Things with a History: Transcultural Materialism and The Literatures Of Extraction In Contemporary Latin America

This phrase, whose utterance seems to have outlived the very items it laments, is now commonplace. When, one wonders, were things made to last? Is the golden standard, say, vacuum cleaners from before offshore outsourcing took hold in the 1990s, or cars from before the oil crisis of 1974, or, farther back in time, preindustrial, handmade shoes from the 1700s? In an entirely different order of magnitude, there is the Venus of Willendorf, dated some twenty-five to twenty-eight centuries ago. Now that was “made” to last! But perhaps the saying implies a more modest timescale: a lifetime. It speaks to the discomfort people experience, in their own brief stint as living beings on this earth, upon realizing that objects that might resist the passing of time succumb to it all the same. This casual utterance conjures many complex, interrelated matters. As the examples suggest, things that do not last may bear witness to changes in labor relations or in geopolitics; to the relative transience of human flesh when compared to more robust materials, such as limestone; to mortality itself. I have chosen this introductory vignette because it shows language trying to come to terms with material transformation.

The present volume is interested in more elaborate expressions than sayings—namely, in works of fiction and other cognate works of art that face similar challenges. I focus on a region and on a period, Latin America after 1989. In recent years, there has been a seismic transformation in our rapport to objects. To point to just a few examples of this shift, prior to roughly 1989 there was no consolidated World Wide Web or widespread mobile phones, let alone smartphones; there was no buzz about an “internet of things” or “3-D printing”; the trade in digital-age commodities (like lithium from Bolivia for batteries) was much smaller; the market for global luxury brands was more modest; more poor people around the world were getting their nourishment from industrial food-supply chains; an increasing number of better-off, “food-conscious” enclaves were abandoning those networks here and there; the Amazonian rainforest was larger; and there were smaller amounts of waste everywhere. The cumulative effect of these gradual transformations, which have picked up speed lately, suggests that we are currently undergoing a shift in a long-prevailing material paradigm. If one could imagine a long-standing, unwritten pact between humans and nonhumans, as of late we would be in the process of rewriting it. Take the awe and shock implicit in “things are not made to last anymore” and multiply it in many directions, some of the things in question being technological and others less so, some manufactured and some not, some organic and some inorganic, and you may appreciate the conjuncture that literature currently faces.

Things with a History shows that contemporary Latin American fiction not only reflects this transformation; it enriches our understanding of it and challenges the status quo that underwrites it. Once in motion, material change can have its own dynamic, and ecological transformation its own force. Capital may not fully control these new flows, but it quickly adapts to them and learns to profit from them, finding renewed occasions for inequality—hence my allusion to a status quo in a context that is, like climate change, essentially unstable. As my previous monograph showed, Latin American literary and cultural interrogation of globalization—the accelerated, uneven flow of people and things—make the region a privileged site at which to theorize our times.1 In this book, I formulate the notion of transcultural materialism. While not exclusive to Latin America, the phenomenon has taken shape there, at the intersection of intellectual and literary history. I characterize it throughout the volume, focusing on its more recent stages. Transcultural materialism shares with other materialisms—Lucretian, mechanical, dialectical, and so forth—a fundamental orientation toward bodies instead of souls, tangible affairs instead of speculative notions. At their most basic, all materialisms oppose idealism; they claim that matter is all there is.

Several traits distinguish the transcultural variant. For one, it is an intellectual praxis rather than a philosophical doctrine. Its raison d’être is the critique of extractivism, in the two senses of study and opposition. Extractivism, simply put, is exploitation of nature and labor. Economists use the term to describe an economic model that revolves around extracting natural resources and selling them on the world market. It’s the default strategy for Latin American economies; it’s also one that practically forecloses the possibility of ever catching up with those nations that truly reap the benefits of added value. (Think of rubber trees coming back to the Amazon, priced at a premium, as truck tires.) I favor an expansive use of the term.² Crucially, I find that extractivism traverses economics, nature, and culture. The works I study work against it by articulating natural and human history in thought-provoking ways. They intervene, primarily, in language and storytelling. But if words themselves may at times compound the effects of extractivism (“meat”), they are also a site for ecological-political action. The flipside of this argument is that reading for human and nonhuman history does literature a service too: it reveals aspects of form that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Transcultural materialism infuses the realm of externality with storytelling and literary language. It presents compelling, enduring stories about people and processes which, by virtue of being outside of narrative, are an easier target for exploitation. The prefix “trans-” comes to bear in that these stories often involve different communities in conflict, but also in that the concept surpasses what we most commonly associate with culture. Indeed, it cuts across into its purported other, nature. Meanwhile, the suffix “-ion” in “transculturation” signals a dynamic process, rather than a stable condition, for “culturation” is not the same as “culture.” Moreover, the root word “culture” is something of a misnomer if one associates it exclusively with some kind of collective spiritual life. “Culture” here is a concrete and, again, not just a human affair—think of how the etymology of the word relates to fermentation. These aspects will all come together more clearly through examples, including, below, the retelling of the socio-botanical history of sugar and tobacco in Fernando Ortiz (who coined the term transculturación). As it happens, a final distinguishing trait of transcultural materialism is that abstract definition can only go so far. Unlike the stories it deploys, as a whole it is something (to recall Wittgenstein’s distinction) one can show, not tell.3

A useful shorthand to better grasp what this praxis is about is to consider it an Aufhebung, or sublation, of two distinct, and to some extent opposing, ways of thinking: historical materialism and new materialisms. One puts the human species first; the other, precisely, seeks to decenter it.⁴ I regard contemporary Latin American literature as a site of articulation of these two strands. In the aggregate, the region’s fiction advances the social vein that has been, traditionally, one of the strongest and most familiar features of its most prominent novels. At the same time, however, it develops an additional, complementary dimension, which one could describe as postanthropocentric. It is my contention that a corpus of recent literary works has much to teach us about such “recombined” materialism, and, reciprocally, that materialism allows us to interpret those literary works more relevantly. A central tenet of my approach is to appreciate the role of literary language in remediating the relationship of humans and objects. Such an operation has political consequences in a traditional sense, as engaged literature has had for decades, but it also extends the reach of politics to nonhumans. Critique needs fresh approaches to new materialism, and vice versa—Latin America shows the way forward.

As such, this book will be of interest to various constituencies, from my disciplinary home of Latin Americanism to comparatists and world literature scholars, from critical theorists to flat ontologists. Some schools of new materialism are, bluntly put, anti-Marxist. Among today’s most influential radical thinkers, understandably, there is suspicion about schools of thought that de-emphasize the human.5 And yet I think there are great resources in new materialism for the renewal of dialectical thinking, and many concepts of Marx himself, such as the notions of primitive accumulation and commodity fetishism, which should inform today’s materialism. There will be time to get into the finer conceptual work of how such categories must adapt to today’s fiction and to new materialities. For now, in broad terms, the goals of this volume are as follows: first, to show that the study of things as a means to reveal the true nature of social relations should counterbalance appraisals of objects as autonomous, nonhuman entities; and second, to explore how the nuanced and rich representations of human-nonhuman relations afforded by literature allow us to navigate that tension, providing a powerful methodological and conceptual tool to better grasp our present.

While focusing on works from the last twenty years, I also intersperse strategic mentions (Benjaminian “flashes”) of historical precedents. Latin American literature has long since engaged the effects of capitalism on its peripheries, including fundamental transformations in how we relate to objects. I regard the language deployed in the region’s fiction as one of the realms where different material paradigms clash. Allusions to pregnant moments of the past elucidate the present and allow a more complex, diachronic understanding of the changing role of literary language in justifying or questioning the base assumptions of human-object relations (for instance, the assumption that objects are objects and subjects are subjects, full stop, as if things did not have agency or as if humans were not also acted upon). Because of its semiperipheral condition in world literature, the corpus I study can serve as a limit case that invites a reassessment of the relationship of literature and materialism at a global level. A rising scholarly trend of the last two decades or so, which I like to call “worldliteraturism” to stress that it is indeed a trend and not a new natural state of affairs, puts forward the valuable notion that the world itself, not just nations or regions, can be a chamber of resonance for literature. However, more often than not, this is done in humanistic and idealistic terms—in short, anthropocentrically. This book advocates for reading world (and not just Latin American) literature in a less-than-humanist, materialist, and anthropodecentric way.

Among Latin Americanists—notable contributions by Mariano Siskind, Gesine Müller, Ignacio Sánchez Prado, and others notwithstanding—“world literature” is often suspect as a critical paradigm.6 Could worldliteraturism be just another fad that distracts the field from its core mission of studying the cultural products of the region and producing quality scholarship in Spanish and Portuguese? Or worse, might it be cultural imperialism in new garbs? These are valid questions that deserve nuanced answers. The latter are best found in a posteriori, actual readings, rather than at the level of a priori discussions of principle. My work, the present volume included, develops my views on the subject; summary position-taking only conveys so much. With that caveat, let me state that I do find World Literature (I henceforth capitalize the paradigm) to be very relevant to Latin Americanism, and vice versa. The compromise of entering into worldlit conversation entails producing scholarship largely, though not exclusively, in the English language. This is to the benefit of a broader scholarly community. Translation prevents losing monolingual readers; moreover, in literary studies, as in any other profession, and among general readers worldwide, English is increasingly common.

To boot, I am making the case for the pertinence of new materialism, a host of theories in English and French that have hitherto paid little attention to Latin America and which, it would seem, I now want to “creolize.” Does this sound familiar? Similar arguments have been made about earlier “posts”—structuralist, modern, and colonial.⁷ Let me reassure the skeptical reader that the present study is not a case of creolization: new materialism, despite its relative neglect of the region in formal scholarship, is not new to Latin America, which rather has a rich tradition to make explicit and to draw from. Neither is it esoteric, for all that defining a common lingo has been a priority for the movement in recent years, leading to a proliferation of terms. This I avoid as much as possible—discussions about “Anthropocene” versus “Capitalocene,” say, will not be front and center.⁸ Anticipating objections of a different kind, it is also worth mentioning that a focus on nonhumans does not seek to somehow cancel out the human, as in a zero-sum game. Finally, for the Great (Latin American) Book enthusiasts out there, the materialist turn does not further bury Literature with a capital L in the pit that the linguistic, textualist, and cultural turns had already dug for it—false charges to begin with, in my opinion. The triangulation of Latin Americanism, World Literature, and materialism makes sense because a rich corpus and its tangible referents sustain it.

Walter Benjamin famously wrote about “brushing history against the grain.”9 My intervention from the margins of Western culture seeks to capture the spirit of that phrase, with a twist: it finds fascinating that Benjamin, whom we traditionally read in terms of the critique of historicism, should resort to this evocative material metaphor. What brush, what grain? Is there something in those objects that leaves an imprint on his thinking? Deconstruction familiarized us with the recursivity involved in using language to think about language. Here language is material in the first order: a thing. And in the second order, it is a thing that summons other things. The instability and plasticity that new materialist thinkers celebrate in stuff is also present in language. In the opening passage of this introduction I referred to the “golden standard” of object permanence, and I have just mentioned the “spirit” of Benjamin’s dictum. What’s in a metaphor? Clearly, we must pay attention to language, which is something that literary critics do well, when we think about materiality. Literature, rather than being an afterthought of social science or science studies—the protagonists of historical materialism and new materialism, respectively—should be at the center of our inquiries. Another Benjaminian thinker, Hayden White, claimed something similar about Euro–North American modernist fiction and the Holocaust. In simple terms, the way Woolf, Joyce, or Dos Passos wrote, down to their word choices and plot devices, showed the historian the way to tell that ghastly story and, by extension, how to think historical discourse anew.¹⁰ Similarly, another way to frame the present study of contemporary Latin American literature at the crux of two materialisms is as groundwork for urgent future theorization.

As is well known, for Ortiz tobacco and sugar are poles that explain the development of Cuban society, for they represent two opposing forms of production and social organization. Tobacco, the native crop, traditionally revolved around artisanal labor and empowered, skillful workers; from early on, sugar demanded large plantations and disenfranchised, rote labor.¹⁴ Point and counterpoint: one favors the growth of a middle class of independent producers; the other divides society and leads to monopoly, and so on. The resulting “tune” would be the soundtrack of Cuban history. The literature on Ortiz has reduced their rich interaction, in this treatise of over three hundred pages, to the notion of transculturation, which it supposedly illustrates. I shall put forward the rather bold claim that the many elaborations on this idea, a major staple across decades of Latin Americanist criticism, build upon what is, essentially, an oversight.¹⁵ Every inflection point in the use of the term along the way, including Cornejo Polar’s Andean adaptation or Moreiras’s deconstructionist take at the turn of the twenty-first century, to name but a couple of milestones, could be subject to revision in light of this finding. Here I will only tackle the source and its more contemporary ramifications.

Now, if we accept the reductive reading, sugar and tobacco are excuses to refer to the broader, abstract problem. At best, when Ortiz goes into great detail about the specific botanical properties of plants, this amounts to digression; when he dresses them up and treats them as characters in a novel, the effect is embellishment. At worst, sugar is simply a stand-in for capitalism and tobacco for socialism, and transculturation is something of a third way. But Ortiz, who is always reluctant to reduce narrative to argument, points to a definition and yet does not quite give it: “And each of them [immigrants] torn from his native moorings, faced with the problem of disadjustment and readjustment, of deculturation and acculturation—in a word [en síntesis], of transculturation.”¹⁶ If transculturation is the synthesis of loss and gain, then what is it not?

Every one of the very few explicit moments in the book that might offer a definition of the term “transculturation” fails to do so. They may have performative value and literary interest, but they are not definitions in a strict sense, for they do not separate what is from what is not. Since seemingly everything, everywhere, at any moment may be called “transculturation,” the term is something of an idle noun. I leave it to intellectual historians of the period to examine in detail the reasons for the successful transmission of this ambiguous term. However, it is clear that Ortiz’s tooting his own horn—by reproducing in his journal Malinowski’s prologue and an excerpt from the book—had something to do with it. The coinage added philosophical legitimacy to Ortiz’s less abstract, more grounded intellectual efforts. The same volume of the journal features a translation from Bachelard on the psychoanalysis of fire and an article on the philosophy of Heidegger.17 The common thread of the three pieces is an exploration of the nature of objects, from different intellectual orientations. My suspicion is that Ortiz wanted to add a patina of metaphysics to his fundamentally materialist method.

In my nominalist interpretation, Counterpoint exemplifies transculturation rather than explain it. Consider the most cited passage of the book: “Cultural unions, like the reproductive process between individuals, lead to offspring that partake from elements of both sources, and yet are different from them.”¹⁸ Ortiz is trying to express that transculturation is a sinuous affair. He is pointing in the direction of the totality of human-vegetable-economic history, alluded to in the “reproductive process between individuals,” which evokes at one time sex, cellular reproduction, and capital accumulation. If a statement like this makes any sense at all, it is because a complex assemblage, conveyed as simple fable, stands behind it. Transculturation is less a concept one can adopt or not, agree with or take exception to, but something much broader: a methodology based on a specific worldview, one where there is a continuum between human affairs and the vegetable kingdom, both engulfed in materiality. It is as if Ortiz were saying: “To think transculturally, you must follow along the many twists and turns of my history of tobacco—take in the whole story.” In importing the term into literary and cultural criticism, Rama and Pratt, writing under the aegis of the cultural turn, kept the socioeconomic narrative but discarded the veritable “life stories” of leaves and stems that Ortiz so frequently and carefully describes. Put differently, they thought, like Malinowski, that the allegorical apparatus of the book was ultimately dismissible, as if in some sense it could not really be about tobacco and sugar.

By contrast, that is exactly what I find most pertinent for today’s critical discussion: a de-allegorization, a literalization of this fundamental study, which really is about plants that are also goods, for Ortiz examines them in their becoming. I do not just find in Ortiz a constructivist, but also a realist; not merely a precursor of cultural studies, but also of new materialism.19 Hidden in one of the later annexes, one may find a claim that, to my mind, is the most explicit he gets about the true, indexical nature of the term transculturación: “The history of tobacco affords [ofrece] an example of one of the most extraordinary processes of transculturation.”²⁰ This offering is the book itself, one that was written and should be read as if in the presence of sugarcane and tobacco plants. Transculturación, a narrative praxis rather than an abstract notion, posits that there is always a material basis for culture. However, it does not recur to the familiar sense of Marxist base and superstructure, a layered metaphor that leads to the separation of nature from culture. Sugar and tobacco are part of nature, as they are part of the economy, and one can follow the ways in which they seemingly go in and out of culture, that purportedly separate realm. Or one can appreciate the continuum, as Ortiz does, and use narrative to trace their becoming across disciplinary and epistemological boundaries.

Narrative has such a preeminent role in Ortiz’s method that a curious plot frames the entire book. The narrator—for it is fair to call the first person that—says there ought to be a romance, written in the manner of Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita (1283–1350), with sugar and tobacco as its protagonists. But finding himself unfit for the effort, he says, “All I can do is to set down, in drab prose, the amazing contrasts I have observed in the two agricultural products on which the economic history of Cuba rests.”21 This is surely an instance of false modesty, for the prose is anything but drab. It is also an affirmation of the borrowings from Ruiz, who provides the allegorical device and, perhaps more importantly, the standing of a trickster within the tradition. To be sure, Ortiz takes economic history seriously, but he wants to enliven the topic. Hence the allusions to “humor,” “fables,” and even, later on, “fairy tales.” There would be a pedagogical objective as well, for the hypothetical counterpoint would have an “educational value”—in the original, it would serve “enseñanza popular.” But does he or does he not write the alluded-to literary work? That counterpoint, which could be a guajira, curro, rumba, or liturgy, to mention just a few of the referents that Ortiz associates with the musical notion, is a phantom text. The narrator speculates on the beneficial effects that such a text could have while he is, in fact, writing it. The title-essay is that poem. It is a work of literature followed by documentation—annexes which, although not entirely exempt of literary interest, fall outside of the narrative unity.²²

This explains why the first part is so thin in references to the social science literature and so rich in a doxographical collection of quotes on sugar and tobacco by a heterogeneous group of authors, including Lope de Vega, Georges Sand, and the Cuban poet Fernando Milanés—or why it goes on for pages, with obvious delight, on the whims of his characters: tobacco “heightens its inborn rank” by adopting the native woods of Cuba as its carriage, on its way to visit European aristocrats; the baby Rum is born from the marriage of Don Tobacco and Doña Sugar.²³ A reader looking for an abstract takeaway may grow impatient, but when one has followed the long history of tobacco and has accompanied the personified plant from its humble origins to its rarified consumers, a sense of irony emerges. Always in his ludic tone, Ortiz gestures toward the absurdities of transnational commerce. One gains a fuller understanding of how value is constructed over time, how it may relate to exploitation, and how it is embedded in material culture. These realizations call for narrative and poetic devices: a text within a text, a text that poses as a different text, a superposition of metaphors and allegories. The gist of the narrative operation is to estrange the very quotidian substance of sugar in order to illuminate its historical conjuncture. Instead of regarding the book as a predisciplinary, always-lacking piece of social science, one may see it as an erudite, essayistic novel. Ortiz resembles more an avant-garde writer than a disciplinary anthropologist.

Seen under this light, the companion essay has much to say. For a piece on “human factors,” food is a notably central element, particularly the ingredients that different ethnic groups contributed to the national soup, ajiaco. Gustavo Pérez Firmat has observed that the essay makes essentially the same argument as the book on transculturation, with “a different vocabulary and style of argument.”24 That would be true if the former were indeed an essay about an abstract notion, which one could succinctly summarize or extricate from its materialist unfolding, and not the narrative experiment that it is. It is a work in which one learns to think differently about matter as one reads, and the same could be said about the ajiaco piece. There we read a long enumeration of the ingredients in the soup, along with the ethnic groups that contributed them. It is a long paragraph, unfit to cite in full here, framed as follows:

For us, the image of the ajiaco criollo symbolizes well the formation of the Cuban people. Let’s follow the metaphor. First of all, an uncovered casserole. This is Cuba, the island, the stove pot placed over the flame of the tropics…[enumeration of ethnic groups and ingredients] along with the fire of the tropics to warm it, the water of its skies for the broth, and the water of its seas for the sprinkling of the saltshaker. With all of that our national ajiaco has been made.²⁵

The loving, bird’s-eye view of a Caribbean island gives us an aeronautical, modernist metaphor. But years before food studies, the idea of a multiethnic nation as a cauldron of soup makes the essay just as thought-provoking as the more elaborate Counterpoint. And, crucially, like the occasional nod to beets and rum in that book, it hints at a “chorus”—a field of interacting forces rather than a dialectic.²⁶

Note also the malleability of Ortiz’s language. He says ajiaco symbolizes the formation of the Cuban people—not simply the Cuban people as a stable entity, which would mean that, say, corn stands for the indigenous people, beef for Spaniards, plantains for Africans, or spices for Asians. There a thing would take the place of a group of people, in a more straightforward symbolic function. But the soup, with all its slow brewing, stands for the process. Symbolization is asymmetrical and diachronic. It entails a whole that is more than the sum of its parts, a gastronomical (benignly nationalistic) affair that exceeds the more pragmatic American melting pot. And then the next line posits, rhetorically, “Sigamos la metáfora”—Let’s follow the metaphor. One could read that as an oratorical cue, for the essay was originally a public lecture, meaning “Let us dwell on this.” But when one takes into consideration what takes place in Counterpoint, this is more a matter of gaining elucidation through language—through the elusive but revealing qualities of literary language, that is. The passage brings to mind Maurizia Boscagli’s observation that “the critique of the present through stuff demands plasticity.”²⁷ Indeed, “plasticity,” “flexibility,” “malleability,” or “suppleness” would aptly describe how thinkers like Ortiz open up their times—and ours—to critical scrutiny. In this case, the Cuban’s “stuff” is tobacco, sugar, and language.

Ortiz’s core belief seems to be that literary imagination allows us to reassess our historical and material situation. He founds a mode of Latin American, new materialist writing that seeks both explanation and intervention, interweaving human and nonhuman history through literary language. He shows us how objects or materiality in general can awaken history. As Coronil is keen to show, the characters in Ortiz’s fable owe at least as much to Marx’s Madame la Terre and Monsieur le Capital as to the Archpriest of Hita’s less polemical relatives Mr. Carnival and Lady Lent.28 Understatedly, Ortiz is integrating historical and new materialisms already. His writing transcends divides between the sciences and the social sciences, revealing phenomena that straddle botany, economics, and literature. Counterfetishism of the commodity and longue durée accounts of the agency of objects are both within the reach of this narrative mode, which I have called, adapting Ortiz’s terminology, transcultural materialism. There, the nonhuman aspect of culture is revealed, without reducing it to cold facts or disingenuous description. As noted, the term has more of a deictic value than an abstract function; it signals an expansive praxis, not a distilled theory. Still, for a working definition, consider this praxis as the noninstrumental use of stories and literary language to upset the nature-culture divide, affect our rapport with things, and reassess our place in human-nonhuman history. In particular, I deploy it in an attempt to understand the worldwide material shift that has been taking place since roughly 1989, as represented by contemporary literature placed in conversation with relevant historical precedents.

This proposal gains traction in conversation with the work of Jane Bennett and Bruno Latour, important sources, among others, throughout this book. Bennett, who speaks of a vibrant materialism, recognizes the agency of objects: in her examples, the enticement of potato chips or the role of electricity in shaping daily life.29 Read literally, Ortiz does something very similar in regard to objects we ultimately incorporate as smoke in the lungs or fizz in the mouth. Meanwhile, Latour notes that, when reading about a hole in the ozone layer, he finds that a newspaper’s sections cannot quite “contain” the phenomenon: it is something that could equally belong under the headings “science,” “society,” “politics,” and so on—even “fiction.” The resulting “hybrid” article “mixes together chemical reactions and political reactions.”³⁰ Mutatis mutandis, Ortiz does the same with his crossover treatise, a socio-botanical novel of sorts. Latour cites as examples of his method studies that “reconstruct” the United States “around the incandescent filament of Edison’s lamp” or do something similar for French society through an examination of Pasteur’s bacteria.³¹ It is easy to appreciate how Ortiz carried out a similar operation in Cuba by focusing on tobacco and sugar—not just commodities but, in a more basic sense, nonhuman entities.

Today’s fiction responds not only to the legacies of colonialism so vivid in Ortiz but to the unprecedented changes in our rapport with objects in the last two decades. A case in point, as I now turn to discuss, is the work of the contemporary Cuban writer Antonio José Ponte.³²

Flash forward from prerevolutionary to post-Soviet Cuba: in Ponte’s Las comidas profundas (Deep Foods, 1997), the “Special Period” is the elephant in the room. Fidel Castro introduced the phrase “special period in time of peace” in 1990 to frame the dire years—continuing at least until 1996—after the withdrawal of the USSR’s economic activities from the island. Indicative of the unique challenges this posed to the regime, a caption for photos of protests at Havana’s Museum of the Revolution reads, “Groups of antisocial elements and tramps performed counterrevolutionary riots in two neighborhoods.”³³ Although never explicitly mentioned, this is the backdrop of the book. It starts with the phrase “A castle in Spain…”—a French idiom for daydreaming.³⁴ True to the saying, the narrator sits at an empty table in Cuba and yearns for foods that do not come to him. His story quickly blends into that of King Charles V, expecting a royal visit: that of pineapple, “lion among fruits as he is lion among kings.”³⁵ Struck with love for the unique, hitherto unknown fruit, Charles contemplates it, compares it to a walled city, wonders if it is a he or a she, then thinks of her as a captive queen, an offering. In his hands, readers are led to believe the pineapple is Cuba, or the colonies, or the world: a multifarious orb similar to those Peter Sloterdijk analyzes in Spheres, symbols of empire.³⁶ And, all along, also something immaterial, a dream within a dream, a mise en abyme of hunger.

Ponte went into exile a number of years ago—he defected, one could say, borrowing vocabulary from a different era. Unavoidably, reading about Charles V, one wonders: Is this conservativeness, nostalgia for the old regime? An oblique comparison of the most powerful man in the history of Hispanic cultures and the island’s aging strongman, Fidel Castro? Speculation is cut short by the startling denouement of the vignette: Charles worries that eating the pineapple will make him insane, like his mother, Juana la Loca (Joanna the Mad). Even more interestingly, he fears that “an unknown ocean would extend between them.”37 If aura is the effect that something close is at a distance, then ingesting the thing would deauratize, render banal. In this case, it would also burst the illusion of possessing distant lands never seen. Biographical fallacy permitting, here one sees the hungry writer in Havana and the exilé in Madrid. As this vignette suggests, reading political content in Ponte is anything but straightforward.

It’s a wicked thing to write about food during a time of hunger; it is all the more wicked to do so with an eye for the historical configuration of food at a time of historical change.³⁸ The narrator sets himself to the task of invoking “the spirit of ancient foods.”³⁹ The book, a collection of vignettes and ruminations with a novelistic quality, is the spiritist séance. Consider the roads not taken: not a criticism against the increasingly autarchic Castro regime for favoring scarcity over international dependency; not a condemnation of a world order—or not an obvious one, in any case—that left Cuba to its own means. Ponte chooses the more circuitous Ortizian route of imbricating material history (of Cuban foods, in this case) with history tout court. At stake is no less than the claim, which made great waves in the nineties, that history came to an end.

The idea was Francis Fukuyama’s. “What we may be witnessing,” he wrote in the summer of 1989, “is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”40 Writing from neoliberal Mexico, Octavio Paz reached a similar conclusion a few months later in his Pequeña crónica de grandes días (1990), where he also characterized said political system as the next and last step for what was once known as the Second World.⁴¹ Paz represents a highly influential view that the Special Period had to react against; citing him illuminates Ponte’s historical conjuncture. Says the Nobel laureate, unequivocally, “The revolutionary ideal has suffered fatal blows; the hardest and most devastating ones have not been from its adversaries, but from revolutionaries themselves: wherever they have conquered power, they have muzzled the people.”⁴² For a sharp but revealing contrast, consider Fidel Castro’s words from the speech that launched the Special Period, delivered in the Karl Marx Theater of Havana in January 1990:

The way we see the future, we really see the Party leading indefinitely.

Neither Carlos Marx, nor Lenin, nor Engels said on what day the party would be over—they did not say. They said that one day the State would disappear, which is something more than the party. Still, as far as one can tell, the moment in which the State comes to an end is far away. So we will have to keep on dealing with this apparatus—what is there to do? It is still undecided at the theoretical level, and, foremost, beyond theory in praxis, on what day and in what world the State will have disappeared. Then, truly, it won’t be like somebody hopping onto a rocket to go to another planet—that day we will have changed this planet (APPLAUSE).

Carlos Marx said that one day humanity will have overcome prehistory. And I think, I always did and still do, that the day that the exploitation of man by man disappears, the day that humanity as a whole is ruled by socialist principles, or beyond, by communist principles, that day prehistory would be over [habría terminado la prehistoria].⁴³

The note “applause” is part of the official, tachygraphic record from which I quote. The message is clear: the Party is not over, nor is history—here “prehistory.” The caesura would be the end of the State, an apparatus that Castro appears willing to do without if only conditions were more favorable. But that project belongs to the future or to a different world. The end of history he vindicates is the ultimate resolution of contradiction by reaching the endpoint that is communism, not liberal democracy. But since that option is not viable, history must continue. In other words, the Cuban Communist Party must remain a beacon for the world. Cubans must continue la lucha in times of peace, diverting their efforts and energies from preparation for a possible U.S. invasion to the steadfast maintenance of the revolution in the face of economic adversity. (The more pragmatic passages of the speech mention the shortage of Soviet oil.) The speech marks the turning point that leads to Ponte’s hungry narrator; its language, particularly its way of talking about history, rings very differently from the novelist’s musings on Charles V, whom he successively invokes with envy, parody, and mild reverence.

Meanwhile, Ponte renders history as an erotically charged fruit. (With his usual graphic good sense, Daniel García’s cover illustration for the Argentine edition captures this, with a vertically sliced pineapple that evokes, as the French painter Gustave Courbet might put it, “the origin of the world.”) Deep Foods does not side with Castro, but neither does it align itself with Fukuyama or Paz. The book does not advocate an end of history or a continuation; it founds, in the autonomous space of literature it fiercely defends, a third temporality. A figure Ponte does side with is Lezama Lima, the great origenista. Ponte offers a brief commentary on Lezama’s influential essay “Corona de las frutas,” from 1959. It was published in Lunes de revolución, a short-lived literary supplement from the honeymoon period between intellectuals of all ilks and the Cuban revolution. There Lezama writes something that Ponte might find prescient: “From Charles V to Talleyrand, names of classic sturdiness or devilish demands have proclaimed the extension of their domains in the firmament of their palate.”44 At the time there were government-sanctioned recipes for making Cuban dishes out of animal parts, including skulls, that were hitherto considered industrial waste. In Con nuestros propios esfuerzos, published by the Cuban army in 1992, we read the following: “By taking meaty advantage of these parts of the cow, one can obtain byproducts that were earlier discarded due to lack of experience. The initiative consists in utilizing the ears of the cow, the trachea, esophagus, labia, cuts of the innards, skull and tendons in order to fabricate croquettes, homemade blood sausages, and hamburgers.”⁴⁵ This is a diet suitable for a city under siege—Leningrad, say—or enduring the toll of war—Berlin. The island, an/the extension of Castro’s domain, could be seen as proclaimed by those manuals of resistance through hunger.

To fully appreciate the poignancy of the Castro–Charles V comparison, consider Heberto Padilla’s critique of Lezama Lima and his group, Orígenes, in “La poesía en su lugar,” a few years before his famous, forced, public recanting divided the intelligentsia between pro- and anti-Castro factions. During his revolutionary phase Padilla describes Lezama’s group as “an instance of our most pronounced bad taste…proof of our past ignorance, evidence of our literary colonialism, and our enslavement to old literary forms. It is not by accident that the words, the vocabulary of these poets make repeated monarchic allusion: Kingdom, crown, prince, princess, heralds.”46 As the opposition Padilla outlines here suggests, Ponte is changing the terms of the debate. His opening “monarchic allusion,” combined with an empty table, is a play both on aestheticism and on social realism. In Ponte’s account, Charles is essentially hungry, unsatiated. Meanwhile, Castro chose dignity for his people at the cost of scarcity; accounts of the people’s choice on the matter and of their understanding of what dignity means, obviously, vary. The regime casts hunger as resistance; so does Ponte, albeit with a different, unheroic spin. Fittingly, the dense language of Deep Foods laments and endures its bodily effects. The book assimilates hunger to unrequited love, imagining a troubled love story of Cubans with food that transcends the ages.

But how to think sub specie aeternitate in the face of scarcity? This unresolved question is the driving force of Ponte’s book; its dialectic is one between the will to historicize and the immediate demands of survival. Like Lezama, Ponte sets his eyes on a long historical horizon—longer, particularly, than the presence of Marxism on the island. And so his allusion to Silvestre de Balboa’s Espejo de paciencia taps not only on its foundational, early modern evocation of Cuba as a land of fruit and riches, but also on its plotline, which is essentially the story of a kidnapping that must be endured—hence the patience, as in pathos. On a couple of occasions, amid heavy, neo-neo-baroque paragraphs, the narrator portrays himself as a prisoner. That is no doubt a loaded metaphor, given its context. Likewise, there is painful irony in the epithet he gives to the island, “The Place Where Tasty Foods Come From” (a pun on the phrase “de donde son los cantantes” [where singers are from]). There is further irony in the realization that fruits such as the pineapple, with its age-old evocation of cubanidad, were in no shortage in rural areas, but neither could they provide complete nourishment.

Arguably, the most compelling feature of Ponte’s book is how he derives lessons about mankind and its relation to food from the more historically precise coordinates of the Special Period—while illuminating that moment all the same. We can then extend this line of thought to say that hunger, that original form of desire, is always embedded in literature. One can find it in texts, as one can find eros, whose imprint on culture is a major theme in psychoanalytical approaches. Here mother’s milk is both about the mother and about the milk itself, the psyche and the body, life and survival. Reading hunger in literature is finding human conatus, that is, perseverance in being. There is the memory, in Ponte’s simile, of having been cold.47 Cold: the risk of losing oneself to the elements; hunger: that of losing oneself to lack. These are experiences of the human-nature continuum. Finding the traces of hunger in literature, beyond a mere heuristic device, can be part of a critical agenda that recognizes very concrete forms of precariousness and thinks alongside them. Food is of a part with language. We read about how despair (read hunger) multiplies metaphors: “pork chops of rice with fries, fried calamari without calamari.”⁴⁸ Eating, the indispensable operation that binds human and nonhumans, is an occasion for historical, political reflection.

For his part, Latour favors the terms “nature-culture.” He also prefers “collective” over “society” to account for the nonhuman elements that underpin human life; he formulates the notion of “network,” a concept that cuts across multiple disciplinary divisions, for it is “simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, like discourse, and collective, like society.”⁴⁹ And he talks about hybrids, as in assemblages of human and nonhuman elements, and of a Constitution with a capital C, their reified status quo.⁵⁰ Borrowing this terminology, one could say that Cuban writers like Ortiz and Ponte present networks, deal with hybrids, and undertake something of a Constitutional reform. Except their efforts, which in Ortiz’s case predate Latour’s by several decades, and in Ponte’s run parallel to it, do not need such profusion of terminology. Latour’s neo-scientistic language and the Cubans’ literary experiments are different answers to a common question about how to conceive and talk about the continuum between natural and human affairs. Following the contours of their narratives could ultimately make the lingo unnecessary.

In that vein, for their theoretical value, one may revisit the seven sections of Deep Foods. There are many insightful discussions there of foods and of more or less known pieces about food, by a heterogeneous group of writers. We read in the second section, which deals with learning to like foods we previously disliked, that some foods “take us back to the origin.” Citing Bertrand Russell’s essay “On Useless Knowledge” (1935), Ponte says that an apricot tastes better when one knows about its long history, from its domestication in the early years of the Han dynasty in China, through its arrival in Rome in the first century CE, to the present. “Very long fibers have woven that meat that can be undone with the teeth,”51 he reports, and by madejas (fibers) he means historical events. Strikingly, Russell’s essay is also a defense of idleness. But how to even think of idleness in state-controlled socialism? If the system worked flawlessly, idleness would potentially be akin to dissidence, at least beyond vacation and resting periods regulated by the state. But the system does not work in that way, and idleness is not a luxury of aristocratic intellectuals like Russell but the plight of the unemployed. Ponte seems to relish precisely that condition. His Cuban present is like a time without time.

However, the third section offers a different temporal dimension, opening with an archeological excavation that, as I see it, may either take place in the present or allude to a distant future. Ponte writes about finding iron instruments, very old turtle shells, and bottles used to reinforce walls. As it happens, the province of Cienfuegos has been the site of several important archeological digs, during which turtle remains have in fact been found, as have bottles that were used as construction material.⁵² Although Ponte’s narrative could allude to those real-life findings, the astounding thing about his account is that, in passing, he uses the word “beer” in English: “En el calor del día se piensa en la sed de albañiles de hace siglos y la gente vuelve a empinarlas, huelen sus picos a ver qué queda de la vieja beer” (In the heat of midday people think about the thirst of bricklayers from centuries ago and lug those bottles again, smell their lips to see what’s left of the old cerveza).⁵³ Is this an allusion to colonial trade, which might have brought products from a nearby English-speaking place, such as Jamaica? Or is the thirst of construction workers that of contemporary Cubans who, like in old times, make do with what is available to build houses? In the second case, the passage would be a flight forward into the future. At the risk of overinterpretation, one could even see in this beer the staple of a future capitulation of Cuba to the United States. The archeological dig scene is a mere two pages in length, leaving more questions posed than answered. Its unique mood, which combines stasis and discovery, further serves the cause of unsettling historical narratives.

Benjamin’s thoughts on archeology come to mind. He compares the task of a critical theorist to that of digging, and (as I read him) thereby relates language to earth. Memory is “a medium for exploring the past,” while earth is “the medium in which ancient cities lie buried.”54 Ponte proceeds in Benjaminian fashion, looking for certain truths (about apricots, say) hidden in language; he also leaves a reflective trace of his search as he goes. Hence his reflections on “the habit of making foods out of words.”⁵⁵ One could see the book in its entirety as an impossible archeological exercise that digs the past beneath the present and at times even hints at an uncertain future. This exercise is impossible not because of its temporal focus, or lack thereof, but because it searches for organic traces—the very kind archeologists cannot find. More than bottles, turtle skeletons, or iron tools, it is the pineapple not eaten centuries ago that Ponte seeks to unearth. In many ways, as the title suggests, his foods are “profound”: they are deeply buried, forgotten during a time of hunger, yet rich in history and present value. They are a national treasure the disenfranchised narrator is somehow entitled to amass.

The third section of Deep Foods moves rapidly away from the archeological site, first to a reflection on Lezama Lima and then to a story about a historical meal offered by a Cuban noblewoman in Madrid. Together, these three moments compose an unusual triptych, as the more essayistic portion is in the middle of two narratives. Perhaps glossing Lezama and recounting the marquise’s soiree are all part of digging—of investigating in words the profound truths of food, in fiction and nonfiction alike. And if, indeed, as the saying goes, “we are what we eat,” then Ponte would be tackling ambitious questions about the Cuban, if not the human, condition. His gloss of Lezama highlights the remark “As he eats, the Cuban man incorporates the forest,” only to affirm the sharp contrast between that “incorporation” and the more mainstream use of the word at the time of Lezama’s writing.⁵⁶ In that period, says Lezama according to Ponte, “government propaganda” kept droning on about the verb “to incorporate,” as a way of signaling the historical necessity of the dissolution of the individual: “There shouldn’t be any personal goal but that of becoming a grain in the bowl where greater, superhuman forces came to eat.”⁵⁷ Here dissidence becomes the desire not to be eaten alive.

This halfway point across the sections of the book raises some general questions. That Cubans incorporate the forest when they eat may mean, allegorically, that their sustenance is defiance—as it were, they join the ranks of a different army. It is an odd use of the reflexive verb “incorporarse,” which usually precedes a preposition. Lezama and Ponte are purposefully playing with the object-subject divide by approximating swallowing and being swallowed by. But isn’t that indistinction the point of incorporation—that is, of becoming one body? Note how the body politic, the body proper, and nature are all interconnected, thanks to the binding force of literary prose. From serving as the more or less unwitting setting for Cuba’s experiment with socialism, Ponte renders the island’s nature as the reason to reformulate that experiment. In so doing, Deep Foods comes closer to Bennett’s cited notion of “vibrant materialism” than to environmentalism. In the latter, nature and culture can be understood separately, for the “environment” is external, almost a backdrop. By contrast, Bennett maintains that “the locus of agency is always a human-nonhuman working group,” while “human agency is always an assemblage of microbes, animals, plants, metals, chemicals, word-sounds, and the like.”58 The present study takes these words to heart. However, without putting too fine a point on terminology, I obviously find my coinage more precise—better to call Ponte a “transcultural materialist.” Despite a general agreement between my theorization and Bennett’s, differences with Bennett have to do with the meager place that colonial dynamics occupy in her thinking, hence my use of the term “neo-extractivism”—the bread and butter, pun intended, of Ponte’s ruminations. This, coupled with the significant, but ultimately subordinate, role of literature in Vibrant Matter, provides useful distinction. Additionally, a pitfall to avoid is reproducing in criticism what happens in society at large: to apply a metropolitan theorist to a semiperipheral literature is the road most traveled. The more interesting political option is to rewrite the theory from the ground up.

Fittingly, Ponte avoids the environmentalizing effect of plain language, which is better at singling out objects than at describing the continuum that is materiality. His revision of Lezama’s dictum goes beyond partisanship into a veritable politics of nature.⁵⁹ When he recognizes the agency of food, he mobilizes transculturation against state-imposed historical materialism. This is to eat so as not to be eaten, as in the cannibalistic logic of cultural critique in Virgilio Piñera, albeit extended to other organic materials. In the vignette of the Madrid dinner party, Spanish guests are treated to roots and stems, leaves and cortices. An astute guest thanks the hostess for feeding him the forests of her country. Those at the table experience, in the characteristically hypersensualized take Ponte has on Ortiz’s motifs, “the same awe of those who saw for the first time how a man smoked tobacco leaves.”⁶⁰ Lungs and gut take in the forest; the forest takes over the metropolis. But the forest is also a threat, and, by eating it, Cubans vanquish it. “Overeat” it, though, and there would be no Cuba left to speak of. In this fashion, Ponte’s syncretic language captures a dynamic that crisscrosses the economical and the ecological, island and continent, periphery and metropolis, past and present, body and nature.

Similarly, Latour is concerned about the inability to think together the human and the nonhuman, or to articulate global and local concerns. In the face of something like the contemporary ecological crisis, which patently cuts across all these divisions, we need to repair the fracture between “knowledge of things” and “power and human politics.”61 Wouldn’t this be a fair description of Ponte’s project? In his book, the long history of colonialism, the Cold War, and its aftermath all converge in Cuban foods. It is as if he were saying: “If we think deeply about food, we will arrive at significant truths.” This is a recursive operation, because food does not end in food—food is of a part with language, desire, negativity, which is all the more reason to excavate these truths in literary language. Ponte goes on to note that no regime, authoritarian (policial) as it may be, can sever the relationship of a people with its foods, which lingers in language even when food staples are not available.⁶²

Polemically, one could say that Ponte is being more radical than Castro, more materialist than the party-line historical materialists. He is “a hunger artist,” to borrow the shrewdly allegorical title of a Kafka tale that—a point I will merely insinuate here—he may very well be rewriting.⁶³ Surely, one could describe the ideological state apparatuses of the Castro regime, different as they are from those of a capitalist state. But Althusser’s explanations as to why subjects stay subject, past direct repression or coercion—that is, his analysis of internalized power structures—would fall short, in light of Ponte’s work, of Cuban reality.⁶⁴ The politics of eating in the Cuba of the Special Period entail a complex dynamics of dignity and resistance. Deeps Foods casts it as eroticism. The ideological identification of subject with nation is about desire. In my reading of Ponte’s prose, Cuba is a matria, a motherland, which would add a layer of meaning to a passage Adriana Kanzepolsky underlines in her afterword to the book: “All foods are an ersatz of mother’s milk.”⁶⁵ This departs from the more conventional reading of the acceptance of authoritarianism as fixation with the father figure. The dynamic is, in a manner of speaking, as follows: since, as censorship would have it, Ponte could not rant against the father, he takes it out on the mother. Cuba was Cuba before being socialist; islands are blessed with abundance and scarcity alike. Ponte’s heterochronic narrative puts hunger in perspective, reveals its transhistorical charge of desire.

Back in the fourth section of the book, there is a musing inspired by Apollinaire: an enamored young man woos and threatens a girl by lovingly eating her shoe, which a chef has prepared. It is a gesture made “to underline his subservience to her [avasallamiento], but also talk of possession.”66 In a peculiar, circuitous way, Deep Foods is Ponte’s dictatorship novel, his book about prison food.

While the fifth of the seven sections of the book claims that hunger will never cease to be a part of Cuban literary language, in the way that those who have been very cold cannot shake off the feeling once they are in a temperate room, the sixth section discusses an aliñado or prú, a homemade liqueur made of fermented fruits and other staple crops that are, like rice, from the eastern part of Cuba.⁶⁷ In peasants’ homes, recounts Ponte, it is customary to prepare one when a woman is pregnant: the drink ferments as the baby grows.⁶⁸ In this way, the aliñado will be ready for the baptism celebrations, and beyond. Because fermented drinks hold well, there are families that keep some of the beverage for years, to be had at wedding celebrations for those same children.⁶⁹ The liqueur is, quite literally, an eau de vie. Ponte cherishes the parallel between bottle and womb, which become “twin fermentations.”⁷⁰ The image is something of an ars poetica, as his book has been a long, vitalist effervescence, a quest for satiety and celebration. And, although it goes unnamed, here there is a nod to a famous quote. The reference would not escape Cuban readers, who still congregate in the Karl Marx theaters of the island: “Force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one.”⁷¹ Is this Ponte suggesting revolution on the revolution? Or is he casting himself as a different kind of midwife, with violence sublimated if it is present at all? This endpoint to the book’s erotic charge is purposefully puzzling, and too narrow an interpretation would not do it justice. And yet it is certain that Ponte prefers a historical movement that is organic and nonteleological. This is his take at “incorporation,” as in Lezama’s dictum that Cubans incorporate (to) the forest as they eat—a far cry from incorporating into a Party.⁷²

The other vignettes in the section contribute to this reading. The narrator ventures from the aliñado to Ortiz’s ajiaco to the Shatapatha Brahmana, and closes with a poem by none other than Luis Marré, founder of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC). He embraces Ortiz’s use of the plate as a figuration of Cuba, adding that “moros y cristianos”—rice and beans, literally “Moors and Christians”—would extend his logic all the way to Charles, “awaiting the pineapple.”73 The fable from the Brahmanic sacred text holds that, in the afterlife, what we eat will assume human form and eat us. In the four corners of heaven, animals will slice us, trees will chop us, mute vegetables will swallow us, and water will drink us. I read this as reinforcement of the human-nature continuum and circle-of-life concepts from earlier chapters. There is also an oceanic feeling that befits the fictional reconciliation with the motherland as a land of plenty. Indeed, throughout the book Ponte makes several references to Eastern religions, the very source of the concept of “oceanic feeling” in Romain Rolland and Sigmund Freud’s correspondence.⁷⁴ But here the proverbial “being one with the world,” so evident in the aliñado-woman coupling, quickly fades into failed cosmopolitanism. Ponte quotes Marré as writing: “This loaf of bread was made with flour from the USSR. The rice came from China. The lentils were sown in old Spain. The vegetables were picked from the valley of Güines…. We drink well water. We draw it with a fourth of a horse (-power, a small engine of). The well is of blue serpentine rock and sits next to a lemon tree.”⁷⁵

The citation comes from “Nos comemos la tierra,” whose title is a double entendre for “We eat dirt” and “We take the world by assault.” The irony in citing this quaint prose poem lies in the fact that it was written at a time of relative abundance and integration into the world; by contrast, the Special Period was anything but. Marré harmonizes the global and the local; Ponte explores their contradictions. The one-fourth-horsepower engine, which irrupts into the poem, surrealistically, as a fraction of a horse, is in Ponte’s gesturing more about scarcity than about simplicity. Worldliness, organicity, and exile all clash in this thought-provoking envoi to Ponte’s chapter. Real-life implications are very real, too, if one remembers that Marré, as head of UNEAC, would have to oversee Ponte’s expulsion. Indeed, after a lifetime of participation in the cultural milieu, UNEAC ostracized Ponte in 2003, which ultimately led to his leaving the island for good in 2007. (Conspicuously, Marré changes the “USSR” in the first line for “Ukraine” in later re-editions of the poem—e.g., in the selected works he published after receiving the National Literature Prize.) And so this is an overdetermined, heterodox fable, which brings together apparatchik, ajiaco, and Brahmanism. Its lesson of “Those who eat will be eaten” echoes concerns of historical and new materialism.

The seventh and last section of Deep Foods consists of the curt phrase “A table in Havana…”76 It brings us back to the start—indeed, the origin—, to hungry dreams: a table in Havana is worth a castle in Spain. It also evokes the punch line of another notorious seven-part work, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”⁷⁷ For the Austrian philosopher, such denouement signaled the aspiration that language could exhaust reality. For the Cuban novelist, by contrast, it posits that both language and reality are inexhaustible, try as we may to make foods out of words and eat them whole. Censorship, quite possibly, was another consideration. After all, love-hate for socialist Cuba, or for Cuba tout court, are frequent topics in the nation’s diasporic literature. Without ignoring the explanatory power of exile, I have preferred instead to examine how the text actualizes the legacy of Fernando Ortiz’s thought, engaging historical and new materialisms in original ways. Deep Foods is one of the works of contemporary Latin American literature that enriches our understanding of that intersection, and one of the texts that most explicitly realizes Fernando Ortiz’s thought. Ponte illustrates, in an Ortizian vein, the interrogation of materialism that is now taking place in contemporary Latin American literature. This is precisely what the present book sets out to explore.

Things with a History analyzes the place of contemporary Latin American fiction within the profound material transformation of our times. After globalization, we live in an age where culture seems to become in some ways more immaterial (i.e., less bound to specific objects or places) and in other ways leaves a more irreversible material footprint (i.e., through pollution and ecological damage). This dialectic has increasingly come under the scrutiny of cultural critics and philosophers, but there are few contributions by scholars of literature in such debates. To that end, I formulate broad theoretical reflections that actualize notions such as estrangement, primitive accumulation, commodity fetishism, historical materialism, and the agency of objects. In a way, like Ponte, I seek to extend Ortiz’s narrative project to a broader corpus. Inspired by Cuban Counterpoint, this book constructs a similarly materialist narrative that, although situated within literary theory and criticism, projects itself across the incommensurable realms of history, economy, and biology. One could see in Ortiz a forefather to a Latin Americanist political ecology of materiality—or a refreshingly jargon-free narrative praxis that pursues conceptual elucidation without sacrificing complexity.⁷⁸

Still, if one were to borrow Latour’s terminology, one could easily say that the likes of Ponte and Ortiz examine collectives and networks. As I have shown, the personification of tobacco and sugar was less a matter of poetic license than an intuition of the agency of objects; the same is clearly the case with foods. Like Latour, Ponte and Ortiz concern themselves with how the relationship between human and nonhuman entities determines a course for modernity that it is not too late to revise. The French thinker notes that when ethnographers venture outside the West, they produce unifying narratives that weave together technology, religion, botany, and so forth. This, however, is harder for them to achieve when examining the West, which is supposed to be modern and, therefore, is taken to rest on the separation of nature and culture, the human and the nonhuman. He hopes to reveal that for us too there is a “seamless fabric”; in other words, as the resounding title of his book claims, he wants to show that we have never been modern. The “amodern” project of Latour and others speaks volumes when considered side by side with the cultural products I address in the present study, particularly as they originate in what Arturo Uslar Pietri would call (transforming the phrase “Far East”) “Extremo Occidente”: the confines of the West.79 In many regards, Latin America has been a site for the best and the worst experiments of Western techno-social rationality. From that position, this book examines hybrid narratives that challenge the modern separation of nature and culture.

I am interested in the ways literary works can have an effect similar to that of Ortiz’s narrative. Fernando Coronil has wondered too about how it is that a book about commodities produces the effect that we understand the social forces that have constructed Cuban identities. He gives himself a provisional answer: “The mystery of this effect…is perhaps resolved by realizing that Ortiz treats tobacco and sugar as highly complex metaphorical constructs that represent at once material things and human actors.”80 This explanation falls short of answering the question. Rather, I think the “mystery” has to do with Ortiz’s uncommon and very early understanding of the agency of objects. The power of fascination of the book may very well rest on the fact that, ultimately, we too are objects, as are the books we write. Unlike philosophy, literature can be part and parcel to the objective world. Works like Counterpoint and Deep Foods reveal agency as something that is social, but also collective; not just human, but hybrid. Ortiz captures this most eloquently when he compares the dissemination of tobacco with that of syphilis, which is one short step away from understanding migration and human commerce as phenomena that are biological, as they are social.⁸¹ Malinowski too, in his prologue, speaks of “the profound influence exerted by sugar on the civilization of Cuba.”⁸² The agency of nonhumans has been there all along, inviting us to rethink historical agency altogether—a goal that the seamless fabric of metaphor and narrative is most fit to carry out.

Indeed, because literature is so powerful at revealing the agency of nonhumans, Bennett draws many meaningful examples from poems and short stories.⁸³ These include Kafka’s character Odradek, from “The Cares of a Family Man”—a talking spool for thread—and a striking epigraph by Henry David Thoreau: “Go not to the object; let it come to you.”⁸⁴ One wishes Bennett were familiar with the work of Ortiz and Ponte when she posits, “Maybe it is worth running the risks associated with anthropomorphizing (superstition, the divinization of nature, romanticism) because it, oddly enough, works against anthropocentrism; a chord is struck between person and thing, and I am no longer above or outside a nonhuman ‘environment.’”⁸⁵ From Doña Azúcar to the aliñado, the protagonists of the Cubans’ imagination fit that description—including, of course, the “risks.” It is in light of those potential pitfalls that nuanced, theoretically rich close reading gains all the more relevance.

But politics is where I part ways with Bennett, and certainly with Latour. Without turning her back on human exploitation, Bennett imagines a politics that does not deny vitality to nonhuman actants. I couldn’t agree more. But out of necessity, she does this by turning her back on the human-centered methods of historical materialism: demystification, suspicion, analysis of the superstructure, and so forth. This was an important step to take in the history of materialist thought, for it greatly expands its methodological repertoire and its objects of study, and Bennett, a distinguished political theorist, does so with great success. But I think we are already in a different critical moment, when the cross-fertilization of materialisms is in order. Politics may not begin or end with human affairs, but that is no reason to neglect a tradition that, with some reformulation, can elucidate key aspects of the nature-culture continuum. As I will show, Latin American literature offers a natural bridge between these two lines of inquiry and foregrounds the viability of their articulation.

This also means that I cannot subscribe to Latour’s method through and through. A minimal way of expressing my disagreement would be to say that I don’t find his ideas of Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) to be fully transferable from their home in science and technology studies to the field of literary studies. For, indeed, what is literature within radical monism? One could describe how the pulp of trees becomes paper and how synthetic thread binds the cover of a book. But the moment words are printed on the page and there is a reader to interpret them, it is as if an entirely new, preeminently human realm has begun: the text is not the book. As ANT would have it, describing is transforming: because facts are not separated from values, the role of the critic is to tell the world as it is—in other words, to show how human and nonhuman actors form networks of distributed agency that define the course of events. I can envisage a reformed, invigorated practice of reception theory that engaged the circulation of books and other media in their materiality, and I am aware that cognitive approaches to literature may hold the promise of describing networks all the way from the black and white stimuli on a page to the critique of bourgeois life in Madame Bovary.86 These are just different tracks: I am interested in a manner of interpretation that, although it has inspired Bennett and others, receives from their methodologies little in return.

A different, more emphatic way of drawing the line would be to affirm the pertinence of ideology critique, despite Latour’s insistence that the fall of the Berlin wall and the miraculous year 1989 showed that both socialism and naturalism were utter failures. This strikes me as a hyperbolic, unnecessarily polemical position meant to scandalize his native, left-leaning Parisian intellectual milieu: the “We have never been modern” side of his argument is more amenable than the implied “We have never been socialist”—or capitalist, for that matter: Why bother discussing commodification and the exploitation of surplus labor, those entelechies, if a perspicuous narrative of networks would account for them anyway? “Ideology” is certain to inform literary works, however much it may serve as a catchall phrase for myriads of collective configurations. That does not make it a less valid category, nor does it justify dropping it from the vocabulary of critical intervention. Latour claims that socialism, which he unfairly identifies with Soviet-style communism, is predicated on the separation of nature and culture. This may be so, but it is also true that his notion of “amodernity” depends on the radical separation of moderns and premoderns. But what about Latin America, which formulated socialist ideals in different ways than the North? And what of its ways of thinking, which are not identical with those of a fully modern society but are also not premodern? These questions need to be addressed by not one but by several studies. The present one, as already mentioned, focuses on the contemporary, with some discussion of select, elucidating past moments.

Transcultural materialism is also a historicism. In the terms above, it is more explanatory than deterministic, although it does connect some present-day effects to their past causes (see the discussion on primitive accumulation in chapter 2). It’s inclusive, precluding only recalcitrant idealism—the kind that confounds the autonomy of art with a critical pass to avoid the world entirely. One key difference with historical materialism is the scope of what counts as material: the nonhuman agents that Marx and Engels entertained were almost always, in one way or another, connected to the economy. Their approach is economicist. Nonhuman agency is expressed, primarily, through the commodity form. As the chapters of this book make clear, the connection of objects with human labor is only one aspect of their agency. Another key difference has to do with the primary domain of critique. Historical materialism was systematic and comprehensive, covering, in Marx and Engels’s parlance, everything from base to superstructure. At the peak of its scientistic ambitions, whether by authorial intent or Party ventriloquizing, it was a total theory of reality.

By contrast, the domain of transcultural materialism is narrower and its ambitions more modest. Its main object of study is works of literature and culture, themselves tributary to broader natural-cultural practices. A key task is explicating ideological underpinnings that go beyond (not past) class struggle into competing visions of nature, and of human labor within it. I don’t regard this as an end in itself, for that would amount to instrumentalizing literature. Much as understanding art entails having at least some knowledge about the society that makes it meaningful (where does a text end and its context begin?), an appreciation of its natural-cultural presuppositions, whether explicitly or implicitly thematized, provides a fuller understanding. Immanent reading and cultural critique, in the work of late-twentieth-century thinkers from various political persuasions—Adorno, the late Derrida, and González Retamar, to name a few—were about as compatible as walking and chewing gum at the same time. The reason for this is that works of art and literature are informed by the same forces that inform society at large. Meanwhile, new materialism, and anthropodecentric thought more broadly, show that “society” is not the whole picture. Industrialization may be a function of social relations—the proletarization of the many, the capitalization of the few—but minerals, machines, farm animals, and water sources, to name merely some nonhuman actors, play their part too.

In slogan form, to Jameson’s “always historicize” I add: “with things.”87 A counterpoint with the nonhuman enables new modes of analysis. Animals are not my focus, as they deserve separate studies. Neither do I venture much into disciplinary history, other than to provide a backdrop to my claims—engaging briefly, for example, with Sidney Mintz’s history of sugar, John Tully’s history of rubber, and so on. The closest I come to the discipline is to draw on the work of Hayden White, whose own standing within the discipline, it seems to this outsider, is that of “the great unread”: an increasingly marginal classic. (I hope to be wrong on this account.) I similarly only approximate disciplinary anthropology, enlightening conversations on tobacco with Matthew Kohrman and on earth-beings with Marisol de la Cadena notwithstanding, by way of Arjun Appadurai’s disciplinarily prosperous notion of “the social life of things.”⁸⁸ My historicizing with things, then, is foremost about Latin American and World Literary historiography. However, I do find that common structures lie at the center of a Venn diagram of partially overlapping humanities disciplines, notably literature, history, and anthropology. White addressed this with his typologies of emplotment, argumentation, and ideology. His fundamental discovery was that historians and others are affected by several of the same literary structures as anyone who tries to tell a story. Inasmuch as that is the case, and taking his often-criticized taxonomical tropology with a grain of salt, there is a common core in this book that will be of interest across disciplinary divides.⁸⁹ At the very least, Things with a History counters a prevailing anthropocentric thrust in literary studies. This impulse has deeper roots: we often tell stories to distinguish ourselves from nature. “We” here means the West, and criollo Latin America within it: look no further than the book of Genesis. But counterstories abound; language resists. The method and praxis of this book revolve around potentiating these other forces. This is beneficial across the board, for literature, pharmaceutically, can be a powerful agent in reinforcing the preeminence of the human and in interrogating it. The goal of this book will be achieved if it teaches how to preserve and think through the tension between words and things, thus understood.

This book is organized around specific material configurations.⁹⁰ In turn, the corpus that results from reading certain works together—belonging to material entanglements rather than to national concerns or aesthetic movements—will prove fruitful to the task of reimagining the contemporary. There are two sections in this book, “Part 1: Objects” and “Part 2: Assemblages.” The first deals with basic elements (raw material, soil and particles, corpses) that explicate and, in some ways, constitute, from the bottom up, the more complex phenomena in the second (hyperfetishism, digital accumulation). While individual chapters may be of interest to different kinds of readers, the book is best read as a progression.

“Part 1: Objects” has three chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on so-called raw materials, such as rubber. Rubber mediates between nature and culture, the jungle and the factory. It led to the deforestation of vast stretches of the Amazonian basin, the subjugation of surviving Tupí-Guaraní indigenous peoples, a short-lived economic boom, and remarkable works of art. The chapter focuses on Muñecas (2008), by the Argentine writer Ariel Magnus, which tells the story of an immigrant librarian who lives alone with his silicone sex dolls. I situate the novel within its literary “rubber precedents,” notably two Colombian novels, José Eustasio Rivera’s classic La vorágine (1924; trans. The Vortex, 1935) and César Uribe Piedrahita’s lesser-known Toá (1933). This constellation reflects a desire for absolute control that determines human relationships with rubber. While other works vociferously denounce the atrocities of extraction, Magnus incorporates their critique in subtler ways, ultimately leading us to rethink the role of “raw” material in historical materialism. Taking advantage of the fact that the natural rubber boom was relatively short-lived, and its cultural representation consistently comprises a smaller corpus, my goal in this chapter is to further define a model for the study of more extended commodities and their associated cultural production. Rather than approaching this period as an exceptional time, as it is often construed, I show how it is a cultural formation that participates in the broader trends of the evolution of materiality and extractivism in the region.

The second chapter goes one step further by considering works that, beyond exposing the notion of “raw” material, thematize the politics of such basic nonhumans as rocks and particles. Rather than thematization per se, which a variety of genre and media can offer, the chapter focuses on the possibilities of literary form when confronted with the ungraspable vastness of the earth or the unfathomable smallness of the subatomic. Such are the unlikely topics of the Bolivian Blanca Wiethüchter’s novel El jardín de Nora (1998), in which the earth lays waste to a garden, and the Argentine César Aira’s novella El té de Dios (2010), in which a subatomic particle wreaks chaos in the universe. (Neither of these would qualify as genre fiction.) I examine both works in detail, as well as in conversation with Tim Morton’s notion of “hyperobjects,” which would accurately describe the kind of nonhumans their plotlines depict but would willfully ignore their political dimension. My sociohistorically situated reading exploits formal resources in Wiethüchter and Aira to reveal what’s at stake in their stories: unevenness on a global scale. Rocks and atoms may have no politics, but the quests for minerals for the digital age in the Andes and for the basic structure of reality in the Swiss Alps do. Throughout the chapter, I ask the question of how literature can contribute to our understanding of geological and atomic things, which transcend a human scale and life span, while at the same time remaining committed to pressing concerns.

“Part 2: Assemblages” considers the interaction of humans and nonhumans at a higher, more complex level of organization. It has two chapters. Chapter 4 interrogates the notion of commodity fetishism, as developed by Marx, from the vantage point of transcultural materialism. My revisionist reading complicates the notion that a counternarrative may reveal the social relations behind the fascination toward commodities. Instead, I characterize a mode of storytelling I call “hyperfetishist.” Hyperfetishism exacerbates social tension, seeking to disturb our relationship with the object rather than to demystify it. The advantages of this mode are manifold, for it affirms the reality of fetishism and recognizes its connection to material properties instead of searching for a supposedly hidden truth. I analyze works that hyperfetishize: the Colombian José Asunción Silva’s 1925 posthumous fin de siècle novel De sobremesa (published in translation as After-Dinner Conversation, 2010); his countryman Fernando Vallejo’s works, which build a natural bridge between the nineteenth century and the present, notably his fictionalized biography of Silva, Almas en pena, chapolas negras (1995), and his more recent novel Casablanca la bella (2014); the Mexican Margo Glantz’s mordant Historia de una mujer que caminó por la vida con zapatos de diseñador (2005); and, finally, her countrywoman Daniela Rossell’s photographic essay Ricas y famosas (2002). From the softness of shoes to the glow of faux gold, from unfashionable toilets to crumbling houses, hyperfetishism makes an important contribution to the critique of emerging material paradigms.

Drawing inspiration from Benjamin’s discussion of motifs in Baudelaire as a key to understanding the zeitgeist of the mid-nineteenth century, chapter 5 carries out a similar operation with regard to a constellation of Latin American creators and the early twenty-first century. I trace a red thread through sources that unmask ideologies of the digital: the cellphone as agent of alienation in the Mexican-American corrido band Los Tigres del Norte, the personal computer as broker (and breaker) of love in the work of Chilean novelist Alejandro Zambra, and dystopias of cloud computing as political fables in that of his countryman, genre author Jorge Baradit. Throughout the chapter, I revisit Bennett’s reflections on the agency of objects and Jonathan Crary’s coinage of the “24/7” mode of experience to show how such works deflate some of the myths associated with “digital culture.” As I demonstrate, the semiperipheral condition of Latin America, a late adopter of technologies, allows the region’s writers to incisively probe ideologies of the digital. This is most notably the case of an important, undertheorized strand in contemporary culture: celebratory, acritical techno-utopianism. Much in the way that digital gadgets themselves build upon simpler artifacts and labor relations, albeit under a different political sign, the chapter develops earlier claims about extractivism and commodity fetishism to further the case of art versus tech.

The book’s general conclusion takes stock of the ways of representing the contemporary material turn in recent Latin American culture. These include reappropriations of raw stuff, hyperfetishism, digital ideology critique, object-centered literary historiography, and geologism. I proceed to show how, taken together, these strands challenge different aspects of a worldwide economic system, from extraction to consumption, revealing the continuities between nonhuman and human agents, including narrative. I subsume those operations under the rubric of “estranged extractivism,” namely, an actualized form of estrangement that sets in creative tension humanist ideals with a renewed appreciation of our inorganic lives, always already embedded in biological and economical transaction. Bringing such externalities into narrative has an eye-opening effect. Ditto for telling “stories” and “histories” —the same term in Romance languages—of objects, and finding our own place among them. With a brief excursus into the musings on rubber boots in Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård, I show how the present volume’s critique of neo-extractivism originates in Latin America but has World Literary implication. Beyond appreciating the affinities between bones and rocks, or blood and other life-sustaining fluids (as the work of Manuel DeLanda and other flat ontologists would do), my readings suggest a call to action, an engaged literary politics of the inorganic at a global scale.91 I also draw inferences on how the overarching narrative of this book provides a model to invigorate traditional ideology and cultural critique with the powerful insights of new materialism.

Contemporary Latin American culture has much to offer to the mutual enrichment of critique and new materialism. Tellingly, at roughly the same time that Latour was publishing a study around the premise that “we” have never been modern, Argentine anthropologist Néstor García Canclini was publishing another around the premise that Latin Americans deploy strategies to enter and leave modernity.92 Both works are post-1989 reactions, shake-offs of Cold War schemata. For the French thinker, dismantling modernity was an arduous task; for the Argentine, less so. Indeed, Latin America’s experience with many of the techno-social underpinnings of that thing we call “modernity” offer a unique vantage point. The region has never taken it for granted or laid claim to its “we”—how could it? Interestingly, there was a fork in the road: García Canclini developed hybridity in a cultural sense, while Latour did so in a natural-cultural one. We are now at a time when critical agendas may again overlap. And yet the natural world is preeminent in a region that, by comparison, displays a less manicured, human-designed environment than Latour’s North Atlantic. Contemporary Latin America produces what I have characterized as a recombined, transcultural materialism. It is a form of storytelling that elucidates critical concepts, particularly the continuity of nature and culture across human and nonhuman history. It is not subservient to any theory, metropolitan or otherwise, but a self-sustaining speculative exercise. One may cite new materialist thinking à la Latour or Bennett to footnote it—not the other way around.

Recall how we began the twentieth century trading in heavy bunches, bushels, balls, and heaps. We now exchange those very same things, but also bits, bytes, software, and intellectual property. As before, narrative can reveal the material element in culture, economically and otherwise—even botanically. The tale of two materialisms might end happily, for you can have them both, at least, in literature.

But what if it doesn’t end happily? The consequences of ignoring the ties between economic and ecological systems are plain to see. As if ignoring the plights of nature and labor were not risky enough, there is also a more basic epistemological consequence: doing so paints an erroneous picture of the world. It posits two different, parallel orders—one of things and one of men—and leads to believing that solving a problem in one order has nothing to do with solving, or creating, a problem in the other. The modest but not quite negligible contribution of literary scholars has to do with a critical term mentioned above: World Literature. If we are to imagine a world that makes sense of World Literature, and vice versa, it might be beneficial to do so through the lens of transcultural materialism. “Art exists,” as Viktor Shklovsky famously put it in “Art as Device,” “to make the stone stony”; the Russian formalist’s foe was habitualization and its speedy perception, which “devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.”⁹³ His were the early days of Soviet industrialist zeal, which he both echoes and fears: my Slavicist colleagues report that the word “device” in the title of his essay connotes machinery, such as a tractor.⁹⁴ And yet the slowing down he advocates for, which he casts as art’s raison d’être, is nothing other than resisting the drudgery of Taylorism.

We are quite a way from the ¼-horsepower engine of Cuban communism, but there are family resemblances. Shklovsky was a White Russian turned Red and Marré a lifelong Party member; Ponte is a disenchanted son of a revolution. If World Literature scholars were to weave their stories together, they could show how their world was not just made of ideology but of things with a history. Shklovsky falls back on Cartesianism when he claims, a few lines below the passage cited, that “Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.”95 However, it is objects that brought about his estrangement [остранение], objects reconsidered and written into poems, but never quite abandoned. They are so important, in fact, that he avoids them, Scylla in a sea where the reduction of literature to algebra is Charybdis. Neither object nor symbol, literary language had to chart its way for formalism. The object is important, Ponte reminds us, when the object is food. But then food, and the hunger that drives us to it, model how we relate to all things. Shklovsky was a vitalist who, at least in the essay we more commonly associate with him, overlooked that sustenance is life itself.

Narrative has the power to counterfetishize commodities and historicize foods; more broadly, it can interrupt our unreflective ways of relating to objects. In the abandonment to the pleasures of literature there is a potential to repair the suture that Cartesianism has made in Western rationality. We know that we are objects ourselves; we too are matter. But the division between res cogitans and res extensa, our thinking selves and our materiality, is so entrenched that it is very difficult for us not to think in those terms. It’s easier to fantasize in a literary register that tobacco and sugar are sentient beings that condition our ways of living, or that the pineapple is a traveling queen. Metaphor, metonymy, allegory, and literary figures in general supplement what deduction and inference have difficulty grappling with. Under the spell of narrative, we may reassess our social and historical conjuncture and rethink our place within the material world entirely.