Introduction: A Tale of Two Materialisms
1. See Héctor Hoyos, Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
2. A related work that considers forms of cultural resistance to extractive capitalism is Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017). Unflinchingly, Gómez understands extractivism as theft, particularly against indigenous and Afro-descendent territories (xviii). With a “decolonial femme methodology” and an emphasis on activist art practices, the book aligns indigenous sovereignty with ecological preservation in the Yasuní region of Ecuador, the Bío Bío region of Chile, and the Cauca Valley in Colombia, among others.
3. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. Charles Kay Ogden (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1999), esp. 2.171–2.172 and 4.1212. For discussions of the distinction see Marie McGinn, “Saying and Showing and the Continuity of Wittgenstein’s Thought,” Harvard Review of Philosophy 9 (2001): 24–36; and Adrian W. Moore, “On Saying and Showing,” Philosophy 62 (1987): 473–97.
4. Similarly, Jennifer French thinks that ecological and radical thought should be reconciled, especially in the Latin American context. She also offers a convincing explanation as to why this synthesis has not yet taken hold: “What could be more ecological than dialectics, or more dialectical than ecology? The similarity of these two critical models is both obvious and all too often overlooked, perhaps because Marxism’s decline and environmentalism’s rise have been largely contemporaneous among progressive intellectuals in the United States and Latin America.” Jennifer L. French, Nature, Neo-Colonialism, and the Spanish American Regional Writers (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2005), 157.
5. In the words of one prominent critic: “The New Materialism emerged in part to replace a currently unfashionable historical materialism. Yet whole currents of it would seem to have no particular concern, as historical materialism does, with the destiny of men and women in an exploitative world.” Terry Eagleton, Materialism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2016), 17.
6. The defensive stance against worldlit comes across most vividly in Ignacio Sánchez Prado’s early edited collection, América Latina en la “literatura mundial” (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006). Note the scare quotes in the title. Sánchez Prado’s more recent Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2018) presents a Bourdieu-inspired account of Mexican literary exceptionalism vis-à-vis global trends. Mariano Siskind’s unsurpassed Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2014) is a de rigueur referent, while Gesine Müller’s co-edited collections provide states of the art—notably, the volume co-edited with Jorge Locane and Benjamin Loy, Re-Mapping World Literature: Writing, Book Markets and Epistemologies between Latin America and the Global South (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018). Another useful source is the special issue “Rethinking World Literature in Latin American and Spanish Contexts,” ed. Annalisa Mirizio and Marta Puxan-Oliva, Journal of World Literature 2, no. 1 (2017): 1–9.
7. See, for instance, John Beverley, Michael Aronna, and José Oviedo, eds., The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995).
8. Donna Haraway draws important terminological distinctions in “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6, no. 1 (2015): 159–65. In a 2017 blog post, Steve Mentz, a scholar of oceanic literature and eco-criticism, tallies close to twenty neologisms for the new era: see “The Neologismcene,” Arcade: Literature, the Humanities and the World (blog), https://arcade.stanford.edu/blogs/neologismcene.
9. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. and introd. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 257.
10. White ruminated on this idea throughout his scholarship, from his classic work The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973) to a late text that, via a reading of Saul Friedländer, develops the connection of metahistory and the Holocaust: White, “Historical Truth, Estrangement, and Disbelief,” in Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, ed. Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner, and Todd Presner (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016), 53–71.
11. See Ángel Rama, Transculturación narrativa en América Latina (Buenos Aires: Andariego, 1984); Bronislaw Malinowski, introduction to Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y azúcar: Advertencia de sus contrastes agrarios, económicos, históricos y sociales, su etnografía y su transculturación, by Fernando Ortiz, 2nd ed. (Havana: Universidad Central de las Villas, 1963), xi–xix. For a multidisciplinary approach to the legacy of Fernando Ortiz, see Mauricio A. Font and Alfonso W. Quiroz, eds., Cuban Counterpoints: The Legacy of Fernando Ortiz (Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2005). In the latter work, especially worthy of note is Jean Stubbs’ extrapolation of counterpoint to today’s transnational habano commerce. See “Tobacco in the Contrapunteo: Ortiz and the Havana Cigar,” in Cuban Counterpoints: The Legacy of Fernando Ortiz, ed. Mauricio A. Font and Alfonso W. Quiroz (Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2005), 105–23.
12. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 7.
13. Fernando Coronil, introduction to Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, by Fernando Ortiz, trans. Harriet de Onis (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), ix–lvi.
14. Ortiz worries that a certain enlightened worker is falling prey to the stultifying effects of radio. He refers to the fascinating practice of public reading in tabacaleras, which allowed workers to instruct themselves as they rolled cigars. Ortiz admires such “factory graduates”—the term is José Martí’s—for “the tobacco worker is a nonconformist who thinks and insists upon a new design for living [renuevo del modo de vivir].” Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar: Advertencia de sus contrastes agrarios, económicos, históricos y sociales, su etnografía y su transculturación, 2nd ed. (Havana: Universidad Central de las Villas, 1963), 92. Radio was part of a broader mechanization that led to the collapse of that mode of production and worker culture. For a contemporary play that depicts this shift in factories of Cuban émigrés in Florida, see Nilo Cruz’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Anna in the Tropics (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2003).
15. For an overview of the discussion on transculturación from 1940 onward, see Jossiana Arroyo-Martínez, “Transculturation, Syncretism, and Hybridity,” in Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought: Historical and Institutional Trajectories, ed. Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Ben Sifuentes Jáuregui (New York: Palgrave, 2016), 133–45.
16. Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, trans. Harriet de Onis (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 98.
17. See Revista Bimestre Cubana 45, no. 1 (1940). Ortiz was a liberal democrat who favored compromise throughout his life, including staying in Cuba after the 1959 revolution. It is reasonable to suppose that the progressive gesturing in Counterpoint harmonized with the ideals of the Castro regime. At the same time, its lightheartedness and subtlety did not quite make him a threat to Batista and his proxy rulers. For a fascinating account of the debates on the monoculture of sugar that frame the original publication in 1940, see Enrico Mario Santí, “Towards a Reading of Fernando Ortiz’s Cuban Counterpoint,” Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas 37, no. 1 (2004): 11–13.
18. This is a modified version of Coronil’s translation in his introduction to Cuban Counterpoint, xxvi. “En todo abrazo de culturas sucede lo que en la cópula genética de los individuos: la criatura siempre tiene algo de ambos progenitores, pero también siempre es distinta de cada uno de los dos.” Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano, 103.
19. For a recent discussion of the relations between realism and new materialism, see the book-length conversation between Manuel DeLanda and Graham Harman. The latter is of the opinion that “all coherent materialisms must be forms of realism”: “If human history ha[s] been so deeply affected by the material culture of weapons and battles, of vaccines and quarantines, of matter and energy flows in industry and trade, then a belief in a mind-independent world follow[s] logically.” Manuel DeLanda and Graham Harman, The Rise of Realism (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 3.
20. Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano, 183.
22. There is a notable gap between the roughly one-hundred-page title essay and the remaining two hundred pages of “annexes” (whose length varies by edition). Judging from the way the twelve annexes are cited throughout the essay, my sense is they should be read as elaborations on specific points, almost extended endnotes. On this point I disagree with Coronil, who thinks there is a “counterpoint” between the first essay and the remaining sections, as well as with Santí, who finds them “complementary.”
23. Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint, 43–46.
24. Gustavo Pérez Firmat, The Cuban Condition: Translation and Identity in Modern Cuban Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 24.
25. “La imagen del ajiaco criollo nos simboliza bien la formación del pueblo cubano. Sigamos la metáfora. Ante todo una cazuela abierta. Esta es Cuba, la isla, la olla puesta al fuego de los trópicos…junto con el fogaje del trópico para calentarlo, el agua de sus cielos para el caldo y el agua de sus mares para las salpicaduras del salero. Con todo ello se ha hecho nuestro nacional ajiaco.” Fernando Ortiz, “Los factores humanos de la cubanidad,” in Fernando Ortiz, ed. Julio Le Riverend (Havana: Unión de Escritores y Artistas, 1973), 155–56. Unless otherwise indicated, henceforth all translations from sources in languages other than English will be my own.
26. Absent from the English translation, the section on beets provides one of the book’s most interesting and contradictory moments. Beets in the tropics represent the worst of imperialism for Ortiz—although he does not use the term. Ortiz advocates for a certain rational economic order of “true universal exchange” (verdadero librecambio universal) where all the sugar of the world of the tropics is produced in the tropics (Contrapunteo cubano, 462). Contrast that free market stance with one of his most openly socialist statements, in the following page: “Hoy día, con azúcar de caña o con azúcar de remolacha, el problema va siendo igual. Una misma estructura económica, mecanizada, monetizada y deshumanizada, determina fenómenos análogos para las dos, en las llanuras frías como en las sabanas tropicales. En los campos remolacheros como en los azucareros es una misma la angustia. Las tierras que producen los azúcares no son de quienes las labran y los provechos se van lejos” (Contrapunteo cubano, 463). It belongs to a different study to elucidate the idiosyncratic blend of free enterprise and agrarian reform in these underexamined pages.
27. See Maurizia Boscagli, Stuff Theory: Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 14. Boscagli pursues a kindred goal to that of this book while focusing on a Euro-American corpus.
28. Coronil, introduction to Cuban Counterpoint, xxviii.
29. See Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), esp. chap. 2 (“The Agency of Assemblages”) and chap. 3 (“Edible Matter”).
30. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 1.
32. On Ponte’s oeuvre up to the mid-aughts, see the special issue on the author in the journal La Habana elegante 31 (2005). Carlos Alonso offers another comprehensive view in “La escritura fetichizadora de Antonio José Ponte,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 43, no. 1 (2009): 93–108.
33. Katherine Gordy, “Dollarization, Consumer Capitalism and Popular Response,” in Cuba Today: Continuity and Change since the ‘Período Especial’, ed. Mauricio A. Font, Scott Larsen, and Danielle Xuereb (New York: Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies, 2004), 23.
34. “Un castillo en España…” Antonio José Ponte, Las comidas profundas (Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2010), 9. Mark Schafer translated an excerpt of Ponte’s work under the title “Meaning to Eat,” BOMB Magazine 78 (January 1, 2002), http://bombmagazine.org/article/2448/meaning-to-eat.
35. “La piña es el león de las frutas y Carlos el león entre los monarcas.” Ponte, Las comidas profundas, 12.
36. Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres, trans. Wieland Hoband (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011–16).
37. “Se extendería entre ellos el océano que desconoce.” Ponte, Las comidas profundas, 14.
38. The definitive study of gastro-criticism in Cuban literature is Rita De Maeseneer’s Devorando a lo cubano: Una aproximación gastrocrítica a textos relacionados con el siglo XIX y el Período Especial (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2012). There she situates Ponte in the long history of the island’s writings about food, and also vis-à-vis contemporaries like Zoe Valdés and Daína Chaviano. See, especially, 240–63. For a study that examines the theme of lack across Ponte’s essayistic oeuvre as a recasting of origenismo, see Isabel Alvarez-Borland, “El silencio del hambre: Figuras de la carencia en Antonio José Ponte,” Hispania: A Journal Devoted to the Teaching of Spanish and Portuguese 90, no. 3 (2007): 443–52.
39. “El espíritu de las viejas comidas.” Ponte, Las comidas profundas, 16.
40. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” The National Interest 16 (1989): 4.
41. Octavio Paz, Pequeña crónica de grandes días (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1990), 25.
42. “La idea revolucionaria ha sufrido golpes mortales; lo más duros y devastadores no han sido los de sus adversarios sino los de los revolucionarios mismos: allí donde han conquistado el poder han amordazado a los pueblos.” Paz, Pequeña crónica, 98.
43. “[T]al como vemos el futuro, vemos en la realidad al Partido dirigiendo indefinidamente.
Ni Carlos Marx, ni Lenin, ni Engels dijeron qué día se acababa el partido, no lo dijeron; dijeron que un día desaparecería el Estado, algo más que el partido. Todavía, por lo que se ve, está lejos el momento en que se acabe el Estado, y tendremos que seguir lidiando con este aparato, qué vamos a hacer. Está por decidir teóricamente, y, sobre todo, más que en la teoría, en la práctica, qué día y en qué mundo el Estado haya desaparecido. Entonces, de verdad, ya no será como alguien que se monte en un cohete para ir a otro planeta, sino que habremos cambiado este planeta (APLAUSOS).
Carlos Marx dijo que ese día la humanidad habría salido de la prehistoria. Y lo creo, lo creí siempre y lo sigo creyendo, que el día que desaparezca la explotación del hombre por el hombre, el día que toda la humanidad se rija por principios socialistas o algo más, por principios comunistas, habría terminado la prehistoria.”
44. “Desde Carlos V hata [sic] Talleyrand, nombres de clásica robustez o de demoniaca exigencia, han proclamado la extensión de su dominios en el cielo del paladar.” José Lezama Lima, Imagen y posibilidad (Havana: Letras Cubanas, 1981), 135.
45. “Con el aprovechamiento cárnico de estas partes de la res pueden obtenerse subproductos que antes eran desechados por falta de experiencia. La iniciativa consiste en utilizar las orejas de las reses, la tráquea, esófago, bembo, recortes de tripas, cráneo y tendones para la fabricación de croquetas, morcillas caseras y hamburguesas.” Victor Medero et al., Con nuestros propios esfuerzos: Algunas experiencias para enfrentar el periodo especial en tiempo de paz (Havana: Verde Olivo, 1992), 50.
46. Quoted in William Luis, “Exhuming Lunes de Revolución,” CR: The New Centennial Review 2 no. 2 (2002): 261.
47. “Como enfermos que ni siquiera en habitaciones muy caldeadas consiguen olvidar el frío, tenemos instalada el hambre bien adentro.” Ponte, Las comidas profundas, 44–45.
48. “Chuletas de arroz con patatas fritas, calamares fritos sin calamares.” Ponte, 38.
49. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 4–7; italicized in the original.
51. “Madejas muy largas han tejido esa carne que puede desbaratarse con los dientes.” Ponte, Las comidas profundas, 21.
52. For reports on the actual archaeological excavations, see Santiago F. Silva García, Reynaldo Pérez Jiménez, Orlando Álvarez de la Paz, and Leonardo Rojas Pérez, “Algunas consideraciones sobre la dieta…(Tercera Parte),” Arqueología Centrosur de Cuba, September 1, 2007, http://cuba-arqueologia-centrosur.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html. See also Litzie Álvarez Santana, “Descubren en Abreus piezas arqueológicas,” Azurina: Portal de la cultura en Cienfuegos, December 2, 2009, http://www.azurina.cult.cu/index.php/noticias/1499-descubren-en-abreus-piezas-arqueologicas.
53. Ponte, Las comidas profundas, 23.
54. Walter Benjamin, “Excavation and Memory,” in Selected Writings, 2: 1927–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1999), 576.
55. “La costumbre de hacer comidas en palabras.” Ponte, Las comidas profundas, xx.
56. “Al comer, el cubano se incorpora el bosque.” Ponte, 24.
57. “No debía existir otra meta personal que la de convertirse en un grano del tazón donde vendrían a comer fuerzas mayores, sobrehumanas.” Ponte, 26.
58. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, xvii, 120–21.
59. I adopt Latour’s coinage of “politics of nature” with a grain of salt: “Conceptions of politics and conceptions of nature have always formed a pair as firmly united as the two seats on a seesaw, where one goes down when the other goes up, and vice versa. There has never been any other politics than the politics of nature, and there has never been any other nature than the nature of politics.” Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 28. The shortcomings of this important study include the following: an unwarranted faith in description; the omission of cultural difference for the sake of grounding a “single collective”; the assumption that Western science, oblivious of its colonial baggage, can function as lingua franca; and a hasty dissolution of the facts/values divide, particularly in spaces of former colonial domination.
60. “El mismo sobrecogimiento de quienes vieron por primera vez cómo un hombre fumaba hojas de tabaco.” Ponte, Las comidas profundas. 30.
61. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 3.
62. Ponte, Las comidas profundas, 30.
63. See Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, trans. Donna Freed (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1996). Thought-provokingly, the original title is a portmanteau with a quantifier: “Ein Hungerkünstler.” How many are there?
64. See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation),” trans. Ben Brewster, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: NYU Press 2001), 85–126.
65. Ponte, Las comidas profundas, 40, 57.
70. “Fermentaciones gemelas.” Ponte, 48.
71. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990), 916.
72. Lezama Lima, Imagen y posibilidad, 136.
73. “Aguarda por la piña.” Ponte, Las comidas profundas, 50–51.
Quien está sentado a la mesa de escribir y de comer recuerda las verdaderas comidas, lo que toman al final de sus vidas los grandes taoístas: un poco de rocío, un pedazo de nube, algún celaje, arcoiris. Lo que está al final del comer cubano, supone, el final de todas las metáforas de las comidas cubanas, es la sombra. Por eso Lezama Lima habrá escrito que el cubano al comer se incorpora el bosque. Un pueblo tan solar está obligado a comer oscuridades por naturaleza.
(Ponte, Las comidas profundas, 40)
I have consulted the valuable elucidation of the concept of oceanic feeling in William B. Parsons, The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
75. Ponte, Las comidas profundas, 54. In the first edition of Marré’s book, there are no punctuation marks through the traveling enumeration until the resounding, very local end: “Ese pan fue amasado con harina de la URSS El arroz vino de la China Las lentejas granaron en la vieja España Las verduras fueron cortadas en el valle de Güines…Nosotros tomamos agua de pozo La halamos con ¼ de caballo (con un motorcito de) El pozo es de roca serpentina azul y está al pie de un limonero.” Luis Marré, Habaneras y otras letras (Havana: Unión de Escritores y Artistas, 1970), 30. Compare with Marré, Obra escogida: Poesía y narrativa (Havana: Letras cubanas, 2012), 50–51. For the state-of-the-art collection on post-Soviet Cuba, see Jacqueline Loss and José Manuel Prieto González’s Caviar with Rum: Cuba-USSR and the Post-Soviet Experience (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Also of note is chap. 2 of Casamayor Cisneros’s monographic study of post-Soviet Cuban authors, Utopía, distopía e ingravidez: Reconfiguraciones cosmológicas en la narrativa postsoviética cubana (Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2013), 135–46. In that section, she focuses on Ponte’s interest in ruins and compares him to Senel Paz, Leonardo Padura, and others.
76. “Una mesa en la Habana…” Ponte, Las comidas profundas, 55 (suspension points in original).
77. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, §7.
78. There are limits to the transferability of Ortiz to contemporary critical discourse. His marriage metaphors can be sexist, and his racialization of sugar and tobacco racist. We read that brown sugar, that seductress, passes as white to “travel all over the world, reach all mouths, and bring a better price, climbing to the top of the social ladder” (Cuban Counterpoint, 7). Similarly, cigarettes are “amaricados” (prissy) when compared to virile cigars (9). As these examples suggest, Ortiz is a son of his time, despite the fundamentally progressive tenor of his intellectual pursuits.
79. Arturo Uslar Pietri, Nuevo mundo, mundo nuevo (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1998), 341.
80. Coronil, introduction to Cuban Counterpoint, xxvii. Coronil goes on to say, “By casting commodities as the main actors of his historical narrative, Ortiz at once displaces the conventional focus on human historical protagonists and revalorizes historical agency. Acting as both objects and subjects of history, commodities are shown to be not merely products of human activity, but active forces which constrain and empower it. Thus historical agency comes to include the generative conditions of agency itself” (xxix–xxx).
81. Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano, 305.
82. Malinowski, introduction to Contrapunteo cubano, 13.
83. With a strategic use of name-dropping, Bennett offers a succinct characterization of the two materialisms at stake: “I pursue a materialism in the tradition of Democritus-Epicurus-Spinoza-Diderot-Deleuze more than Hegel-Marx-Adorno. It is important to follow the trail of human power to expose social hegemonies (as historical materialists do). But my contention is that there is also public value in following the scent of a nonhuman, thingly power, the material agency of natural bodies and technological artifacts.” Bennett, Vibrant Matter, xiii. Although its origins go at least as far back as the Greeks, I have called the first option “new materialism,” following the capacious grouping of recent trends in Diana Coole and Samantha Frost’s edited collection, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010).
84. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, xx.
86. For a compelling deployment of this theoretical framework within popular culture, see Frederick Aldama’s Your Brain on Latino Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez, Cognitive Approaches to Literature and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009).
87. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 9.
88. See Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
89. Robert Doran notes, in a metahistorical essay that historicizes metahistory itself, that although “White’s tropological grid appeared at first glance to be rigid and deterministic,” this structure responds to the necessity of choice taught by Sartrean existentialism. Condemned to be free, the literary historiographical model put forward by the present volume would forcibly, according to White’s schema, embrace internal contradiction. The “trope” that it more closely aligns with is synecdoche, for it builds on a part—human-nonhuman relations in fiction—to understand the whole; the “mode” would be integrative; and the “emplotment” would be comedic, as befits the playful legacy of Fernando Ortiz. But then the ideology that goes with these traits would be “conservative,” rather than “radical,” which is closer to my explicit orientation. At the same time, several portions of this volume would naturally map onto a metonymic trope, reductionist mode, and tragic emplotment—staples of Marxism. I make a note of this unresolved, if productive, tension. See Robert Doran, “Choosing the Past: Hayden White and the Philosophy of History,” in Philosophy of History After Hayden White, ed. Robert Doran (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 19.
90. Ericka Beckman makes a kindred argument in Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). From a Foucaultian-Marxist perspective, she concentrates on commodities qua commodities—that is, as export products. This allows her to characterize various works of literature, some of which I also study, as “capital fictions.” While I agree with the overall thrust of Beckman’s volume, my footing in a different materialist tradition leads me to regard such economic narratives as a moment within a broader material transformation. Consequently, my reading of primary materials does not merely highlight their thematization of economic conditions but regards texts as sites for a renegotiation of human-nonhuman relations.
91. See Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London: Continuum, 2006).
92. Néstor García Canclini, Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1989). Available in English translation as Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans. Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. Lopez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
93. Viktor Shklovsky, “From ‘Art as Technique’ 1917,” in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, ed. Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 219.
94. Nariman Skakov and Alice E. M. Underwood have been my interlocutors on this issue. Aleksei Gastev (1882–1939) imported Ford’s methods to the USSR and also wrote poems. He died in the purges.
95. Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” 219; italicized in the original.
1. Raw Stuff Disavowed
1. Bruno Latour, “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik—or How to Make Things Public,” in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 14–44; Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, 4th ed. (New York: Harper Collins, 2009). An enthusiastic, if heterodox, reading of these sources inspires this chapter, particularly the shift described by Latour and the eye-opening notion of “speciesism” first formulated by Singer.
2. For an English-language overview of those debates, I consulted Peter Steiner, Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984).
3. See Ángel Rama, Transculturación narrativa en América Latina (Buenos Aires: Andariego, 1984).
4. José Eustasio Rivera, La Vorágine, ed. Flor María Rodríguez-Arenas (Doral, Fl.: Stockcero, 2013), 174. Until otherwise noted, English translations are taken from The Vortex; La vorágine, trans. Earle K. James (New York: Putnam, 1935).
5. Tulio Halperín Donghi, The Contemporary History of Latin America, ed. and trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 176–77.
6. Rivera, The Vortex, 249. “La secreta voz de las cosas le llenó su alma.” Rivera, La Vorágine, 181.
7. Scott DeVries, “Swallowed: Political Ecology and Environmentalism in the Spanish American novela de la selva,” Hispania: A Journal Devoted to the Teaching of Spanish and Portuguese 93, no. 4 (2010): 539.
8. Jennifer L. French, Nature, Neo-Colonialism, and the Spanish American Regional Writers (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College Press, 2005), 112–54.
9. Quoted in Luis Carlos Herrera Molina, S.J., introduction to La Vorágine, in José Eustasio Rivera: Obra literaria, ed. Luis Carlos Herrera Molina, S.J. (Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2009), 270.
10. William Bull, “Nature and Anthropomorphism in La Vorágine,” Romanic Review 39, no. 4 (1948): 315–18.
11. David Viñas, “ ‘La Vorágine’: Crisis, populismo y mirada,” Hispamérica 3, no. 8 (1974): 18.
12. Rivera, The Vortex, 158.
Aquella tarde rendí mi ánimo a la tristeza y una emoción romántica me sorprendió con vagas caricias. ¿Por qué viviría siempre solo en el arte y en el amor? y pensaba con dolorida inconformidad: ‘¡Si tuviera ahora a quién ofrecerle este armiñado ramillete de plumajes, que parecen espigas blancas! ¡Si alguien quisiera abanicarse con este alón de codúa marina, donde va prisionero el iris! ¡Si hubiera hallado con quién contemplar el garcero nítido, primavera de aves y colores! Con humillada pena advertí luego que en el velo de mi ilusión se embozaba Alicia, y procuré manchar con realismo crudo el pensamiento donde la intrusa resurgía.
(Rivera, La Vorágine, 98–99)
13. Sharon Magnarelli, “La mujer y la naturaleza,” in La vorágine: A imagen y semejanza del hombre, ed. Sharon Magnarelli and Monserrat Ordóñez (Bogotá: Alianza Editorial Colombiana, 1987), 335–52; and Monserrat Ordóñez, “Nota preliminar,” in La vorágine: A imagen y semejanza del hombre, ed. Sharon Magnarelli and Monserrat Ordóñez (Bogotá: Alianza Editorial Colombiana, 1987), 13–18. See also Sharon Magnarelli, The Lost Rib: Female Characters in the Spanish-American Novel (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1985), 38–58.
14. Rivera, La Vorágine, 238.
15. Ericka Beckman, Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 158–88.
16. Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (New York: Random House, 2001), xvii–xix.
17. Rivera, La Vorágine, 118.
18. Rivera, The Vortex, 167. The distinguished historian John Charles Chasteen produced a scintillating new translation of La vorágine in 2018, a whopping sixty years after the standard translation. His take on the passage tips the balance of violence and beauty in favor of the latter: “underneath the swaying iris with petals the color of Mapiripana’s butterfly.” José Eustasio Rivera, The Vortex: A Novel, trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018), 110. However, I shall nonetheless stay with James’s translation—for its historical value, and also because the Chasteen edition came out while this book was already in production.
19. Seymour Menton, “La vorágine: Circling the Triangle,” Hispania 59, no. 3 (1976): 434.
20. Rubén Darío, “Filosofía,” in Obras completas, ed. Julio Ortega (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2007), 286. For a kindred depiction of butterflies in modernismo, look no further than José A. Silva’s eponymous “Mariposas”: “Parecen nácares / O pedazos de cielo, / Cielos de tarde, / O brillos opalinos / De alas suaves.” Obra completa (Caracas: Ayacucho, 1977), 25.
21. Rivera, La Vorágine, 231.
22. Rivera, The Vortex, 48.
23. Rivera, The Vortex, 128; modified translation.
24. César Uribe Piedrahita, Toá: Narraciones de caucherías (Buenos Aires, México: Espasa-Calpe, 1942).
25. See Kalman Mezey, César Uribe Piedrahita, J. Pataki, and J. Huertas-Lozano, “Niaara; A Digitalis-Like Colombian Arrow Poison,” Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics 93, no. 2 (June 1948): 223–29.
26. “Como alguien podría coleccionar caballos, o autos. O sea los tengo en el establo o en el [garaje] pero también…” Ariel Magnus, Muñecas (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2008), 90.
27. Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York: Harper Collins, 2007).
28. Magnus tackles the topic of extermination and its aftermath more straightforwardly, and in a nonfiction register, in La abuela (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2006). There, Magnus recounts his travels and conversations with his Jewish grandmother, an extermination camp survivor who fled to Brazil and later Argentina, while always maintaining a German identity in national terms. Magnus (b. 1975) himself would migrate to Germany and study in Heidelberg. He is interviewed in Der Spiegel: “Argentinischer Autor Magnus: ‘Alle Wollen, Dass Du Nicht Deutscher Bist,’” interview by Stefan Kuzmany, Spiegel Online, October 8, 2010, http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/literatur/argentinischer-autor-magnus-alle-wollen-dass-du-nicht-deutscher-bist-a-721615.html.
29. Walter E. Hardenburg, The Putumayo, The Devil’s Paradise; Travels in the Peruvian Amazon Region and an Account of the Atrocities Committed Upon the Indians Therein, ed. C. Reginald Enock (London: Fisher Unwin, 1912), 25. In his preface, C. Reginald Enock, the book’s editor, invokes the Black Legend by way of explanation of the atrocities committed. His emphasis in salvaging the honor of his countrymen is conspicuous, given that London’s stock exchange funded the Arana brothers:
The sinister occurrences on the Putumayo are, to some extent, the result of a sinister human element—the Spanish and Portuguese character. The remarkable trait of callousness to human suffering which the Iberian people of Portugal and Spain—themselves a mixture of Moor, Goth, Semite, Vandal, and other peoples—introduced into the Latin American race is here shown in its intensity, and is augmented by a further Spanish quality. The Spaniard often regards the Indians as animals. Other European people may have abused the Indians of America, but none have that peculiar Spanish attitude towards them of frankly considering them as non-human…There is yet a further trait of the Latin American which to the Anglo-Saxon mind is almost inexplicable. This is the pleasure in the torture of the Indian as a diversion, not merely as a vengeance or ‘punishment.’ As has been shown on the Putumayo, and as happened on other occasions elsewhere, the Indians have been abused, tortured, and killed por motivos frívolos—that is to say, for merely frivolous reasons, or for diversion.
(Hardenburg, The Putumayo, 38)
“Anglo-Saxon” plantations in North America and the atrocities committed thereon, rendered into fiction in a work as important as Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), would be a good point of comparison.
30. Renowned carioca writer Euclides da Cunha’s 1909 collection of literary essays, À Margem da História, resulted, as with Rivera and Uribe Piedrahita, from a government commission to explore the recesses of the motherland. The title plays on marginal regions, but also on the place of Brazil itself in history, “a vast expanse rather than a country.” Da Cunha has words of qualified praise for seringueiros, the relatively less exploitative Brazilian counterparts to Peruvian and Colombian caucheros. See Rex Nielson, “Amazonian El Dorados and the Nation: Euclides da Cunha’s À Margem da História and José Eustasio Rivera’s La Vorágine,” Ometeca, no. 16 (2011): 16–31.
31. John Tully, The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 190–93.
32. “La muñeca que ve ahí, por ejemplo, respira, le late el corazón, se le calienta el cuerpo, menstrúa cada 28 días. Y es un modelo relativamente viejo, lo compré hace un año. Las nuevas hablan y traen cámaras de video en los ojos.” Magnus, Muñecas, 89.
33. “Más alemán que los alemanes.” Magnus, 102.
34. “Me la meta como se la mete a Lais…Su verga de látex en mi agujero de silicona.” Magnus, 114.
35. “Eso de que las mujeres se implanten silicona por todos lados no les vendrá de las muñecas.” Magnus, 115.
36. Mariano García, Degeneraciones textuales: Los géneros en la obra de César Aira (Rosario, Argentina: Viterbo, 2006), 142.
37. Magnus, Muñecas, 32–33.
38. “Una fábula moderna,” “de esas que relegan la moraleja a la creatividad ética de sus oyentes.” Magnus, Muñecas, 32.
39. A super artist meets a super critic in Mieke Bal’s outstanding Of What One Cannot Speak (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
40. Nunca termino de aprehender cabalmente qué es lo que se espera que uno espere con tanta impaciencia.
–Al principio hay un cadáver y al final encuentran al asesino—razoné en voz alta.—Pero para mí el cadáver es el del suspenso y el asesino es el guionista, en el peor de los casos con la complicidad del director y los actores.
–En cambio en las películas de amor—continuó Selin con mi razonamiento como si fuera ella quien lo venía exponiendo-, desde el principio uno quiere que se besen y sabe que se van a besar y así y todo uno no puede despegarse del televisor hasta que finalmente se besan; eso es lo que yo llamo suspenso.
(Magnus, Muñecas, 33)
41. See Ariel Magnus, Un chino en bicicleta (Buenos Aires: Interzona, 2007).
42. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981).
43. See Héctor Hoyos, Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 33–64.
44. “La vida es una fiesta a la que uno está invitado y va y no hay nadie.” Magnus, Muñecas, 92.
45. “De pronto el cuarto parece trinchera barrida por los faros del enemigo. ¿Estaremos debajo del nivel del mar?” Magnus, 104.
47. Hayden White, “Historical Truth, Estrangement, and Disbelief,” in Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, ed. by Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner, and Todd Presner (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016), 55.
48. Hayden White, “The Modernist Event,” in Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 66–86.
49. “Testigo de una tragedia.” Magnus, Muñecas, 43; “El único sobreviviente de una tragedia personal que de otra forma seguiría ocurriendo en el recuerdo de Selin, invisible para el resto y con el correr del tiempo también para ella.” Magnus, 47.
50. For a thorough discussion of Levi’s metalinguistic reflections on the representability of the Holocaust, see Michael Tager, “Primo Levi and the Language of Witness,” Criticism 35, no. 2 (1993): 265–88.
51. See Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
52. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin, 1977), 107. See the discussion of Arendt in LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 127.
53. “Me pregunto si esto de que las mujeres se implanten siliconas por todos lados no les vendrá de las muñecas. La naturaleza imita al arte, Lais. Dame tu mano. Primero el arte a la naturaleza y después al revés. Así. Y cuando te puedas embarazar, de nuevo al revés. Ida yvuelta idayvuelta idayvueltaid.” Magnus, Muñecas, 115.
54. The first episode of the Huffington Post’s “Love + Sex” podcast discusses the future of sexual androids; reportedly, mermen are in the works. See Carina Kolodny, “Are You Ready to Have Sex with Robots?,” The Huffington Post, January 29, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/29/future-of-sex-podcast_n_6569838.html. For a state-of-the-discipline exploration of representations of digital technology in Latin America, and a rich analysis of their potential for thinking about human-nonhuman desire, see Anna Castillo, “Plastic Companions: Posthuman Intimacy in Twenty-First-Century Latin America” (PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 2017). Castillo considers other contemporary narratives of sex dolls, including João Paulo Cuenca’s O único final feliz para uma estória de amor é um acidente (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2010).
55. See Catherine Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
56. “Igual aquí en Alemania también estamos muy avanzados, no se crea.” Magnus, Muñecas, 60.
57. Fernando Coronil, “Challenging Colonial Histories: Cuban Counterpoint/Ortiz’s Counterfetishism,” in Critical Theory, Cultural Politics and Latin American Narrative, ed. Steven M. Bell, Albert H. LeMay, and Leonard Orr (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 61–80.
58. “Algo en la pureza del aire y en la quietud sobreexcitada del mobiliario.” Magnus has the librarian contemplate the empty library in the hours before the books are “manoseados.” Magnus, Muñecas, 22.
59. Pablo Neruda, “The United Fruit Co.,” in Canto general, trans. Jack Schmitt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 179.
60. One point of reference would be the successful “Object Lessons” series by Bloomsbury Press, which to date has featured titles on drones, golf balls, and driver’s licenses, among other subjects. Upon lecturing at Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Jeffrey Cedeño directed me to kindred work by Erna von der Walde, “Cien años de soledad, historia en fábula,” Cuadernos de Literatura 18, no. 36 (2014): 109–14. Von der Walde shares my interest in Coronil and Ortiz, but aligns more closely with Beckman’s approach, circumscribed to the Colombian context: “Podría organizarse una historia de la narrativa colombiana a partir de las formas en que se representan las relaciones sociales que se han estructurado alrededor de los diferentes proyectos de exportación de mercancías.” Von der Walde, 110. Interestingly, she posits The Vortex as an antipode to One Hundred Years of Solitude.
61. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990), 284–85.
62. Marx, 289; translation modified.
2. Of Rocks and Particles
1. Conquista del desierto was part of a repopulation scheme by obliteration of original peoples, construed as nonsubjects in much the same way as the territory itself was understood. See Tulio Halperín Donghi, Una nación para el desierto argentino (Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1982).
2. “Para efectos de la protección y tutela de sus derechos, la Madre Tierra adopta el carácter de sujeto colectivo de interés público.” Constitución política del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia, article 5.
3. “El sistema viviente dinámico conformado por la comunidad indivisible de todos los sistemas de vida y los seres vivos, interrelacionados, interdependientes y complementarios, que comparten un destino común.” Constitución política del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia, article 3.
4. “La Madre Tierra es considerada sagrada, desde las cosmovisiones de las naciones y pueblos indígena originario campesinos.” Constitución política del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia, article 3.
5. See Bruce Albert, “O ouro canibal e a queda do céu: Uma crítica xamânica da economia política da natureza (Yanomami),” in Pacificando o branco: Cosmologias do contato norte-amazônico, ed. Bruce Albert and Alcita Rita Ramos (São Paulo: Unesp, 2002), 239–70. I thank Romina Wainberg for this reference.
6. “Matar de pena” and “iba a dolerle el corazón.” Blanca Wiethüchter, El jardín de Nora (La Paz: Mujercita Sentada, 1998), 7.
8. “Con infinito cuidado…como si se tratara de un regalo amoroso.” Wiethüchter, 7–10.
Aún aguardó un poco antes de echar a andar, en espera de sentir el rumor en su pecho, ese rumor que la venía acosando desde hacía años…desde el día en el que decidió forzar la tierra a producir un jardín como si estuviera en Viena. Retuvo en el olvido al jardinero, metida en sí misma, se hizo otra vez de la plancha, introdujo el pulgar, el índice y el dedo medio en el agua fría para esparcirla mecánicamente sobre un ropaje inexistente, hasta que el chisporroteo del agua sobre la palma caliente de la plancha la despertó de sus divagaciones, pero sin el rumor en el pecho,…en la huerta del pecho ‘¿quién puede renegar de la autoridad de un médico, después de tantos análisis?’ había regresado a casa, sabiendo que lo que sucedía no era a causa de sus nervios sino ‘un modo de expresarse de las cosas, Franz, de las cosas de las que no se habla.’
(Wiethüchter, 11; my emphasis)
11. “Siempre atento a los rasgos étnicos de los indígenas.” Wiethüchter, 8.
13. “Manzana de la discordia.” Wiethüchter, 29.
14. In a learned article, Mary Carmen E. Molina describes holes as “tensión neurálgica” and “centro de la paradoja en la escritura” in Wiethüchter’s oeuvre (43). Usefully, the critic carries her analysis across poetry collections such as Asistir al tiempo (1975), El rigor de la llama (1994), and Qantatai (1997). See Molina, “ ‘Aquí, digo, y doy un salto’: Hueco y lenguaje en la obra de Blanca Wiethüchter,” in La crítica y el poeta: Blanca Wiethüchter (La Paz: Plural, 2011), 41–78.
15. “Miró anonadada el no hay de la nada que ahora ocupaba el lugar del rosal.” Wiethüchter, El jardín de Nora, 15.
16. Marcelo Villena Alvarado, “Requiem para un modelo: Hueco y experiencia en la obra de Blanca Wiethüchter,” América: Cahier du CRICCAL 34 (2005): 157–65.
17. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica 1.49.1. Sancti Thomae Aquinatis Doctoris Angelici Opera, omnia iussu edita Leonis XIII P.M, Tomus Decimus Sextus Indices: Summa Theologiae et summa contra gentiles (Rome: Apud Sedem Commissionis Leoninae, 1948).
18. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 1.
21. Wiethüchter, El jardín de Nora, 29.
22. “El hueco, más que un grito, le pareció una diabólica sonrisa torcida en la armónica y luminosa placidez de pasto, hojas verdes y variedad de flores.” Wiethüchter, 20.
23. See Pedro Mamani Choque and Daysi Teresa Ramos Alcalá, Cosmovisión andina (Cochabamba: Verbo Divino, 2013); and Manuel M. Marzal and Krzysztof Makowski, eds., Religiones andinas (Madrid: Trotta, 2005).
24. Wiethüchter, El jardín de Nora, 54–55.
25. “La dimensión generadora, materna, de esa ausencia.” Villena Alvarado, “Requiem para un modelo,” 160.
26. Quoted in Mónica. M. Velásquez Guzmán, Múltiples voces en la poesía de Francisco Hernández, Blanca Wiethüchter y Raúl Zurita (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 2009), 125.
27. See Robert P. Harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
29. See a fascinating source that Monasterios cites: Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
30. See Molina, “ ‘Aquí, digo, y doy un salto’,” 64–77; Elizabeth Monasterios, “Rethinking Transculturation and Hibridity: An Andean Perspective,” Latin American Narratives and Cultural Identity 7 (2004): 103.
31. Monasterios, “Rethinking Transculturation and Hybridity,” 99–100.
33. Monasterios makes her case against “cultural hybridity,” which she calls García Canclini’s “postmodern version of transculturation,” as follows: “Even though for many critics this concept stills offers a strong analytical option due to its emphasis on the non-resolution of contradictions, the fact that it works within the logic of capitalism and economic globalization makes it incompatible with cultural productions formulated from different economic and cultural logistics.” Monasterios, 108n12. García Canclini was writing at a time when, as the Cold War thawed, Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action had great purchase in many universities across Latin America.
36. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), xviii.
37. In this way, of the three cosmological principles of encounter of opposites (taypi) separation of opposites (puruma), and unresolvable tension (awqa), the third category would be the more appropriate for Wiethüchter (103–4). A viable line of research for future studies would be to examine these notions and learn from them not just in an abstract sense but as forms of inhabiting nature.
38. Short of de-Westernization, Walter Mignolo, paraphrasing Aníbal Quijano, speaks about escaping mental slavery: “Decoloniality means first to delink (to detach) from [the] overall structure of knowledge in order to engage in an epistemic reconstitution [of] ways of thinking, languages, ways of life and being in the world that the rhetoric of modernity disavowed and the logic of coloniality implement.” Walter Mignolo, “Key Concepts,” interview in E-International Relations, January 21, 2017, https://www.e-ir.info/2017/01/21/interview-walter-mignolopart-2-key-concepts/.
39. Molina, “ ‘Aquí, digo, y doy un salto’,” 73–76.
41. “Se paró el mayor: un leve estertor, seguido por una especie de hipo que se tragaba el aire como para darse un impulso a tiempo de cerrar los labios y emitir un extraño soplo que sonaba bbbbbb. Tomó aliento y—Bbbbbaabbbá…Y cerrando los labios—Mmmmaammmá…Aplaudieron todos.” Wiethüchter, El jardín de Nora, 64.
42. See Velásquez, Múltiples voces, 113.
¡Bbbbuuuueeeeccccoooooo! El que se abrió ahí mismo, abismal y profundo, que se abrió con el viento de voces como una garganta que al despeñarse hacia el fondo dejaba al descubierto los negados jugos de un jardín oculto, que se destapó con un tumulto de piedras como frutos resecos, que ahora despeñadas sobre Franz y Nora los hundían sin oportunidad de voz en aquel hueco negro, despejado por aquella decena de bocas desbocadas, diseñadas con seguridad para otra cosa.
(Wiethüchter, El jardín de Nora, 65)
44. See Carlos Alonso, The Spanish American Regional Novel: Modernity and Autochthony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 38–78.
45. Viktor Shklovsky, “From ‘Art as Technique’ 1917,” in Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, ed. Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 219. See the introduction to this volume, n. 90.
46. See Gregory L. Ulmer, “The Puncept in Grammatology,” in On Puns: The Foundation of Letters, ed. Jonathan Culler (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 164–90.
47. Wiethüchter, El jardín de Nora, 14.
48. “Al otro lado del hueco, no había nada. Phutunhuicu, pronunciaron correctamente cuando aprendieron a hablar los mudos, Phutunhuicu, que en buen aymara es phutunku y en buen castellano, hueco. Pero, nadie los entendió.” Wiethüchter, El jardín de Nora, 65.
49. Concerned, like Monasterios, that “identity is always open to commodification by the cultural-ideologic apparatus of global capitalism,” Moreiras proposes instead that
The relationship between the tactical essentialism contained in subalternist theoretical fictions and the radicality of subalternism as a thinking of negativity (insofar as subalternism is the thinking of whatever is left outside of, that is, negated (and therefore also ‘cathected’) by a hegemonic relation at any given moment) is not to be thought dialectically, but through the notion of a double articulation or double register whereby the subalternist will be able to engage both radical negativity and tactical positivity simultaneously and distinctly.
(Alberto Moreiras, “Hybridity and Double Consciousness,” Cultural Studies 13, no. 3 [1999]: 373–407)
50. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 6.
51. Gabriel Giorgi, Formas comunes: Animalidad, cultura, biopolítica (Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia, 2014), chap. 1.
52. At the “Legal and Literary Persons” special session of the 2016 convention of the MLA, Nicolette Bruner discussed Edith Wharton in light of Citizens United, and vice versa. The essential signposts to the current law and literature debates in the English-speaking context, and promising attempts of expanding such debates beyond it, can be found in Liz Anker and B. Meyler’s New Directions in Law and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
53. For eye-opening documentation on the matter, see Penelope Anthias, “Indigenous Peoples and the New Extraction: From Territorial Rights to Hydrocarbon Citizenship in the Bolivian Chaco,” Latin American Perspectives 45, no. 2 (2018): 136–53. Mounting evidence notwithstanding, leftist ecological criticism of Morales has been dismissed by none other than John Beverley as infantile. See Beverley, The Failure of Latin America: Postcolonialism in Bad Times (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019).
54. César Aira, God’s Tea Party, in The Musical Brain, and Other Stories, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2015), 75–90.
55. For Argentina, see Craig Epplin’s Late Book Culture in Argentina (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017). One of the most thoughtful studies to date of so-called independent publishing in Latin America is Nicolás Rodríguez Galvis’s dissertation, De nouveaux éditeurs ‘indépendants’ en Amérique Du Sud: Émergence, modes d’action, enjeux. Le cas de l’Argentine, du Chili et de la Colombie (doctoral thesis, Paris XIII, 2016).
56. Such is the angle explored in Jesús Montoya Juárez’s Narrativas del simulacro: Videocultura, tecnología y literatura en Argentina y Uruguay (Murcia, Spain: Universidad de Murcia, 2013).
57. Aira, God’s Tea Party, 75; César Aira, El té de Dios (Guatemala City: Mata-Mata, 2010), 9.
58. See Donna Haraway’s now classic Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989).
59. See Philip Lutgendorf, Hanuman’s Tale: The Messages of a Divine Monkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Thanks to ethnomusicologist and South Asian specialist Anna Schultz for her elucidation of these references.
60. In this sense, Aira’s work, in Rebecca Walkowitz’s felicitous coinage, is “born translated”—not, however, in the sense of anticipating its intelligibility, but rather the proliferation of meaning that results from translation. Aira sits in the antipodes of what Tim Parks has called, in another, equally adroit formulation, “the dull global novel.” See Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); and Tim Parks, “The Dull New Global Novel,” New York Review of Books (blog), February 9, 2010, https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2010/02/09/the-dull-new-global-novel/.
61. Aira, El té de Dios, 19.
62. Aira draws the notion of “flight forward” from Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen: “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, ed. Roger Lancelyn Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 145.
63. Aira, God’s Tea Party, 82. “[El Rey de los Monos] les asperja los ojos con limón [a los más débiles], les hace meter la punta de los dedos en el té hirviendo, les tapona las orejas con confites, la nariz con mermelada, les mete cucharitas de plata en el ano…En las pausas, traga litros de té, para alimentar su furia sin causa. Ese té debe de tener algo.” Aira, El té de Dios, 20.
64. Aira, God’s Tea Party, 84. “Fluía a través de un meteorito de acero y níquel como un pájaro cruza el cielo celeste de una mañana de primavera. Atravesaba un planeta y ni se enteraba. Con la misma fluidez impasible atravesaba un átomo. O un papel, una flor, un barco, un perro, un cerebro, un pelo.” Aira, El té de Dios, 23.
65. Haraway, Primate Visions, 260.
66. Latour seems to capture the spirit of this interreligious cover art. He recalls a medieval Spanish disputatio as an example of how literature can undo fundamentalisms and merge insights from different constructivisms: “A monk, a rabbi, and an imam were requested to debate about their creeds and to demonstrate in public the proofs they had of determining the ‘true religion.’ I see great literature as a way to reassemble and to renew those debates, so crucial for future peace. On condition that a fourth representative be brought in: the scientist and the engineer.” Bruno Latour, “The Powers of the Facsimile: A Turing Test on Science and Literature,” in Intersections: Essays on Richard Powers, ed. Stephen Burn and Peter Dempsey (Champaign, Ill: Dalkey Archive, 2008), 287.
67. Aira, God’s Tea Party, 77. “Van cursadas ‘a la evolución’, y llegan automáticamente al instinto de los monos, como un timbrazo.” Aira, El té de Dios, 11.
68. Aira, God’s Tea Party, 79. “Llegaríamos a ese espectáculo inaudito, divino, de una asamblea de monos sentaditos alrededor de una mesa levantando la taza con una mano, el meñique apuntando a la nada que los rodea…modosos, formales.” Aira, El té de Dios, 16.
69. Latour, “The Powers of the Facsimile,” 19.
70. See Diego Vecchio, “Procedimientos y máquinas célibes: Roussel, Duchamp, Aira,” in César Aira, une révolution, ed. Michel Lafon, Cristina Breuil, and Margarita Remón-Raillard (Grenoble, France: Université Stendhal-Grenoble 3, 2005), 95–105.
71. Aira, El té de Dios, 26. “The resemblance between the words is not mere coincidence.” Aira, God’s Tea Party, 86.
72. “Constructivism is made to be the exact opposite of deconstruction while, at the same time, using many of the same resources. But the way they are nested in one another is entirely different. ‘Telescoped’ is actually a good metaphor: the more elements nested the better the view, whereas in the logic of critical deconstruction the more elements the more delayed the grasp should be.” Latour, “The Powers of Facsimile,” 276.
73. Aira, God’s Tea Party, 24. “Estaba y no estaba…. Era el prototipo del colado.” Aira, El té de Dios, 22–24.
74. Aira, God’s Tea Party, 83.
75. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 63. Bold in the original.
76. Aira, God’s Tea Party, 38.
Su identificación con el punto geométrico, que era la coquetería de la partícula, hacía que su manifestación en la realidad fuera una línea, porque un punto en el tiempo siempre será una línea. Y como por una línea pasan infinitos planos en distinto grado de inclinación, a la entrada de ésta en el Té de Dios se formaba una especie de molino de biombos delgadísimos en ángulos distintos y cambiantes, por los que resbalaban los monos…. Al ser tantos los planos, casi nunca dos monos quedaban en el mismo, lo que no impedía las peleas, al contrario.
(Aira, El té de Dios, 26)
77. Aira, 89. “No había cosas en realidad, sino palabras, las palabras que recortaban trocitos de mundo y les hacían creer a los hombres que eran cosas.” Aira, El té de Dios, 32.
78. “I understand by this phrase the cutting up [découpage] of the perceptual world that anticipates, through its sensible evidence, the distribution of shares and social parties…. And this redistribution itself presupposes a cutting up of what is visible and what is not, of what can be heard and what cannot, of what is noise and what is speech.” Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, trans. John Drury, Corinne Oster, and Andrew Parker, (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 225.
79. Aira, God’s Tea Party, 86. “Molino de biombos delgadísimos en ángulos distintos y cambiantes.” Aira, El té de Dios, 26.
80. Aira, God’s Tea Party, 90. “Su partida de nacimiento.” Aira, El té de Dios, 32.
81. Aira, God’s Tea Party, 85. “Un accidente sin contrapartida.” Aira, El té de Dios, 25.
82. Aira, God’s Tea Party, 89; Aira, El té de Dios, 32.
83. Aira, God’s Tea Party, 89, 90. “[Dios] no tenía más remedio que entrar en el juego lingüístico”; “cada uno hacía un recorte distinto.” Aira, El té de Dios, 32.
85. Aira, God’s Tea Party, 89. “Donde se abrían los caminos de la masa y la energía.” Aira, El té de Dios, 31.
86. Aira, God’s Tea Party, 83. “Recorría la nada y el todo por igual, en caída libre, sin oficio ni beneficio.” Aira, El té de Dios, 21.
87. Rita Felski, “Latour and Literary Studies,” PMLA 130, no. 3 (2015): 737.
88. While Felski’s overall point is valid, it builds on false dichotomies: “Instead of engaging in a hermeneutics of suspicion, we conceive of interpretation as a form of mutual making or composing. Instead of stressing our analytic detachment, we own up to our attachments, shrugging of the tired dichotomy of vigilant critic versus naive reader. Instead of demystifying aesthetic absorption, we see that experience as a key to the distinctive ways in which art solicits our attention” (Felski, “Latour and Literary Studies,” 741–42). She develops her views in The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
89. Felski, “Latour and Literary Studies,” 738.
90. The distinguished comparatist and videogame designer Ian Bogost convincingly questions several aspects of Latour’s thinking in Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). For all the influence of Latour’s work, rather than viewing him as a founding figure for contemporary anthropodecentric thinking, it would be more accurate to picture him as a lightning rod.
91. Felski, “Latour and Literary Studies,” 738.
92. Aira, God’s Tea Party, 89; Aira, El té de Dios, 31.
93. Latour, “The Powers of the Facsimile,” 272.
If we demand of matter that it acts as though it has vitality, then we overlook or downgrade the possibility of it simply persisting in a rock-like or mineral condition. And that means that we foreclose on the challenge of thinking through or about a domain of existence that is devoid of any trace of thought, feeling, will, or any other quality we habitually recognize in ourselves. To take a lead from Harman, ‘rather than anthropomorphizing the inanimate realm,’ we need to start ‘morphing the human realm into a variant of the inanimate.’
(Nigel Clark, Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet [Los Angeles: SAGE, 2011], 24. I owe this germane reference to David Stentiford.)
95. Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontopower: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 33.
96. Ilan Stavans, Gabriel García Márquez: The Early Years (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 168.
97. Marisol de la Cadena, Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), 186.
98. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 22.
99. “Muy blanda es el agua e da en piedra dura, / muchas vegadas dando faze grand cavadura, / por grand uso el rudo sabe grand letura, / muger mucho seguida olvida la cordura.” Paraphrased by Raymond Willis as “Water is extremely soft, and it strikes on a hard stone, but by striking it time after time it makes a large hollow; by much repetition an unschooled man can learn a long text; a woman who is long pursued ends up by losing her prudence.” Juan Ruiz, Libro de buen amor, ed. Raymond Willis (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), 144–45.
3. Corpse Narratives as Literary History
1. In Derrida’s succinct formulation, not quite a definition but an illustration, “deconstruction does not consist in passing from one concept to another, but in overturning and displacing a conceptual order, as well as the nonconceptual order with which the conceptual order is articulated.” Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 329.
2. Theo D’haen, The Routledge Concise History of World Literature (London: Routledge, 2011).
3. Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures (New York: Continuum, 2008), 30–31.
4. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 142.
5. David Damrosch, “World Literature in Theory and Practice,” in World Literature in Theory, ed. David Damrosch (London: Wiley, 2014), 3.
6. See David Damrosch’s account of Goethe’s “invisible church” as related to World Literature in the introduction to World Literature in Theory (London: Wiley, 2014), 17. For an overview of Goethe’s complex religious views, I consulted Walter Naumann’s “Goethe’s Religion,” Journal of the History of Ideas 13, no. 2 (1952): 188–99.
7. Carl Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, trans. G. L. Ulmen (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996), 7.
8. Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (New York: Verso, 2013).
10. Amir Eshel, Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); David Damrosch, “Toward a History of World Literature,” New Literary History 39 (2008): 483.
12. Gerald Graff, “Taking Cover in Coverage,” Profession 86 (1986): 41–45.
14. See Héctor Hoyos, Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 14–69; Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking, 1998).
15. Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens (Frankfurt: Insel, 1981), 19–20.
16. Pheng Cheah, What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 6.
17. Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).
18. See Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, 20.
19. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), § 17, 236–84.
20. Damrosch, introduction to World Literature in Theory, 11.
21. I consulted the expanded version of the prologue featured in Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris’s edited collection, Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, trans. Tanya Huntington and Lois Parkinson Zamora (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 76–88.
23. David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 112.
24. Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Rouidez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 3.
25. Although Mariano Siskind has argued, with Lacan and other psychoanalytical referents, that a desire for worldliness has been a driving force in Latin American writers, the bodily is not central to his argument. Siskind, Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press), 9.
26. Kristeva, The Powers of Horror, 2.
27. Roberto Bolaño, By Night in Chile, trans. Chris Andrews (London: Harvill, 2003), 45. “Las cuencas vacías…la quijada abierta como si tras entrever la inmortalidad aún se estuviera riendo.” Roberto Bolaño, Nocturno de Chile (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2000), 62.
28. “You won’t believe this, but [Ulises Lima] used to shower with a book. I swear. He read in the shower. How do I know? Easy. All his books were wet.” Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: Picador, 2007), 246.
29. “Kafka comprendía que los viajes, el sexo y los libros son caminos que no llevan a ninguna parte, y que sin embargo son caminos por los que hay que internarse y perderse.” Roberto Bolaño, El gaucho insufrible (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2003), 158.
30. Roberto Bolaño, Nazi Literature in the Americas, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2008), 145.
31. Sarah Pollack, “Latin America Translated (Again): Roberto Bolaño’s ‘The Savage Detectives’ in the United States,” Comparative Literature 61, no. 3 (2009): 346–65.
32. See Emily Apter, “Literary World-Systems,” in Teaching World Literature, ed. David Damrosch, (New York: Modern Language Association, 2009), 44–60.
33. Immanuel Wallerstein, “1968, Revolution in the World-System: Theses and Queries,” Theory and Society 18, no. 4 (1989): 431, 436.
35. Roberto Bolaño, “El Ojo Silva,” Letras libres (July 2000): 68–72; “Mauricio ‘The Eye’ Silva,” in Last Evenings on Earth, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2006), 106–20.
36. “Es más necesario el ojo del culo solo que los de la cara; por cuanto uno sin ojos en ella puede vivir, pero sin ojo del culo ni pasar ni vivir.” Francisco de Quevedo, Gracias y desgracias del ojo del culo, dirigidas a Doña Juana Mucha, Montón de Carne, Mujer gorda por arrobas / escribiolos Juan Lamas, el del camisón cagado (Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2003), 23.
37. Georges Bataille, “The Solar Anus,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1933, ed. and trans. Alan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 7–8.
40. Benjamin Noys, George Bataille: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto, 2000), 69.
41. Roberto Bolaño, The Insufferable Gaucho, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2010), 123–46.
42. Roberto Bolaño, By Night in Chile, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2003), 116. Originally published as Nocturno de Chile (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2000).
43. Roberto Bolaño, Amulet, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2008), 33. Originally published as Amuleto (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1999).
44. Kristeva, The Powers of Horror, 108.
45. Roberto Bolaño, The Return, trans. Chris Andrews (New York: New Directions, 2010), 135.
46. Bolaño, The Return, 138, 145, 140.
47. Natalie Depraz, “Leib/Körper/Fleisch,” in The Dictionary of Untranslatables, ed. Barbara Cassin, trans. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014), 561.
48. Bolaño, The Return, 136.
49. Bolaño, The Return, 144.
50. Bolaño, The Return, 141.
51. See Hoyos, Beyond Bolaño, 12–20.
52. Good starting points to survey this literature include an article by Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott and a collection by Nicholas Birns and Juan E. de Castro: Villalobos-Ruminott, “A Kind of Hell: Roberto Bolaño and the Return of World Literature,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 18, no. 2–3 (2009): 193–205; Birns and de Castro, eds., Roberto Bolaño as World Literature (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017).
53. Roberto Bolaño, 2666, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 74. Originally published as 2666 (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2004).
54. Bolaño, 2666, trans. Wimmer, 17. “Los organizadores, los mismos que dejaron afuera la literatura contemporánea española o polaca o sueca, por falta de tiempo o de dinero, en un penúltimo capricho destinaron la mayor parte de los fondos a invitar a cuerpo de rey a estrellas de la literatura inglesa, y con el dinero que quedó trajeron a tres novelistas franceses.” Bolaño, 2666, 15.
55. Bolaño, 2666, trans. Wimmer, 109. “En la entrada del hotel los dos porteros le pegaban al taxista, que estaba en el suelo. No se trataba de patadas continuadas. Digamos que lo pateaban cuatro o seis veces y paraban y le daban oportunidad de hablar o de irse, pero el taxista, que estaba doblado sobre su estómago, movía la boca y los insultaba y entonces los porteros le daban otra tanda de patadas.” Bolaño, 2666, 94.
56. Bolaño, 2666, trans. Wimmer, 109, 77.
57. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1969), 68.
58. Bolaño, 2666, trans. Wimmer, 115.
59. Bolaño, 2666, trans. Wimmer, 136.
60. Bolaño, 2666, trans. Wimmer, 130.
En el patio donde se celebraba la barbacoa contemplaron múltiples agujeros humeantes. Los profesores de la Universidad de Santa Teresa demostraron inusitadas dotes para las labores del campo…procedieron a desenterrar la barbacoa, y un olor a carne y a tierra caliente se extendió por el patio bajo la forma de una delgada cortina de humo que los envolvió a todos como la niebla que precede a los asesinatos y que se esfumó de manera misteriosa, mientras las mujeres llevaban los platos a la mesa, dejando impregnadas las vestimentas y las pieles con su aroma.
(Bolaño, 2666, 172–73)
61. Bolaño, 2666, trans. Wimmer, 346. “Una sombra de frustración cruzó la cara del policía.” Bolaño, 2666, 436.
62. Bolaño, 2666, trans. Wimmer; translation modified. “Gritos, como si en una de las salas de la cárcel estuvieran celebrando una despedida de soltero…risas lejanas. Mugidos.” Bolaño, 2666, 436.
63. Bolaño, 2666, trans. Wimmer, 384–85. “Haas le arrebató el punzón al Guajolote y le dijo al Anillo que se pusiera a cuatro patas. Si no tiemblas, pendejo, nada te pasará. Si tiemblas o tienes miedo, vas a tener dos agujeros para cagar…. Disciplina, chingados, sólo pido un poco de disciplina y respeto, dijo Haas cuando a su vez entró en el pasillo de las duchas. Luego se arrodilló detrás del Anillo, le susurró a éste que se abriera bien de piernas, y le introdujo lentamente el punzón hasta el mango.” Bolaño, 2666, 606–7.
64. Bolaño, 2666, trans. Wimmer, 345. “Estamos vivos porque no hemos visto ni sabemos nada.” Bolaño, 2666, 435.
65. Bolaño, 2666, trans. Wimmer, 545.
Según los forenses la muerte se debió a estrangulamiento, con rotura del hueso hioides. En el cadáver, pese a su estado de descomposición, era posible apreciar huellas de golpes producidos por un objeto contundente en la cabeza, manos y piernas. Probablemente hubo violación. La fauna cadavérica encontrada en el cuerpo indicaba como fecha de fallecimiento aproximadamente la primera o la segunda semana de febrero. No hay identificación, aunque sus datos coinciden con los de Guadalupe Guzmán Prieto, de once años de edad, desaparecida el ocho de febrero, al atardecer, en la colonia San Bartolomé.
(Bolaño, 2666, 682)
66. See Chris Andrews, Roberto Bolaño: An Expanding Universe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 394.
68. Bolaño, 2666, trans. Wimmer, 195. “La idea es de Duchamp, dejar un libro de geometría colgado a la intemperie para ver si aprende cuatro cosas de la vida real.” Bolaño, 2666, 251.
69. Bolaño, 2666, trans. Wimmer, 188. “Recordaría el incidente que me hizo olvidar el Testamento geométrico.” Bolaño, 2666, 243.
70. Bolaño, 2666, trans. Wimmer, 189. “El dolor de los otros en la memoria de uno.” Bolaño, 2666, 244.
71. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 88.
72. For an elaboration of this discussion see the piece by New School historian Federico Finchelstein, “Fascism, History and Evil in Roberto Bolaño,” in Roberto Bolaño as World Literature, ed. Nicholas Birns and Juan De Castro (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 23–40.
73. Bolaño, 2666, trans. Wimmer, 790. “Jesús es la obra maestra. Los ladrones son las obras menores. ¿Por qué están allí? No para realzar la crucifixión, como algunas almas cándidas creen, sino para ocultarla.” Bolaño, 2666, 989.
74. Bolaño, 2666, trans. Wimmer, 734. “ ‘El que me violenta por el culo’, es decir ‘el caníbal que me folla por el culo y después se come mi cuerpo’, aunque también podía significar ‘el que me toca (o me viola) y me mira a los ojos (para comerse mi alma)’.” Bolaño, 2666, 917.
75. Bolaño, 2666, trans. Wimmer, 734.
El asado, un cuadro invertido que colgado de una manera es, efectivamente, un gran plato metálico de piezas asadas, entre las que se distingue un lechoncillo y un conejo, y unas manos, probablemente de mujer o de adolescente, que intentan tapar la carne para que no se enfríe, y que colgado al revés nos muestra el busto de un soldado, con casco y armadura, y una sonrisa satisfecha y temeraria a la que le faltan algunos dientes, la sonrisa atroz de un viejo mercenario que te mira, y su mirada es aún más atroz que su sonrisa, como si supiera cosas de ti…Todo dentro de todo, escribe Ansky. Como si Arcimboldo hubiera aprendido una sola lección, pero ésta hubiera sido de la mayor importancia.
(Bolaño, 2666, 917–18)
76. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. and introd. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 256.
77. Bolaño, 2666, trans. Wimmer, 348. “Nadie presta atención a estos asesinatos, pero en ellos se esconde el secreto del mundo.” Bolaño, 2666, 439.
78. See Chris Andrews, Roberto Bolaño: An Expanding Universe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); and Oswaldo Zavala, La modernidad insufrible: Roberto Bolaño en los límites de la literatura latinoamericana contemporánea (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2015).
79. Sergio González Ramírez, Huesos en el desierto (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2002).
80. Fisk, “ ‘Against World Literature’: The Debate in Retrospect.”
81. Evelio Rosero, The Armies, trans. Anne McLean (New York: New Directions, 2009).
82. José Pablo Feinmann, “Dieguito,” in Cuentos de fútbol Argentino, ed. Roberto Fontanarrosa (Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 1997), 60–64.
83. Diamela Eltit, Impuesto a la carne (Santiago: Planeta, 2010).
84. Rodrigo Rey Rosa, El material humano (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2009); Eduardo Halfon, “Han vuelto las aves,” in Signor Hoffman (Barcelona: Libros del Asteroide, 2015).
85. Guadalupe Nettel, El cuerpo en que nací (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2011); Valeria Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth, trans. Christina McSweeney (London: Granta, 2015), originally published as La historia de mis dientes (Madrid: Sexto Piso, 2014); Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, Tropical Animal, trans. Peter Lownds (London: Faber, 2003), originally published as Animal tropical (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2000).
86. Patti Smith, Hecatomb: A Poem, illustrated by José Antonio Suárez Londoño (Medellín: SML, 2013).
87. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, in Werke, vol. 4 (Berlin: Dietz, 1959), 466.
88. Gregory L. Ulmer, “The Puncept in Grammatology,” in On Puns: The Foundation of Letters, ed. Jonathan Culler (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 14.
89. Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, The New Human in Literature: Posthuman Visions of Changes in Body, Mind and Society after 1900 (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
90. Vilashini Cooppan, “Codes for World Literature: Network Theory and the Field Imaginary,” in Approaches to World Literature, ed. Joachim Küpper (Berlin: Akademie, 2013), 111–12.
91. Cheah, What is a World?, 58.
92. Bolaño, 2666, 81. “The great cemeteries at lightspeed.” Bolaño, 2666, trans. Wimmer, 57.
4. Praxis and Politics of Hyperfetishism
1. Or has it? Teo, the seventy-eight-year old former taco salesman who is protagonist of the Mexican Juan Pablo Villalobos’s highly idiosyncratic and Aira-influenced Te vendo un perro (2015), squashes cockroaches with Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Wilhelm, his Mormon friend from Utah, obliges with the Bible. Juan Pablo Villalobos, Te vendo un perro (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2015), 65. The winner of the Herralde and Guardian First Book Awards, Villalobos has been successfully translated into English by Rosalind Harvey and published by And Other Stories, the scintillating British publisher.
2. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990), 164.
3. See an influential revision of Marx’s thought in Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Postone’s discussion of commodity fetishism as catalyzer of abstract labor—an agent in its own right, per his account—could complement my findings. An important caveat is that the agentic properties of things themselves are, arguably, further downplayed in his argument than in Marx’s.
5. Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion,” in Selected Writings, 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard/Belknap Press, 1996), 288.
6. Marx, Capital, 165; my emphasis.
7. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Marx-Engels Selected Works, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress, 1969), 15.
8. “Men do not therefore bring the products of their labour into relation with each other as values because they see these objects merely as the material integuments of homogeneous human labour. The reverse is true: by equating their different products to each other in exchange as values, they equate their different kinds of labour as human labour.” Marx, Capital, 166.
9. Marx, Capital, 176–77.
10. See Gabriel Egan’s elucidating Shakespeare and Marx (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
11. Marx, Capital, 178; my emphasis.
12. René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965).
14. On the dialectics of Spanish American autonomy, see chap. 1 of Ángel Rama, Rubén Darío y el modernismo (Caracas: Alfadil, 1985). For a continental-philosophy-inspired and thoroughly documented take on modernismo, see especially the third edition of Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot, Modernismo: supuestos históricos y culturales, (Bogotá: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2004).
15. The preliminary studies to both the Ayacucho and the Norma editions of Silva’s works provide good pointers for seasoned and new readers alike. For a state-of-the-art study of nineteenth-century Colombian literature, see Felipe Martínez Pinzón’s Una cultura de invernadero: Trópico y civilización en Colombia (1808–1928) (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2016).
16. José Asunción Silva, Guizado E. Camacho, and Gustavo Mejía, Obra Completa (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1977), 22.
17. ¡Si os encerrara yo en mis estrofas,
frágiles cosas que sonreís
pálido lirio que te deshojas
rayo de luna sobre el tapiz
de húmedas flores, y verdes hojas
que al tibio soplo de mayo abrís,
si os encerrara yo en mis estrofas,
pálidas cosas que sonreís!
¡Si aprisionaros pudiera el verso
fantasmas grises, cuando pasáis,
móviles formas del Universo,
sueños confusos, seres que os vais,
ósculo triste, suave y perverso
que entre las sombras al alma dais,
si aprisionaros pudiera el verso
fantasmas grises cuando pasáis!
(Silva, Obra completa, 22)
18. Roca’s self-defined “light essay” (liviano ensayo) relates Silva’s poem to other of his works and points out the author’s interest in animism (11). Kindred claims include highlighting the role of objects as external memories, framing the whole of Silva’s work as a conversation with things (coloquio con las cosas, 13) and stagings of intimacy (17). See Juan Manuel Roca, Cartógrafa memoria: ensayos en torno a la poesía (Medellín: EAFIT, 2003), 9–22.
20. José Asunción Silva, After-Dinner Conversation: The Diary of a Decadent, trans. Kelly Washbourne (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).
23. Ericka Beckman, Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 42–79.
24. A thoughtful alternative appears in Andrade, who downplays the colonial subjectivity at work in Silva’s purportedly admiring European collections. The critic shows instead how those collections affirm a vigorous eclecticism. They reinterpret, rather than imitate, dandyism and decadence. The periphery becomes metropolis through commerce with non-Hispanic capitals: “The fact that Spanish objects are included among many others in this new system of objects also represents a refusal to assign that tradition a privileged position in the formation of the Latin American subject.” María Mercedes Andrade, Ambivalent Desires: Representations of Modernity and Private Life in Colombia (1890s–1950s) (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2011), 47.
25. See Héctor Hoyos, “Re-discovering Ice: García Márquez, Aira, and Vallejo on Chilling Memories,” in Gabriel García Márquez in Retrospect, ed. Gene H. Bell-Villada (Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2016), 103–14; and Hoyos, “El último gramático: Ensayos críticos sobre Fernando Vallejo,” in “El malditismo de Fernando Vallejo como espectáculo melodramático,” ed. Juanita Aristizábal and Brantley Nichols, special issue, Cuadernos de Literatura 19, no. 37 (2015): 169–76. See also Hoyos, “La racionalidad herética de Fernando Vallejo y el derecho a la felicidad,” Revista de Estudios Sociales 35 (2010): 113–22.
26. Fernando Vallejo, La Virgen de los sicarios (Bogotá: Santillana, 1994).
27. Fernando Vallejo, Almas en pena, chapolas negras (Bogotá: Santillana, 1995).
28. The store was called “R. Silva e Hijo” (R. Silva and Son) and was located next to the church of Santo Domingo at “291 and 293, Carrera 7a, segunda Calle Real (Cervantes Virtual).” An 1889 ad mentions English, French, and Viennese shoes for ladies (Casa de Poesía Silva). A few years later, in Prague, Franz Kafka’s domineering father, all shop owner and no poet, had his own writer son work at his fine-goods store (Galanteriewarenladen), unequivocally named “Hermann Kafka.” It was located at the Palais Kinsky, Altstadterring 16 (see Peter-André Alt, Franz Kafka: der ewige Sohn; eine Biographie [Munich: Beck, 2005], 30). The Bogotá and Prague businesses would be today’s Bloomingdale’s—writing and the universal commerce of objects are of a piece.
30. Vallejo, Almas en pena, 273.
31. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (New York: Melville, 2011), 330.
32. Vallejo, Almas en pena, 237.
33. Bertolt Brecht, “Die Dreigroschenoper,” in Ausgewählte Werke, vol. 1: Stücke 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 267.
34. The most capacious English-language study on the cultural politics of the period is José María Rodríguez García’s The City of Translation: Poetry and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010).
35. Houses lost, regained, and everything in between are a recurrent theme in Colombian literature. Draft manuscripts for the country’s most famous book, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), bore the title La casa; García Márquez’s eclipsed contemporary, Manuel Mejía Vallejo, won the Rómulo Gallegos prize for La casa de las dos palmas (1988). In a sense, both novels are about haunted houses. More recently, the theme of expatriate Colombians trying to find a pied-à-terre or restore a family estate in the motherland is present in Santiago Gamboa’s polemical Una casa en Bogotá and in Héctor Abad Faciolince’s bestselling La oculta, both from 2014.
[Los sanitarios ahorradores de agua] definitivamente son los mejores: por el espacio que ocupan, que es poco; por el agua que ahorran, que es mucha; y por el flotador, que no falla: es una válvula…Miren qué preciosidad de espejo de agua o encharque. Acople del sanitario al piso en PVC, muy ligero pero firme. Dos botones de descarga: ocho litros para sólidos, y seis litros para líquidos. Estoy encantado con ellos. Da gusto usarlos. ¡Qué bueno que los compré!
(Fernando Vallejo, Casablanca la bella [Madrid: Alfaguara, 2013], 181)
37. Meanwhile, in the skeletal autobiographical short story “Biografía fantasma” the Mexican-Peruvian writer Mario Bellatin hopes that the toilets of his grandmother’s demolished house are still in use. With its vertiginous metonymic drift, the piece converses well with Vallejo’s novel. Form meets content: it reads as rubble turned highway turned forgetfulness. See Mario Bellatin, “Biografía fantasma,” Letras libres 9, no. 104 (2007): 48–49.
38. Juanita C. Aristizábal, “Fiel a su corriente: Las repeticiones de Vallejo en Casablanca la bella,” Cuadernos de Literatura 19, no. 37 (2014): 204–18.
39. Sherry Turkle, “The Things that Matter,” in Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, ed. Sherry Turkle (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014), 5.
40. “Hay que nombrar las cosas para que existan, pero usted las nombra para que se acaben.” Vallejo, Casablanca la bella, 106.
41. Margo Glantz, Historia de una mujer que caminó por la vida con zapatos de diseñador (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2005).
42. See Suzanne Ferriss and Malloy Young’s Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2006), 54.
43. See Margo Glantz, “Palabras para una fábula,” Debate feminista 13, no. 26 (2002): 144–64.
44. See Brigitte Sassen’s scathing critique in “Heidegger on van Gogh’s Old Shoes: The Use/Abuse of a Painting,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 32, no. 3 (2001): 160–73.
Me interesa mucho la vida de Ferragamo, pensé hoy por la tarde. Idea por lo menos curiosa en alguien que tiene los pies deformes y está tirada en la playa en traje de baño y con los pies descalzos, y en uno de los pies ostenta un juanete imposible de disimular cuando se está descalza, y me pregunto ¿cómo me puede interesar la vida de un señor gordo que se pasó la vida siempre inclinado, midiendo pies, estudiando su anatomía, su estructura y luego confeccionando hormas de madera y que además fue fascista?
(Glantz, Historia de una mujer, 40)
Elizabeth Rosa Horan translates an earlier, slightly shorter version of “andante,” which omits Ferragamo’s fascism, among other aspects, in The House of Memory: Stories by Jewish Women Writers of Latin America, ed. Marjorie Agosín (New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 1999), 197–206.
Me detengo, esto es muy importante; la obsesión principal de Nora García proviene de una concepción especial de la idea de la fama, está relacionada con el honor del nombre. Convencida, regresa a Ferragamo, vuelve a probarse los zapatos, la empleada le comenta, usted ya estuvo aquí, Nora asiente, ruega que se los muestren de nuevo, los contempla, los acaricia, se los pone, verifica que no se le note demasiado el juanete, se decide, se los quita, se encamina a la caja y los paga, pero antes de hacerlo pronuncia un voto, una manda a Santa Teresa de Jesús: usarlos solamente cuando se siente a escribir, como ahora lo hace, con los zapatos puestos, los zapatos Ferragamo que ha comprado en una exclusiva boutique de la calle Bond en Londres, acompañando al calzado, unas medias de ese mismo, exacto color (se comprará luego varios pares de Fogal, pues son las únicas que calzan con los zapatos del gran artesano, mejor, del gran artista del calzado) y, por fin, con solemnidad, ¡ya era hora!, sentada como franciscano seráfico a la máquina de escribir o frente a la computadora, fumándose un cigarrillo, oyendo a Bach, comiendo turrón de yema y bebiendo un oporto, comienza el acto más heroico de su vida; escribir la historia de la mujer que caminó por la vida con zapatos de diseñador.
(Glantz, Historia de una mujer, 24)
47. Erin Graff, The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 67–71.
48. Margo Glantz, Las genealogías (Mexico City: Casillas, 1981); trans. Susan Bassnett as The Family Tree: An Illustrated Novel (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1991).
49. See Margo Glantz, Zona de derrumbe (Rosario, Argentina: Viterbo, 2001).
50. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: Macmillan, 1899), 75.
51. Rubén Gallo, New Tendencies in Mexican Art: The 1990s (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 66.
52. See Bill Brown, Other Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 31.
53. “Le spectacle est le capital à un tel degré d’accumulation qu’il devient image.” Guy Debord, La société du spectacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 32.
54. See Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, “Mode d’emploi du détournement,” Les lèvres nues 8 (1956): 3.
5. Digitalia from the Margins
1. Three indispensable sources from this rich, sprawling scholarly terrain are Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have a Politics?,” Daedalus 109, no. 1 (1980): 121–36; Chellis Glendinning, “Notes Toward a Neo-Luddite Manifesto,” Utne Reader 38 (1990): 50–53; and Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Science as Culture 6, no. 1 (1996): 44–72.
2. Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (New York: Anchor, 2004), 62.
4. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 111.
6. “Ya traigo mi celular.” Los Tigres del Norte, “El celular,” recorded 1992, track 7 on Con sentimiento y sabor (Tan bonita), Fonovisa Records, compact disc.
7. “Parezco influyente.” Los Tigres del Norte, “El celular.”
8. “ El patrón me lo dio en el trabajo / porque un ejecutivo yo soy / la verdad que ya mero me rajo / me controla donde quiera que yo voy.” Los Tigres del Norte, “El celular.”
9. “Mi mujer por poquito me cacha / me tiene fichado con mi celular.” Los Tigres del Norte, “El celular.”
10. “Así funciona el silencioso negocio del turismo sexual en Cali.” El País, April 22, 2012, http://www.elpais.com.co/elpais/cali/noticias/turismo-sexual-practica-cada-vez-comun-en-cali; Chip Torres, “Te voy a dar un byte,” YouTube video, June 15, 2011, https://youtu.be/pDVORKo8rYs; Daddy Yankee, “El celular,” recorded 2006–7, track 10 on El Cartel: The Big Boss, El Cartel/Interscope, compact disc.
11. Andrés López, La pelota de letras, Universal Music Colombia, [2004] 2005, DVD.
12. Another source worth considering at length would be Álex Rivera’s low-budget, fascinating sci-fi film Sleep Dealer (2008). A bilingual story set in a dystopian future with a fully militarized border, it follows a Chicano drone pilot in the U.S. Army and the son of one of his targets south of the border. As they discover, the two men are not that different from each other—the orphan works in construction by way of virtual reality, based in Mexico but “working in” the United States. Álex Rivera, Sleep Dealer, Los Angeles: Maya Entertainment, 2009, DVD. For a cogent discussion of the film, see Luis Martín-Cabrera, “The Potentiality of the Commons: A Materialist Critique of Cognitive Capitalism from the Cyberbracer@s to the Ley Sinde,” Hispanic Review 80, no. 4 (2012): 583–605.
13. I develop my reading of Zambra alongside a discussion of his musical references in Héctor Hoyos, “The Tell-Tale Computer: Obsolescence and Nostalgia in Chile after Alejandro Zambra,” in Mediatized Sensibilities: Technology, Literature, and Latin America, ed. Matthew Bush and Tania Gentic (New York: Routledge, 2015), 109–24.
15. Alejandro Zambra, Mis documentos (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2014), trans. Megan McDowell as My Documents (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2015).
16. See Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez, eds. McOndo (Barcelona: Mondadori, 1996).
17. Alejandro Zambra, “Historia de un computador,” Letras libres (August 2008): 44–47.
18. “Una vez solo, Sebastián instaló el computador y comprobó lo que ya sospechaba: que era notablemente inferior, desde todo punto de vista, al que ya tenía. Se rieron mucho con el marido de su madre, después del almuerzo. Luego ambos hicieron espacio en el sótano para guardar el computador, que sigue ahí desde hace años, a la espera, como se dice, de tiempos mejores.” Zambra, “Historia de un computador,” 47.
19. Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).
20. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), xvii.
21. “Como si obedeciera a un impulso y no a una decisión responsable.” Zambra, “Historia de un computador,” 44.
22. “Breves líneas que él llamaba versos libres,” Zambra, 44; my emphasis.
24. “Le asignaron una habitación individual.” Zambra, 45.
25. “como si correspondieran a viajes distintos.” Zambra, 45.
26. Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Vintage, 2011).
27. Lanier, 11. The quintessential Chilean example would be the 2010 hit single “Los adolescentes,” by Dënver. Its music video, widely popular on YouTube, eroticizes suburban teenage life to staccato sequences and electronic beats. See Dënver, “Los adolescentes,” YouTube video, October 2, 2011, https://youtu.be/0lhj7V1QtGE.
28. Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget, 12.
30. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: Norton, 2011).
31. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Selected Writings, 4: 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard/Belknap Press, 2006), 328.
32. Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (New York: Verso, 2013), 10.
33. Glendinning, “Notes Toward a Neo-Luddite Manifesto,” 51.
34. Another forward-looking thinker is the Italian philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi. He suggests, provocatively, that we present-day humans are, vis-à-vis the rise of automation, in the situation that Malinche was regarding Hernán Cortés’s conquest of Mexico: we can temper it, but in any case, we will facilitate it. Franco Berardi, “Malinche and the End of the World,” in The Internet Does Not Exist, ed. Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle (Berlin: Sternberg, 2015), 100–109.
35. Alejandro Zambra, “Recuerdos de un computador personal,” in Mis documentos (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2014), 62.
36. Zambra, “Recuerdos de un computador personal,” 62.
37. Walter Benjamin, “Baudelaire,” trans. Rodney Livingston, in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard/Belknap Press, 2006), 27.
38. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), 45.
39. Alejandro Zambra, Bonsái (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2006), 15.
40. Alejandro Zambra, Bonsai, trans. Caroline De Robertis (New York: Melville, 2012), 10.
41. Giorgio Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?,” in What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2009), 44.
42. Valeria de los Ríos expands on the Agamben connection in her article “Mapa cognitivo, memoria (im)política y medialidad: Contemporaneidad en Alejandro Zambra y Pola Oloixarac,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 48, no. 1 (2014): 145–60.
43. Martin Jay offers a lucid critical response to Bauman’s recurrent use of the liquid metaphor in “Liquidity Crisis: Zygmunt Bauman and the Incredible Lightness of Modernity,” Theory, Culture, and Society 27, no. 6 (2010): 95–106.
44. I expand on this issue in “Aftershock: Naomi Klein and the Southern Cone,” Third Text 26, no. 2 (2012): 217–28.
45. Idelber Avelar, The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999); Nelly Richard, The Insubordination of Signs: Political Change, Cultural Transformation, and Poetics of the Crisis, trans. Alice A. Nelson and Silvia Tandeciarz (Durham, N.C., Duke University Press: 2004); Alberto Moreiras, “Hybridity and Double Consciousness,” Cultural Studies 13, no. 3 (1999): 373–407; Moreiras, The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001).
46. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper, 1977), 4.
47. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990), 874–75.
48. Michael Armbrust, Armando Fox, Rean Griffith, Anthony D. Joseph, Randy H. Katz, Andrew Konwinski, Gunho Lee, David A. Patterson, Ariel Rabkin, Ion Stoica, and Matei Zaharia, “Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing,” Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, Rep. UCB/EECS 28, no. 13 (2009): 3.
49. Jorge Baradit, Synco (Barcelona: Ediciones B, 2008).
52. On the development of ARPANET and its ultimate adoption in civilian life, see Niels Brügger, ed., Web History (New York: Lang, 2010).
Detrás de ellos [pasó] un escuadrón de flamantes Fiat 600 que contenían el microcomputador personal desarrollado por el Instituto Miguel Enríquez para los ejecutivos de terreno de Synco, una maravilla de la miniaturización que había causado asombro en la última feria tecnológica mundial en París. El último Fiat 600 tiraba de un pequeño [remolque] acoplado con el modelo ‘Atacama X-12’, un moderno computador completamente inalámbrico de apenas ochenta kilos de peso.
(Baradit, Synco, 211)
55. Across the Andes, notable Argentine works similarly defamiliarize our technological present, including Daniel Link’s Exposiciones (Buenos Aires: Blatt & Ríos, 2013); and Sebastián Robles’s Las redes invisibles (Buenos Aires: Momofuku, 2017).
Conclusions: Extractivism Estranged
1. See chapter 1, note 21.
2. See Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (2004): 225–48.
3. See Ursula K. Heise, “Ecocriticism and the Transnational Turn in American Studies,” American Literary History 20, no. 1–2 (March 1, 2008): 381–404; Pheng Cheah, What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016).
4. Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (New York: Verso, 2015).
5. “¿Quiere Ud. saber cuál es nuestro destino?, los campos para cultivar el añil, la grana, el café, la caña, el cacao y el algodón, las llanuras solitarias para criar ganados, los desiertos para cazar las bestias feroces, las entrañas de la tierra para excavar el oro que no puede saciar a esa nación avarienta.” Simón Bolívar, “Carta de Jamaica,” in Carta de Jamaica y otros textos (Caracas: Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho, 2015), 56.
6. The most thoughtful exposition of how neoliberalism has bred its own ethos even in Pink Tide (extractivist) governments, and moreover in everyday urban practices, is Verónica Gago’s Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies, trans. Liz Mason-Deese (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017).
7. Bruno Bosteels, The Actuality of Communism (London: Verso, 2011).
8. Bosteels, 29; my emphasis.
9. A touchstone in this discussion is Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999).
10. Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim, eds., Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
11. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), xiii, xv.
12. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 22. For a useful overview of recent leftist thinking that, salutarily, includes the work of Donna Haraway, see Razmig Keucheyan, Left Hemisphere: Mapping Contemporary Theory (New York: Verso, 2013).
13. This position has been articulated differently by McKenzie Wark, who sets out to select “from within the archive those strands of Marxist theory for which the Anthropocene already appears as an object of thought and action in all but name.” Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (London: Verso, 2015), xx. While I find Wark’s cyborg-internationalist agenda persuasive, and consistent with some of my findings, I find his derision of high theory rather troubling.
14. Vladimir Ilich Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 32 (Moscow: Progress, 1973), 93.
15. Lenin, 94. I first learned about this argument from an excerpt, thought-provokingly featured alongside a Brecht poem on Lenin’s death, that serves as the inaugural piece of Debord and Wolman’s remarkable situationist magazine, Les Lèvres nues 1 (1954): 3–4. Other underexamined sources of new materialist intuitions already present in historical materialism include the Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov, who committed suicide in his fifties in the year 1979. See, especially, Ilyenkov, “The Materialist Conception of Thought as the Subject Matter of Logic,” in Dialectical Logic: Essays on Its History and Theory (Moscow: Progress, 1977), 251–88. Ilyenkov’s Mexican contemporary, José Revueltas, reflects on similar matters in “Razón dialéctica y mercancía,” in Dialéctica de la conciencia (Mexico City: Era, 1982), 168–72.
16. For a thoughtful piece on the “crisis of the humanities,” see Eric Hayot, “The Humanities as We Know Them Are Doomed. Now What?,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 1, 2018, https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Humanities-as-We-Know-Them/243769. A fiery debate on the politics of digital humanities was sparked by Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia in “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities,” Los Angeles Review of Books, May 5, 2016, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/neoliberal-tools-archives-political-history-digital-humanities/.
17. Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 237.
18. See Henry Petroski, The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (New York: Knopf, 1992); Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals, SCM Definitions and Glossary of Terms, updated August 2013.
19. See Alberto Acosta, “Extractivism and Neoextractivism: Two Sides of the Same Curse,” Beyond Development 61 (2013): 61–86.
20. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei, in Werke, vol. 4 (Berlin: Dietz, 1959), 466.
An die Stelle der alten lokalen und nationalen Selbstgenügsamkeit und Abgeschlossenheit tritt ein allseitiger Verkehr, eine allseitige Abhängigkeit der Nationen voneinander. Und wie in der materiellen, so auch in der geistigen Produktion. Die geistigen Erzeugnisse der einzelnen Nationen werden Gemeingut. Die nationale Einseitigkeit und Beschränktheit wird mehr und mehr unmöglich, und aus den vielen nationalen und lokalen Literaturen bildet sich eine Weltliteratur.
(Marx and Engels, 466)
22. See Maxim Gorky, Mother (New York: Citadel, 1947); George Orwell, 1984 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017); and Roberto Arlt, Mad Toy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002).
23. Bolaño, 2666, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 469. “Estrella quería saber cosas de computadoras, quería aprender, quería progresar, dijo la muchacha. Tanta computadora, tanta computadora, no me trago una palabra de lo que me dices, tortita, dijo Epifanio. Yo no soy su pinche tortita, dijo la muchacha.” Bolaño, 2666 (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2004), 588.
24. Bolaño, 2666, trans. Wimmer, 484. “Un experto en informática que ha levantado su propio negocio.” Bolaño, 2666, 606.
25. Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre, Maquilapolis, (San Francisco: California Newsreel, 2006), DVD.
26. In a riposte to Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s neoliberal feminism, which encourages (mostly white) women professionals to assert themselves by “leaning in” during Silicon Valley board meetings, the cultural critic bell hooks notes that gender equality discourse is sometimes oblivious of intersectionality and class: “Privileged white women often experience a greater sense of solidarity with men of their same class than with poor white women or women of color.” bell hooks, “Dig Deep: Beyond Lean In,” Feminist Wire, October 28, 2013, https://www.thefeministwire.com/2013/10/17973/.
27. Glendinning, “Notes towards a Neo-Luddite Manifesto,” in Utne Reader 38 (1990): 51.
28. Alberto Vásquez-Figueroa, Coltán (Barcelona: Ediciones B, 2008), 79.
29. Vásquez-Figueroa, 42.
30. Michael Nest, Coltan (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 2.
31. See Michel Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique: Cours au Collège de France (1978–1979) (Paris: Gallimard, 2004).
33. Eric Herhuth has explored this aspect, along with the movie’s heteronormalizing thrust, in “Life, Love, and Programming: The Culture and Politics of WALL-E and Pixar Computer Animation,” Cinema Journal 53, no. 4 (2014): 53–75.
34. Kim Hyesoon, All the Garbage in the World, Unite!, trans. Don Mee Choi (Notre Dame, Ind.: Action, 2011), 29–30.
36. Jorge Furtado, Ilha das Flores (Casa de Cinema de Porto Alegre, 1989), film.
37. Eduardo Coutinho, dir., Boca Do Lixo, (1993; Rio de Janeiro: VideoFilmes, 2004), DVD; Lucy Walker and Karen Harley, Waste Land (London: Almega Projects, 2010), 99 min. For a survey of Brazilian cinema on garbage, see Ernesto Livon-Grosman, “Thinking on Film and Trash: A Few Notes,” ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America 14, no. 2 (2015): 53–55.
38. “Livre é o estado daquele que tem liberdade. Liberdade é uma palavra que o sonho humano alimenta, que não há ninguém que explique e ninguém que não entenda.” Cecília Meireles, “Romance XXIV ou DA BANDEIRA DA INCONFIDÊNCIA,” in Romanceiro da inconfidência (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2004), 82.
39. NPR Staff, “After Dump.”
40. Jasanoff and Kim, Dreamscapes of Modernity.
41. Karl Ove Knausgård, Autumn, vol. 1 (New York: Penguin Random House, 2017), 92.
Don Juan nos dio la espalda y pareció meterse un poco entre la enorme y solitaria mata de café. Como escondiéndose entre las hojas verdes. Como buscando algo entre las hojas verdes. Como queriendo que la vieja mata lo protegiera. Aún de espaldas, estaba quitándole granos de café a la vieja mata, lentamente, tiernamente, sus manos de campesino dejando que los frutos rojos cayeran insonoros sobre la tierra seca. Se agachó un poco, y le quitó los granos más bajos. Se estiró hacia las ramas de arriba, las jaló hacia él, y sus manos expertas las dejaron sin grano alguno. El suelo, alrededor de sus pies, se fue tornando rojo. Su sombrero de petate crujía contra el ramaje. Parecía él ahora más encorvado, más pequeño. Siguió quitando y botando los frutos al suelo. Siguió adentrándose en el follaje de la vieja mata, adentrándose en el verdor de tantas hojas y ramas de la vieja mata, hasta que todo él desapareció por completo.
(Eduardo Halfon, “Han vuelto las aves,” in Signor Hoffman [Barcelona: Libros del Asteroide, 2015], 72)
43. Claude Lanzmann, Shoah (Hollywood, Calif.: New Yorker Video, 2003), DVD. A kindred intervention, pertaining to unspeakable horrors of a different scale, is Patricio Guzmán’s El botón de Nácar [The Pearl Button] (2014). The film’s centerpiece is a pearl button found at the bottom of the ocean, in the process of calcifying back into the rock, as if coming home. The button is in fact forensic evidence (but not only that): it belonged to the shirt of a desaparecido thrown to the ocean under Pinochet. Patricio Guzmán, The Pearl Button (New York: Kino Lorber, 2016), DVD.
44. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Idea of Natural-History,” in Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno, ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 111–24. For an up-to-date take on some of these ideas, see chap. 7 of Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010). While discussing Darwin, Bennett devotes fascinating pages to the “small agency” of worms in human history—without the accumulated effects of their exertions, there would be no culture to speak of.
45. These meanings are also elucidated, more explicitly and programmatically, in Teixeira Coelho’s História natural da ditadura (São Paulo: Iluminuras 2006). Equal parts Sebald and Oswald de Andrade, this name-dropping, free-associating rumination of a book features black-and-white photographs and long paragraphs that seek to “anticonstruct” dictatorship. Here dictatorship is understood as a more or less latent worldwide condition epitomized by the Chinese wall, the unfortunate and greatest achievement of humanity (in that it is the sole construction visible from space), countered by such constructions as Walter Benjamin’s memorial in Port Bou. Coelho, a professor emeritus of cultural agency (açao cultural), offers a prescient, materialist call to arms for the ongoing resistance to the country’s sharp rightist turn: “Tudo aquilo que entra em tensão ou que trabalha em tensão, como se diz, a exemplo de um cabo de aço que sustenta uma ponte, se solidifica cada vez mais” (277).
46. Rubén Darío, “El rey burgués,” in Obras completas, ed. Julio Ortega, vol. 1 (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2007), 63–67.
47. Rosario Castellanos, Oficio de tinieblas (Mexico City: Mortiz, 1966); trans. Esther Allen as The Book of Lamentations (New York: Penguin, 1998); Julio Cortázar, Rayuela (Madrid: Catedra, 1963); trans. Gregory Rabassa as Hopscotch (New York: Penguin, 1966).
48. See Jorge Coronado and Ximena Briceño, eds., Visiones de los Andes: Ensayos crític0s sobre el concepto de paisaje y región (La Paz: University of Pittsburgh Press and Plural, 2019), 184–86.
49. See Malcolm Quinn, The Swastika: Constructing the Symbol (New York: Routledge, 2005).
50. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Continuum, 1997), 5.
51. This speculative claim is inspired in equal parts by Sidney Mintz’s historical-materialist history of sugar and by Michael Pollan’s observations on the coevolution of crops and concepts (see chapter 1). See Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1986). For a forgotten classic history of Cuban sugar—which Mintz omits—see Manuel Moreno Fraginals’s The Sugarmill: The Socioeconomic Complex of Sugar in Cuba, 1760–1860 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1976). The Spanish first edition, from 1964, is dedicated to Ernesto Che Guevara. Roberto González Echevarría pointed out Mintz’s omission to me at Yale.
53. Neil Larsen, “Literature, Immanent Critique, and the Problem of Standpoint,” in Literary Materialisms, ed. Mathias Nilges and Emilio Sauri (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 76.
54. Raymond L. Williams, “An Eco-critical Reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude,” in The Cambridge Companion to Gabriel García Márquez, ed. Philip Swanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 64–77.