization. In closing his discussion of the tumbler, Lenin notes that “a full ‘definition’ of an object must include the whole of human experience, both as a criterion of truth and a practical indicator of its connection with human wants” and reminds his readers, citing Plekhanov, that “truth is always concrete, never abstract.”15 The mind reels.
For readers who may feel that the above paragraphs carry a few “isms” too many, or who wonder if Leninism or Spinozism have much to do with literature, let alone Latin American literature, I’ll grant that, to some extent, we can dispense with the abstruse theoretical discussion. Not because, again, “critique has run out of steam,” “suspicion is overrated,” “theory is passé,” or, heavens, because texts are to be data mined rather than read. Such ideologemes feed the niche specialization-irrelevance vicious circle in the humanities, itself reflective of broader trends in cognitive capitalism.16 It is, rather, a matter of charitable interpretation and economy: works of literature already think for themselves. (This heuristic point of departure broadens, rather than narrows, the space for theoretically informed interpretation.) The present volume has shown how literature both represents and enacts materialist thinking. It provides more than mere illustration to the task of renewing the materialist scaffolding of contemporary speculative leftism.
To appreciate how this might be the case, recall the distinction between actors and actants: works of literature are the latter.17 An actor is often a conscious, willing human; an actant needs neither of these attributes. “Actant” encompasses humans and nonhumans, individuals and collectives. My sense is that an indispensable aspect of the agency of literature, thus construed, is precisely its literariness. Theme, embeddedness within communities, symbolic value, social function, and so on matter plenty, but the event that is literature is not reducible to any of these features. On the contrary, it is the assemblage of these interactions, as they crystallize around books and other stuff, that matters: the sum total of the forces it unleashes, the matrix of possibilities, the breaking down of language—and its building up, once again.
Supply-Chain Critique versus Global Extractivism
Retrospectively, the arc of the present volume can be seen as a disassembling of the proverbial personal computer. Under the aegis of a recombined (historical and new) materialism I have called “transcultural,” the book has progressed from raw material (chapter 1) to digital artifacts (chapter 5), with stopovers at crucial turning points. The latter include basic, enduring entities such as soil and atoms (chapter 2); corpses, essential to understanding the porous border between human and nonhuman (chapter 3); and hyperfetishes, a distinctive, recent phenomenon that anticipates infatuation with digital gadgets (chapter 4). At this point, it is worth taking this multilayered critique of commodity fetishism one step further by tackling, in literature, the various compounding forms of extractivism involved in recent technology. Contemporary literature, as previously noted, allows us to appreciate the present in its opacity, rather than in its deceiving transparency.
To that end, in this section I would like to formulate the rudiments of a corpus that works against the accumulation of surplus value in supply chains. Increasingly sophisticated—read exploitative—contemporary supply chains crisscross several continents with exacting precision. While upper management has a perspicuous view of supply chains, views from the ground are partial at best. Indeed, something that allows capitalists to extract hyperbolic margins from unsuspecting producers and consumers is their exploitees’ lack of awareness of the scripted paths from raw material to purchased product, where the chain ends, and of its continuation, often unwieldy, from use to waste. This is in part a problem of storytelling. Products (commodity fetishes) are storied in all their banal glory, from enthusiastic reviews, through publicity, to infinite variations of consumer reverie. Their production, and the social relations that make it possible, are another “great untold.” I hold no illusion that piecing together stories about traveling goods and their afterlives will spark worldwide revolution. But I do find it salutary, in today’s largely postpolitical World Literature criticism, to engage with stuff—literally.
For a working definition of a supply chain, consider a pencil: its supply chain encompasses all logistics from sourcing wood and graphite, through assembly, to the sale that brings it to an end customer.18 Ecologically responsible manufacturers would factor into their calculations what happens to the object afterward, notably decomposition—or lack thereof, as in the case of plastic. Before globalization—a technosocial process of integration that gained speed around 1989, the spur for the critical revival of World Literature—most of those steps happened locally. (Yes, there was trade along the Silk Road centuries ago, but at a radically different order of magnitude.) Extractivism has intensified accordingly. It is an economic model in which some nations specialize in producing raw goods while others specialize in manufacturing products.19 Purportedly, this leads to increased overall efficiency, but it in fact solidifies an uneven scheme in which profit differentials can never be leveled out. Extractivism and supply chains compound to maintain global inequality despite net growth. Meanwhile, World Literature preaches a baseline equality among the literatures of the world. It is easy to read in this contrast bad faith, self-deception, compensation, utopianism, complicity, or a combination thereof.
In fact, World Literature has never been alien to such matters. Consider The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engel’s seminal work of 1848, which provides one of the first notes on record of the term Weltliteratur. Famously, the authors describe how “new wants” require satisfaction from distant lands, leading to economic interdependence.20 “And as in material, so also in intellectual production,” they go on to claim, adding that “national one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.”21 Approaching the passage dialectically requires appreciating its internal contradictions, implied sublations, and overall teleology. I read it both as celebration of an unintended favorable consequence of the consolidation of the bourgeoisie at a global level and as budding critique of its emerging, integrated culture. It should give us pause that the manifesto should end on the still-unheeded call for proletarians of the world to unite. The international bourgeoisie was already several steps ahead of that. One side of the argument is the invocation of a proletarian World Literature, of which the manifesto itself would serve as an illustration; the other a condemnation of World Literature altogether. The heights and abysses of later socialist realism can be seen under the light of this contradiction, be they state-sanctioned (Maxim Gorky), antistate (George Orwell), or stateless (Roberto Arlt).22
As others are better suited to dwell on Marxian exegesis or social-realist literary historiography, I will turn to a different way of building on the parallelism of goods and literature. It is not exactly descriptive, in the way that Bourdieuan sociologies of literature, themselves beholden to the isomorphism of Weltmarkt and Weltliteratur, are. Rather, salvaging for a different era the fundamentals of socialist realism and adopting them as methodological imperatives, I seek to use cultural production to expose social reality and thereby participate, however modestly, in its transformation. I take my cues from the chapters above. Recall the following: it is ironic, to say the least, that the seemingly abstract, speculative action of pondering literature and biopolitics should take place on a very concrete laptop computer. The latter is always already a reification of transnational social relations and biopolitical entanglements, including coltan from Congo and lithium from Bolivia. Its nether parts report: “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.” As much a product of human ingenuity as the novel is, the computer speaks to the global condition in an entirely different key. We could ignore it as an externality to “spiritual” production (an epic misunderstanding best captured in the German agglutination Geisteswissenschaften cited above), ruminate humanistically on its role in how we think (à la Friedrich Kittler), or engage it on its own terms. As I see it, literature can either turn a blind eye to its conditions of production or, on the other hand, call them into question.
When teaching Zambra’s “Historia de un computador” (chapter 5), time and again I ask my students, teasingly: “What is your favorite brand of Chilean computers?” “None” is the right answer, as there is comparatively little in the way of high-surplus-value technological products from Latin America. And yet Zambra’s story, already tinted with nostalgia for a time when daily computation was limited to the living room, has been taken up by avid readers in its successful translations into several languages. This is but a pyrrhic victory in commercial terms, for Latin American literary fiction—with the arguable exception of the Boom writers, Roberto Bolaño and, possibly, Yuri Herrera and Valeria Luiselli—is rarely a high-surplus-value affair. And yet it is meaningful that this literary critique of technology should go against the grain of hegemony. If one realizes, moreover, that personal computers are but a chapter in the long history of computation, and that they are ideologically conditioned—computation need not be “personal”; i.e., individualist—then it becomes apparent that Zambra, from Santiago, is driving technological commodity fetishism to its exhaustion. The point is well taken that literature can estrange our relationship to computers. In this case, it does so by inscribing them into narratives more complex than planned obsolescence, parodied in the short story.
I have followed this trail in the work of a more famous countryman of Zambra’s: Roberto Bolaño, author of 2666, the 2004 classic (chapter 3). At this point it’s worth recalling that Klaus Haas, a person of interest in the investigations of the Juárez femicides and the nephew of Archimboldi—the lost German luminary whose search provides the lengthy novel its unity of action—sodomizes his prison mates with cool detachment (and a cold knife blade). Well before such horrors, while Haas is still a free man, we learn something rather meaningful: he owns a computer store.
The construction of this character is too important in the novel for this to be an idle detail. At this point in the novel, the wants of the forlorn, well-established European academics of the first part align themselves with the broader wants of the market and, inconclusively, with the wants of one or several killers. They all travel to distant lands to satisfy them. Detective Epifanio Galindo cross-examines women who work for Haas—read, through homophony with the German noun, Hate. The detective is flirtatious, belittling, and oddly caring. He investigates the murder of their coworker Estrella Ruiz Sandoval and wants to know if she was an habitué of nightclubs. The intimation and misogynistic overtone is that somehow she had it coming. A coworker categorically denies the accusation: “Estrella wanted to know things about computers, she wanted to learn, she wanted to get ahead, said the girl. Computers, computers, I don’t believe a word you’re saying, cupcake, said Epifanio. I’m not your fucking cupcake, said the girl.”23
The woman’s self-assured, defiant stance is met with the patronizing, derogatory “tortita” (translated here as “cupcake”), Mexican slang for “fatty,” “vagina,” or “lesbian” (nuances the translation misses). Women in the computer store are defying gender roles. Estrella herself used to work in a maquiladora: by working for Haas, she has moved up in the world. In Epifanio’s eyes, Madonna-whore Manicheism becomes butch-victim. Hence the disdain for his interviewee. Meanwhile, when Haas is thrown in prison, justly or not, he introduces himself to the hardened narcos there as “a computer expert who started his own business.”24 Bolaño has a knack for making the most mundane phrase seem eerie, and this is one such occasion. The self-defined computer expert, to put the matter in the prison slang, will make bitches of them all. Computation then provides the link between several compounding factors: the aspirations for social mobility that drive women from the Mexican countryside to a lawless, chauvinist, desert town; a geography ripe for both impunity and deregulation; a global desire for gadgets of all ilk that reshaped northern Mexico in the wake of NAFTA. Scores of brown women sit in a maelstrom of power differentials.
2666 sits somewhere between the all-knowing, evil computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and the fascist propaganda screens in George Orwell’s 1984. Much can be said about its slow, paratactical unfolding from European universities and high culture to the depths of border-town femicide. I am characterizing this movement, tendentiously, as taking us, knowledge workers par excellence, from the spiritual achievements that software like Microsoft Word make possible to hardware and the social conditions of its production. In this account, high and low not just collapse in an evocative figure like Bataille’s solar anus, but in the more prosaic and quite physical body of modern gadgets. The latest “personal” computer or equivalent novelty is the embodiment, and corporate resolution, of social contradiction. Mining, foundry, fabrication, stocking, distribution, design, engineering—these are worldwide class dynamics and levels of education brought together in seeming harmony, provided there is a narrative. And indeed there is one, thanks to techno-utopianism: the story that this benefits the whole. Transcultural materialism complicates that story.
For its part, Maquilápolis, Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre’s eye-opening 2006 documentary, shows a different facet of the same workers Bolaño writes about.25 In the haunting opening sequence, we see their disciplined bodies casting shadows on the desert as they replicate the movements they would do in the factory. Uniformed women wave their hands in the air rhythmically, as if carefully operating machinery, miming their daily routine. The visual quotation of the famous sequence in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) is apt. In the silent cinema classic, the conveyor belt is a central element; here it is absent, for the cogs and wheels of these women’s employment extend themselves along an invisible, transnational assembly-line. Long sequences portray the daily lives of specific workers (Carmen Durán, Lourdes Luján) and their plight for labor and ecological justice.26 Shots of blue uniforms hanging from a thread—against the backdrop of distant factories or highway overpasses—conjure domesticity and work, private life and globalization. In a close-up, women utter the names of their employer companies. Their bodies rotate, as if standing on an off-frame lazy Susan, resembling exhibited products. Later, they showcase the finished products of their labor (TV parts, pantyhose) in their hands. Here supply-chain critique, in the vein of transcultural materialism, interweaves social relations with means of production, domains that orthodox Marxism held separate. Stories of things and stories of people bear upon each other.
What drives goods around the world is added value. More than the sum of its parts, a computer derives profit from every link in the supply chain. The company makes a killing at each transaction, from the mining of mercury and gold in Africa and South America; through the aluminum foundries for the computer’s frame and motherboard assembly in China; to its rote software coding in India and its design in Cupertino; to its glorified commercialization in all of these locales. Think once more of rubber trees coming back to the Amazon, many times more expensive, as truck tires. To get a sense of the magnitude of modern extractivism, multiply this by each of the numerous components in a tech gadget—then bundle and copyright them. Each additional level of accumulation makes the human labor involved in the process more abstract and harder to grasp. Glendinning’s previously cited dictum resounds, “All technology is political.”27 Any computer reflects social relations of production at a global level.
Addressing this requires us to venture beyond the boundaries of Latin Americanist literary criticism, narrowly construed, far beyond auteur-activist documentaries like Maquinápolis, across media, genres, and locales. Consider, for the sake of simplicity, the two other crucial moments in computer supply chain literature: mineral extraction and artifact disposal. Regarding the former, prolific genre writer Alberto Vásquez-Figueroa, something of a Spanish Simenon, gives us the 2008 novel Coltán. It is a hard-boiled rewrite of Christie’s Ten Little Indians (1939) with the board of Dall & Houston, an ersatz Haliburton, as the dying Indians. The premise is smart: Aarohum Al Rashid, a mysterious figure evocative of Islamist insurgents, starts murdering them one by one for not paying a Robin Hoodesque ransom: the rebuilding of Iraqi infrastructure. Coltan comes into play because Dall & Houston has sought to rein back its trade.28 This leads to plot twists and a chase across the continents that results, unsurprisingly, in the revelation that Al Rashid was a board member all along.
What interests me in this cultural product is how it both denounces and symbolically exploits the coltan trade. Take a character, the Belgian swindler Marcel Valerie. We see through his eyes Congolese child coltan miners for the first time, covered in dust and always at risk of being buried alive in mine shafts, like an “army of ghosts.”29 Valerie learns from his Kazakh guide that their day shift is worth twenty cents (in euros); he’s amazed, but not appalled. Seizing a business opportunity, he purchases the mine from the Kazakh for a bargain of thirty million euros. With a heavy hand, here Vásquez-Figueroa communicates the mind-bending scalability of modern profit. Yet he is also complicit in what he denounces, for he builds a European bestseller upon sensationalist myths about coltan. As Michael Nest shows in an eponymous 2011 study, it is false that 80 percent of the world reserves are under control of mass rapists in Congo, a legend that once prompted a well-meaning Democratic U.S. senator to say that “without knowing it, tens of millions of people in the United States may be putting money in the pockets of some of the worst human rights violators in the world simply by using a cellphone or a laptop computer.”30 Alas, if only systemic responsibility were so simple. Coltán, the novel, serves as cautionary tale against a certain kind of simplification.
Ironically, simplicity in form can convey ideological complexity. Colombian conceptual artist Antonio Caro presents a powerful, straightforward work of art that comments on mineral extraction: Minería (2012). In this work, it looks as if the Colombian flag—a stripe of blue sandwiched between two parts of yellow above and one of red below—had forgone its yellow stripe in favor of the word “MINERIA.” Achieving the not-insignificant task of seeing his country’s flag as objet trouvé, Caro nods to the representation of riches by the flag’s yellow—that is, gold. The viewer is reminded that gold does not happen spontaneously but through laborious, indeed toxic, extraction. The blue of oceans and the red of founders’ blood look orphaned when the yellow of gold retreats into the sans-serif, bulky all caps of the title word, forcefully presiding over the piece. The artwork puts in stark relief that national identity hinges on surrendering natural resources to foreign powers: then for mercantilist, now for digital accumulation. This revisits familiar motifs in Caro’s lifelong, playful rumination on names, symbols, and catchphrases, which include the late seventies pop-art gesture of writing the name “Colombia” in unmistakable “Coca-Cola” font. It solidifies the impression, cultivated throughout his oeuvre, that the country is for sale. Caro extracts and transfers the gold from the nation’s symbolic reserves onto the fraught terrain of contemporary debates on nature and culture.
Carolina Caycedo, born in 1978, pursues similar goals with her Be Damned series, notably the piece YUMA, or the Land of Friends (2014) (figure 6.1). Commissioned for the Berlin Biennale, it documents, in a grand, Jacques Louis David–like format, the construction of a river dam in El Quimbo, Colombia. It is a dizzying experience to stand in front of the work, as if carelessly soaring above the terrain, while also being reminded of one’s smallness vis-à-vis the towering, flat image. High-definition depiction, paradoxically, gains the qualities of abstraction. A different kind of found object, the piece originates in a satellite photograph from the exact coordinates of the construction site, seemingly a click away, yet shrouded in lush tropical nature—if not for long. Yuma is the Muisca name for the river. Caycedo would agree with Heidegger on how a dam instrumentalizes nature, with the added component of turning entire displaced, meagerly compensated indigenous and mestizo populations into similarly instrumentalized “nature.” This is the contemporary, Latin American instantiation of the biopolitics of neoliberalism that Michel Foucault discussed in his late opus The Birth of Biopolitics.31 It bears noting that all this scarring of the earth happens in the name of the electricity that fuels our gadgets.
Vásquez-Figueroa’s coltan, Caro’s gold, and Caycedo’s hydropower stand to gain when set in conversation with each other. The Spaniard might sensationalize more than elucidate, uproot problems in the name of localization, and contribute very meagerly to the genre of the novel, his chosen art form. But he also reveals, by contrast, a certain nationalistic myopia in his Colombian conceptual-artist interlocutors. How many nations’ flags could, in how many languages, replace their colors with the word “mining”? How many “natural resource” exploitation sites could be photographed and exhibited in German galleries? Coltán, for better or for worse, reaches out to those other other locales. Similarly, what I am attempting to do here is deploy the resources of World Literature to fill the vacuum of storytelling in supply chains that, in turn, make the paradigm possible in the first place. Consider, heuristically, that Zambra’s tale about computation does not begin or end where its plot does. It belongs to a single cultural assemblage with the maquila prehistory and e-wasteyard future of its title gadget; it informs the articles that frequent-flying intellectuals produce.
Consider computer waste. A quasi-foundational work is the 2008 Pixar animation blockbuster Wall-E. The title character is a postapocalyptic, rubbish-sorting robot that, after many adventures, becomes instrumental to the rebirth of planet earth. As much as I regard the film as a masterpiece of the genre, if the medium is the message, and the medium is mass entertainment, then the message here is just further commodification. I am moved by the robot’s romantic loneliness and his built-up encounter with a feminine, more advanced robot, EVE, endowed with fertility in a barren world. But the extreme embellishment of actual e-wasteyards is hyperbolic,32 particularly when coupled with highly mediated aesthetic practices, dependent on powerful computing, such as corporate computer animation and 3D rendering.33
There are different, more productive responses, such as the South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon’s aptly titled 2011 collection All the Garbage of the World, Unite! Kim finds gods among the refuse and expresses their divinity with jarring effect, building up to garbled words on the page: “Do you know all the dearest gods that are hanging onto our limbs? / On the seat you left, a wet towel, a wad of gum, a crushed tomato…. Yournostrilssingledropofapricklynosehairearth god!”34 One could also think of the Zambian Ellen Banda-Aaku’s witty children’s short story “E is for E-Waste” (2013) and the instructive San Francisco activist video “The Story of Electronics” (2011).35
On disposal, however, the most thoughtful works I know are Brazilian. A case in point is Jorge Furtado’s 1989 avant-garde documentary Ilha das Flores.36 Throughout the thirteen-minute short, a Guy Debord–inspired voiceover, the sound of which is reminiscent of a science documentary, describes the logic of consumerism. Meanwhile, the film follows a tomato from the plot of a Nisei farmer, to a petty-bourgeois family kitchen in Porto Alegre, to the eponymous wasteland in the outskirts of the city. Crude, iterative images of money changing hands splice the already-staccato sequences, themselves introduced by rudimentary computer graphics. At one point, piles of corpses from Nazi factories of death are shoveled into graves. To a jarring electric-guitar riff, the tomato ends up in a pile of organic waste that feeds the homeless denizens of the garbage dump—though not before a dumpster farmer’s pigs get the first pick.
Clearly, Furtado does not film for the faint of heart. However, his work retains a playful lyricism, lost in Eduardo Coutinho’s later, grittier portrait on a similar subject, Boca do lixo (1993), and beautified in Vik Muniz’s paintings with trash and their accompanying documentary, Waste Land (2010).37 Be that as it may, the important links established here are, on the one hand, between freedom and the control of life—Foucault’s dyad—and, on the other, between supply chains and exploitation. The script’s envoi interrupts the by-then established repetition of brain and opposable thumbs as human traits. It introduces freedom as a third, unexpected trait, precisely in the moment when the subject depicted would be, at least in the eyes of the well-to-do, most thoroughly dehumanized. The final lines are a tautology by the modernist poet Cecília Meireles: “Free is the state of one who has freedom. Freedom is a word nourished by human aspirations, that no one can explain, and no one can understand.”38 Rather than a late-romantic invocation of the ineffable or merely an ironic épater les bourgeois, the operation at hand is rigorously dialectic. Shopper “freedom” and obscene differentials in value extraction are of a piece.
In this sense, a computer is very much like a tomato. Electronic wasteyards in rural China and Bangladesh are smoldering no-man’s-lands where day laborers “cook” motherboards to scavenge mineral.39 Nurturing effective forms of solidarity for our present biopolitical conjuncture must cut across facile oppositions: local-global, digital-analog, producer-consumer, human-nonhuman, organic-inorganic. Mobilizing cultural production to illuminate different moments in exploitative global supply chains, as I have strived to do here in short form, may contribute to this task. The next logical task remains to extend these insights from cultural products that relate mimetically to actual production and consumption to those that allude to them only indirectly. The wheels of commerce will be there still, covered by a very thin veil. As of late, their movement subsumes more and more of human activity, literature being no exception. Arguably, sharply differentiated accumulation of surplus value will continue to occur whether we describe it or not, challenge it or not. But so will a cognate literary corpus continue to exist, brought about by its own internal logic. Examining it will, at the very least, raise important questions about the autonomy of literature.
Alternatives include addressing a corpus of World Literature as handed down to us by critical consensus or by the culture industry. The latter offers fine representatives of literary genres, the former a snapshot of today’s society and values; they overlap, partially. But neither necessarily speaks to, recalling Jasanoff’s term, “sociotechnical imaginaries.”40 These vary widely among locales and have significant impact. The harmonizing agenda of World Literature may fail to appreciate those aspects. They do not always emerge in a single work but, as I have shown, in a host of works that revolve around a singular object. Heuristically, again, the object in focus has been a computer, including some of its parts and some aspects of its afterlife. It bears repeating that I write from a place known by the moniker “Silicon Valley,” named after the eponymous semiconductor. Most service workers here speak Spanish at home, are more likely to come across a movie like Wall-E than any work of highbrow Latin American fiction, and could not afford engineering or literary criticism careers. In more ways than I intuit, my book reflects this.
Now, for all that a computer may reflect global social relations of production in its hardware and software, a skeptic might say that the act of writing “with” one is free from that backstory. I would disagree, obviously, at various levels, ranging from my understanding of what writing is (here I do side with Kittler), to, more importantly, my commitment to recognizing and engaging with the materiality of cultural production. The goods and literature debate has been framed in terms of parallelism, to various degrees of proximity. I regard it, rather, as a matter of imbrication. To my mind, the question is not whether they are imbricated, but how. Computation is an interesting starting point because it is becoming the sine qua non of literary culture, as it is of cinematic culture: a purportedly disembodied process that is in fact very tangible; a seemingly gratuitous affair with vast economic consequences. The most brilliant algorithm has little effect without supply chains and all they entail. Should one ignore this epoch-defining phenomenon? (For its part, “applying” the tools of digital humanities raises the question of who the agent is and who, alas, is the tool.) Projecting the stories of objects into their real-world material entanglements cultivates a different ethos—one of thinking with literature wherever it may take us. It has been the path charted here, and it is but one of several ways of thinking with, not past, the imbrication.
Paradoxically, reconnecting material and intellectual production may serve well those who seek to “liberate” the former from the latter, as bourgeois piety dictates. “Art for art’s sake” is not achieved by fiat. Of course, it may also rekindle a political streak that the Marxist tradition of World Literature has lost to the more tepid Goethean vein. In either case, it is a sensible measure, lest the debate on the global autonomization of literature happen in a denial of historicity. There is similarly much work to do, self-consciously, to not replicate extractivism by plucking from the cultures of the world to build upon them conceptually, thereby adding value, and then shipping them back to their places of provenance as theory. If the present study has, unavoidably, skirted this position, it has done so as a necessary moment in throwing the proverbial wrench into ever-expanding forms of accumulation.
Things with a History
Where to go from here? A succinct comparison of noteworthy contemporary authors, as captured in the contrast between their respective material invocations, leads the way. Take the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgård (b. 1968), whose six-novel autobiographical work My Struggle (2009–11) is something of a twenty-first-century World Literature classic. He went on to pen the very remarkable Autumn (2015), a collection of short texts with the stated goal of explaining the world to the author-narrator’s unborn daughter, one “thing” at a time (Knausgård is no stranger to hubris). The heterogeneous collection that ensues—dawn, telephones, Flaubert, vomit—is thought-provokingly idiosyncratic. Individual pieces double as prose poems or the entries of a personal encyclopedia. Under the heading “Rubber Boots,” we read about a pair that belonged to the author’s late father. Walking in them gives the narrator “great pleasure,” for as “the foot sinks down into the mud without anything penetrating its protective cover, the mud oozes up around the boot but the foot remains dry—and sovereign somehow.”41 This feeling of sovereignty amounts to a triumph over death. The subject wills itself away from mourning his father or commemorating him reverentially via his personal objects. At the same time, the narrator celebrates the impermeable capacities of rubber, a turning point in the separation of nature and culture, ahistorically.
Contrast this with the short story “Han vuelto las aves,” by the Guatemalan author Eduardo Halfon (b. 1971), in which mourning means stepping deeply into history, natural and otherwise. Halfon writes genre-defying, recombining, episodic narratives. Across several volumes—notably El boxeador polaco (2008), Monasterio (2014), Signor Hoffman (2015), and Duelo (2017)—such episodes compose a loosely autobiographical Künstlerroman. Recurrent themes include the imminence of intimacy between the author-protagonist and traveling, mysterious women; echoes of violence in rural Central America; and the memories of his grandfather, who survived Auschwitz. The story at hand, masterfully suspenseful, is set in the coffee-growing region of Huehuetango, near the Mexican border. In medias res, the author-protagonist arrives at the Martínez’s house, with a purpose readers are not privy to, but which entails learning from the residents, as if taking notes for some report. (Per the book’s copyright page, the piece was originally commissioned by the Inter-American Development Bank.) Residents gradually open up to señor Halfon, leading to the revelation that their son has been assassinated, readers gather, in the long struggle to establish fair and sustainable farming practices. The denouement is worth citing at length, as Mr. Martínez penetrates into his son’s unattended shrub of a coffee plant:
Don Juan turned his back to us and seemed to step into the enormous, lone coffee plant. As though hiding among its green leaves, searching for something among its green leaves. As though wishing the old plant would protect him. His back still to us, he was plucking beans off the old plant, slowly, tenderly, his campesino hands letting the red fruit fall soundlessly onto the dry ground. He bent a little and picked the lower beans. He stretched to the upper branches, pulled them toward him, and his expert hands stripped them clean. The ground around his feet was turning red. His straw hat crackled in the branches. He now looked more hunched, smaller. He kept on plucking beans and dropping them onto the ground. He kept entering the foliage of the old plant, the greenery of the leaves and branches, until the whole of him disappeared entirely.42
It’s an overdetermined image, to be sure. “Don Juan” here is an enamored, heartbroken picaflor, a hummingbird, serving as accessory to life at a site where life itself commemorates death—a de facto botanical memorial. (This comes within an oeuvre in which Shoah memorials are not uncommon, effectively leveraging recognition of the Guatemalan genocide on the original historical phenomenon that led to the juridical notion of extermination of a genus.) We learn, in this sentimental education of a short story, that deshijar, that is, plucking beans in order for plants to yield fewer and better-quality beans, is a verb. The irony is unsettling, as is to “witness” a private act of mourning in full color: red and green. Breakthrough in healing or dwelling in the symptom, we don’t know. Anagnoresis is only partial, because the process of getting here matters more than the revelation itself. The story is not about the assassination of a coffee cooperative campesino, but about everything that surrounds it, down to the fraught origins of “fair trade.” The true realization is that family history, the history of Guatemala, and world and natural history are all organically connected.
Simone de Beauvoir was moved by a deliberately long take in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) of the grass that continues to grow, to this day, on the train tracks of extermination.43 “The basic quality of the transience of the earthly,” wrote Adorno in his 1932 essay “The Idea of Natural-History,” “signifies nothing but just such a relationship between nature and history: all being or everything existing is to be grasped as the interweaving of historical and natural being.”44 Halfon illustrates what Beauvoir and Adorno meant45—not at the abstract level, for there is nothing abstract about it, but as tangible, embodied experience. Again, the contrast with Knausgård is enlightening. For the Norwegian, the milky rubber tree remains in the margins of history. Less than a relic, it is a disavowed pre-text for the late father’s (synthetic?) rubber boots, themselves an instrument for the separation of nature and culture, human and nonhuman history. For the Guatemalan, the bushy coffee plant is history. More than a relic—a living being—it bears the fruit of the lost son’s botched effort, situated at the crossroads of Guatemalan history, natural and otherwise. Whereas extractivism plays a role in both bereavements, one engages it critically and the other doesn’t. The uptake, and an important conclusion for the present volume, is the following: whereas cultural production carries with it the traces of material-social transformation, it often also covers these traces. This dialectic of exposure and erasure justifies the expanded hermeneutical practice I have called “transcultural materialism.”
I have read for disclosure and for concealment of such matters as abusive, epoch-defining “social pacts” with things; coinages and other linguistic practices that reinforce fixed hierarchies among humans and nonhumans, first, and among humans and nations, consequently; and separation of humans from nature, coupled with narratives in which humans can just take and take without ever giving back. Narrative and language alone do not and cannot determine such facets of extractivism, but they can certainly make them worse or better. Recall, from the introduction, the role that Hayden White gives to accounts that destorify or denarrativize the Holocaust. Unified narratives give the impression that one can grasp that event. Disassembling such narratives, and letting constellations and fragments speak for themselves—incidentally, as Halfon does—communicates anew the scale and poignancy, the sheer incomprehensibility, of the Shoah. When it comes to communicating the “slow violence” of extractivism, to adapt Rob Nixon’s term, storifying may actually contribute to a better understanding of human-nonhuman relations. As the above take on supply-chain critique suggests, extractivism profits from scatteredness in storytelling. Piecing together bouts of narrative has a salutary effect. Sometimes individual works of literature achieve this; other times it’s the critic’s task to, at a metalevel, facilitate this effect. This can be done by reassessing a single work—for example, by interrogating how its verisimilitude may hinge upon a certain understanding of the nonhuman—or by setting several works into conversation—on the issue of primitive accumulation, say. As previously noted, in Romance languages, Spanish and Portuguese among them, there is a single word for “history” and “story”: historia. Hence things with a history.
In order to intervene in a material-social status quo, one measure is to lay in the open traces of nonhuman domination. This involves a combination of the textual and the contextual, the negative and the positive. Methodologically, the implication is for literary studies to cultivate, at the same time, strategies that may seem antithetical: close reading and sociohistorical (even botanical) interpretation, ideology critique and description. Luckily, there is a rich Latin American tradition—showcased in this book under the aegis of revised transculturación—that makes this possible. The region’s literature has two distinctive features that contribute to this endeavor, bolstering its relevance for literary studies writ large: a thematic investment with making art at the frontier of Western capitalist expansion and a formal investment with language. Some of the most accomplished products of Latin American literary culture marry formal sophistication with political relevance. Early examples include Darío’s short story-cum-manifesto “The Bourgeois King” (1888);46 examples from the 1960s zenith include Castellanos’s counterfactual historical novel The Book of Lamentations (1962) and Cortázar’s experimental novel Hopscotch (1963).47 While this is more readily appreciated regarding politics in a conventional sense (as a humancentric, partisan affair), it holds true for political ecology as well.
Several reading practices emerge. One is to identify and interrogate moments of articulation in which immanent material properties are emplotted or codified through language. The chapters above offer ample illustration. In terms of rhetorical analysis, this often means stopping short of allegory and metaphor. Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar. Similarly, for all that abstraction is essential to thought, it can be easily overused. Novels about the rubber boom, say, may be about commodification, but ascribing to them that abstract operation alone leads to overlooking many a description, setting, and plot twist: to not reading, in short, and also to ignoring plants, rocks, corpses, and things that may have more centrality to historias than we credit them with. Another emerging reading practice is more heuristic in nature, involving proposing alternatives narratives of imbrication between the human and nonhuman. This entails filling gaps and heeding the questions about nature and culture that literary works, more or less explicitly, engage with. The path to a more radical, creative interdisciplinarity—mineralogy and narratology?—lays open.
The critique of extractivism may start in literary works and continue in criticism. By force of custom, unsustainable human-nonhuman assemblages are invisible to the eye. Estranging them makes them visible. A mot juste here or there goes a long way, as does, more broadly, casting doubt onto what appears to be settled. As a case in point, as previously noted, coinages such as “meat” or “raw material” give the appearance, at the very surface of everyday language, that eating animals or extracting minerals has always been the default state of affairs. The very signifier justifies; it gives the standing of a fait accompli to what is, at a tangible level, much more contentious. What to make, then, of entire narratives and discourses built upon the edifice of such equivocations? It may take decades to think our way out of the Cartesian split that informs our unsustainable relation to (within) nature. Rewriting history as natural history, while still doing justice to very human concerns such as labor, would take years for disciplinary historians to achieve, should they choose to do so. And yet time is pressing, as global warming reminds us. Transcultural materialism, by summoning the powers of literature to estrange extractivism, may elicit new ways of thinking about old problems.
A dialectical praxis based on close reading and metalinguistic awareness, the approach I have espoused has an impact on a number of domains. Latin Americanism is an obvious first. Fernando Ortiz’s use of the term transculturación, and its various permutations throughout decades of criticism, is central to the field. The notion has stood for a foundational socioeconomical force in Cuba (Ortiz), a literary integration of disparate elements (Rama), cultural hybridity in the region at large (García Canclini), a specifically Andean dialogue between Quechua and Spanish traditions (Cornejo Polar), a problematic acculturation mechanism (Moreiras), and a racially fraught Caribbeanist cultural narrative (Arroyo), among many others. Trying to pin down this rich, variegating drift is something of a lost cause. This book’s modest but far-reaching proposal with regard to Latin Americanism could be construed as a call to revise—to materialize—this entire genealogy in light of the misapprehension of the more “natural” (botanical, agricultural) aspects in Ortiz’s coinage. The nonhuman is present all along, at every turning point: the invitation is for scholars with granular knowledge of the subfields to explore the implications of this finding. For instance, one task would be to explicate the role that dry highland savannas of Perú and Bolivia (la puna) may have in Cornejo Polar’s thinking; another would be to revise Rama’s discussion of mountains as “natural fortresses” in Arguedas and Mariátegui; and so on.48
Everything established so far is expandable in and transferrable to several provinces of literary and cultural studies. The starting point is simple and the ramifications manifold. I began by making the case for establishing a counterpoint between new materialisms, with their emphasis on nonhuman agency, and historical materialism, with its emphasis on human labor conditions and their historical unfolding. Approaching cultural products in this dialectic fashion does not necessarily lead to a unified analysis, nor is it meant to. Instead, it exposes an important dimension of the tensions and contradictions that literature, like art more generally, plays a part in. The contributions of this approach to present-day criticism include presenting an alternative to the false dichotomy of positivist description versus suspicion that underlies sociologies of literature (Casanova, Moretti) and actor-network theorizations (Felski), while supplementing the cultural-critique impulse prevalent within the field of Latin Americanism (Beasley-Murray, Beverley, Bosteels—to cover the letter b alone). Close reading and (materialist) interpretation get their dues. Suspicion recovers its place as an important methodological principle—and retains suspicion of power, that is, of the mediation of words in shaping human interaction with the world.
But where does transcultural materialism end? In other words, how broad is the corpus of this study, and to what kinds of objects might its findings apply? As naive as it would be to try to script the reception of a book, it’s worth noting that, though expansive, transcultural materialism is meant to have certain bounds. The same is true for Fernando Ortiz’s transculturación, even while, as we have seen, that notion continues to shift contexts and speak to different questions. Many things can be described with the dynamic, diachronic, “slow friction” Ortizian model. At times, it seems that any cultural process—and, per my revision, any natural-cultural process—could be framed in those terms. But when the semantic field of a concept is too vast, the concept becomes useless. Fortunately, many elements do not sit well with transculturación, which allows it to remain meaningful. The term may overcome contradictions and hold opposites within itself, but it does have an outside: it persistently antagonizes essentialism, racism, and ill-founded feelings of cultural superiority. This applies to the notion both as found object and as method, aspects that Ortiz tends to blur together in the development of his views. In the former sense, not everything that has happened in Cuba can be described as transculturación. In the latter, transculturación could not apply to just anything. For an extreme example, consider that, although Nazism drew inspiration from Germanic mythology, American racial laws, and Hindu iconography (swastikas), it would be foolish to describe it as the result of transculturation.49
Similarly, although transcultural materialism could be brought to bear on more issues than I can anticipate—the aspiration of any book—there are limits as to how this might unfold. As I have theorized it, the two central elements here are language and extractivism. The first is the domain that I have focused on, for obvious reasons of disciplinary affordance and bias. Surely, there are social-sciences aspects that could be developed, not least in disciplinary history, whose mainstream instantiation in academic departments has drifted away from the self-awareness about language thoughtfully put forward by the likes of Hayden White, Dominick LaCapra, or the siblings Benedict and Perry Anderson. As an outsider to the discipline—despite the phrase “with a History” in this book’s title—my one plea, coming from the neighboring field of literary studies, is for any historian inclined to take up these ideas to make a significant investment in language—not for stylistic preference or for reasons of methodological affinity, but because my study shows that extractivism continues in language, and so in language it must be, at least partially, dispelled. An analogous entreaty could be made vis-à-vis the more strictly ecological ramifications of this natural-cultural study: minimally, practitioners would do well in considering the role of metaphor in their thinking. The internal connection between extractive language and economic exploitation raises the second limit: acritical takes on material transformation may provide many valuable descriptive leads, but they fall short of the sort of recombined materialism the present volume has grounded. Human labor should not be left out of the picture as we pay attention to nonhuman elements. For a quick literary illustration, recall how the yellow butterflies so celebrated in García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, in a famous signifying chain, bear the color of bananas and allude to massacred plantation workers.
The above suggests that depoliticizing, purportedly “materialist” approaches to literary studies are less relevant than those that in some way continue to engage the enormous power differentials the world is fraught with, and which are in some ways alleviated, in others compounded, by digital technology and the coming revolutions of genomics and material science. Literature is concerned with the world, and the world is an unfair place that develops unevenly. Reading literature and ignoring unfairness is not reading at all. If the time for ideology critique is over, then surely we must live in the best of worlds. Alas, this is not the case, not least because a sharp subject/object distinction has led humans, some more than others, to fancy themselves owners of the world. Extraction of the labor of fellow humans and of “natural resources” preys on a suspended sense of debt and of reciprocity: namely, the fantasy that forces of production, human or not, will just surrender their resources without exhaustion—or rebellion. Ecological damage and most, if not all, variants of capitalism feed of each other in a vicious circle, as proponents of notions such as the “Capitalocene” know full well and as, increasingly, common sense tell us. So the idea that literature and literary studies had a more pressing political role in the smoky-London-sky days of Dickens forgets that much of the world is exposed to the poison of industrial growth, but also that plenty of political-ecological worries besiege even the most greenified of cosmopolitan cities.
At this point, I may already be preaching to the chorus. But I hope to have persuaded readers interested in the nonhuman to take such considerations into account, and to have convinced readers interested in the literary to understand form, as Adorno would have it, as “sedimented content”—with the provision that “sediment” is not a neutral metaphor.50 The thing mediates between cultures like sugar cane mediated between the masters and the enslaved. We use the word “sweet” to describe things pleasant and endearing because, over time, the titillated palates of consumers had more of a say than the tired arms of producers.51 History, with a capital H, rests upon a truce between words and things that narrative and literary language can help bring back into question.
A final vignette drives these points home. In the late aughts, a British Petroleum employee won an internal contest to name a well off the coast of Louisiana “Macondo,” after García Márquez’s accursed fictional town.52 The largest oil spill in U.S. history took place there in 2010. If the media mostly referred to this event as the “Deepwater Horizon” oil spill (pointing, oddly enough, to the malfunctioning drilling rig and not the site itself), it’s because the connotations of depth and distance served the purpose of assuaging reactions to the catastrophe better than the name of the fictional site of the real-life Banana massacre of 1928, ushered in, in turn, by United Fruit Company extractivism. “Macondo,” the magical-realist signifier, probably felt “magical”—read justifying—at the time the risky underwater exploration project was named. The employee, presumably a Latin culture enthusiast, must have been gratified; the company must have found the name good publicity. But the signifier, with its apocalyptic overtones, became “realist,” and was therefore disavowed, after the debacle. (In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Macondo is wiped out by the wind.) It bears noting this took place in a mass of water called the “Gulf of Mexico” that, despite its name, belongs mostly to the United States. Words, too, are things with a history.
One can try to shield novels from the world, as it were, by either actively claiming this has nothing to do with the transnational literary phenomenon that is García Márquez, or by passively ignoring such a major ecological catastrophe—and the extractivist push that, again, scripted it—as mere happenstance. Alternatively, one can let words do the talking, historicizing nature-culture as needed. Marxist criticism holds literature to be entangled in ideology: it does not just represent it—ideology determines its form. Why wouldn’t this also be the case for political ecology? The most basic tenet of our time’s prevailing material paradigm, namely, that man is above everything else, is constantly mobilized and rekindled in language, literary or not. The frequent spiritualist objection that literature can only represent reality, as if it somehow existed in a parallel universe, becomes something of a moot point. Being a monist and reading books are not at odds, because stories don’t exist in a Platonic realm of perfect archetypal ideas. Stories exist and have consequences, some more tangible than others. It is not that the moniker “Macondo” caused the debacle, as superstition might have it. But ex post facto, it resignifies it, giving it historical depth and narrative poignancy. The force of the signifier is of a piece with the event itself, which is literary (it affects the afterlife of the novel), ecological (think maritime birds covered in iridescent, black muck), and economical (millions of dollars “lost”). It is easier to brush oil from feathers than to parse out the literature from everything else here.
Allow me to extrapolate: to define what a literary object or event is, as if looking for the indivisible atoms of literature, is not necessarily a task worth undertaking. “There is a fallacy of ‘agency’ to match every fallacy of ‘application’,” notes Neil Larsen. “A poem or a novel no more acts than a dream or a fantasy does—that is to say, they act only insofar as no conscious social action is possible except as mediated by such mimetic objects.”53 The Macondo oil spill, thus named and thought alongside the novel, is a nightmare that moves to action—and also to reaction: a “media storm” to be contained. While surrealists literalized metaphor, as in Dali’s “ruby lips” precious stone brooch, this is a spillover of metaphor into the literal, and of literature into reality. But “Macondo” is also a cypher for a different, better pact between humans and nature, as Raymond L. Williams has demonstrated in a perceptive eco-critical reading of García Márquez’s novel.54
More broadly, one important feature of Latin American literature is to serve as repository for alternative political ecologies. Transcultural materialism articulates the positive of eco-criticism with the negative of ideology critique not by choice, but by necessity. History and nature are always already interwoven, often to the benefit of extractivism. Consequences, like climate change and ecological displacement, are very real. Literature, without ceasing to be literature, can contribute to the urgent task of intervention. One could even ask again the question: Where does literature end and the world begin?