New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative: Post-National Literatures and the Canon ed. by Timothy R. Robbins and José Eduardo González (review)

New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative: Post-National Literatures and the Canon is a well-conceived examination of recent Latin American narrative that furthers two parallel yet connected lines of inquiry: first, the collection of essays establishes the groundwork for discussing several contemporary movements or “generations,” working through their poetics and roughly tracing their aesthetics; second, it situates these works in relation to the greater body of Latin American narrative, more specifically the Boom and its immediate aftermath. Make no mistake about it—this is an ambitious project, and one that Timothy R. Robbins and José Eduardo González hone and craft to produce a finished product that is useful not only as a reference guide to non-specialist readers, but to researchers interested in locating authors and texts within the wide spectrum that New Trends outlines. The volume is not, however, an encyclopedic reference—like the recent The Contemporary Spanish-American Novel: Bolaño and After—but an orientative text that includes a few essays that will be essential reading for the topic at hand.

New Trends opens with a quote by Ángel Rama on the enduring presence of modernismo. This citation sets the tone for not only the introduction but several of the chapters in the anthology, as there is a genuine attempt to seek a balance between thinkers from different geo-academic circles. There is, thus, a balance between Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters and theories forwarded by the likes of Beatriz Sarlo, Donald Shaw, and Néstor García Canclini on the genesis of a literature after the Boom. Robbins and González mobilize Rama’s musings on Darío to further a concise but illuminative discussion of the rough swaths or trajectories that have been planted in recent Latin American narrative, discussing albeit overtly the very designator of “Latin American” to these at times disparate works and authors. The editors outline the work and manifestos of McOndo and Crack writers, to then segue into a discussion of what they term posnacionalista fiction (6), echoing works by others such as Aníbal González who have discussed writers “after the nation.” For the editors of New Trends, these new works are characterized by “the erosion of the nation-state and the fragile production of locality” (6). There is no effort to clearly define this periodization of Latin American literature (something that will later be argued to be intrinsic to the reception of the Boom)—instead, the editors focus on “four aspects of contemporary life in Latin America that . . . are strongly shaping the way cultural producers relate to their social formation and their national spaces” (6). Namely, they examine “the emergence of a global popular culture,” “the rise of the internet,” “a disinterest in politics,” and “the effects of the dissolution of the nation-state discourse” (12). Several of these factors have been mulled over, reconfigured, and deconstructed in other places, but Robbins and González adhere to them as founding principles to contemporary Latin American narrative. The introduction, then, proves useful for critics attempting to situate many new(er) writers who clearly conform to these rough characteristics that the editors trace.

The individual essays of New Trends covers work from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Puerto Rico, focusing at times on wider movements such as the Crack (as is the case of Regalado López’s excellent piece) or on individual authors, and, at times, a specific work. The breadth of the texts and writers analyzed is not exhaustive—and the editors make it clear early on that it is not their intention to be so—but well-represented and useful for both generalists and specialists. The lack, however, of any mention of Central American fiction is almost criminal, given the importance of writers such as Horacio Castellanos Moya, Rodrigo Rey...