The Twentieth-Century Spanish American Novel

Thirteen: Modern, Postmodern, and Transnational: The Latin American Novel in the 1990s

Thirteen Modern, Postmodern, and Transnational: The Latin American Novel in the 1990s The postmodern and transnational interests of the Latin American writer were evident in the s, a period when the Latin American novel was a heterogeneous cultural manifestation of modernist, postmodern, post-postmodern, feminist, and gay fiction. These fives modes overlap in many ways, frequently sharing a commitment to subverting the predominant discourses of authority and power. Novelists still writing in a primarily modernist vein were associated in Latin America with what was called the Boom and the Postboom. Among these, in the view of many readers and critics, were Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Rosario Ferré, César Aira, Mempo Giardinelli, Isabel Allende, and Antonio Skármeta. Laura Esquivel became one of the best-selling writers of the decade with her first novel, Como agua para chocolate (); in its English translation, Like Water for Chocolate, this novel had considerable repercussions throughout the Americas in the s. Writers such as Diamela Eltit, Alicia Borinsky, and Ricardo Piglia, with a more radical aesthetic and political agenda that some critics have identified as postmodern, published in the s, as did a new generation of post-postmodern writers that included such novelists as the Mexicans David Toscana, Juan Villoro, and Jorge Volpi, the Chilean Alberto Fuguet , and the Bolivian Edmundo Paz Soldán.1 Feminist, gay, and lesbian writers, who became quite visible in the s—and some of whom can easily be associated with the modernist and postmodern novel—continued writing in the s. By the s, Elena PoniatowTseng 2003.2.4 07:37 6754 Williams / THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY SPANISH AMERICAN NOVEL / sheet 219 of 280 206 Toward a Postboom, Feminist, and Postmodern Novel, 1968–1999 ska, who had been known primarily as a journalist and author of testimonio , became established as a prominent feminist novelist with the publication of her Tinísima (). Latin American writers and their readers observed the economic and cultural globalization of the s. The most important cultural context of the increasingly transnational s was the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and accords that were made on a lesser scale throughout the Americas. Globalization was an important phenomenon of the s, and many Latin American intellectuals , including novelists and cultural critics such as Néstor García Canclini, were critical of this change. With the end of the Cold War and its bipolar agenda, Latin American leaders and intellectuals had to rethink and reconfigure the old lines of left versus right and the attendant ideological boundaries. NAFTA and globalization meant a new relationship between the United States and the other nations of the Americas, particularly Mexico. The uprising in Chiapas in  served as a reminder to the Mexican government that the new economic order was not successfully incorporating all segments of Mexican society.The ongoing delegitimization of the PRI culminated in its loss of credibility among the majority of the populace in Mexico by the end of the s.2 Throughout the decade, the nation mulled over the memory of Vargas Llosa’s public declaration in the early s that Mexico’s PRI was la dictadura perfecta. Colombia’s endless crises led to de facto civil war by the late s, with the country’s terrain divided among the government, leftist groups, and drug lords. Several Colombian novelists wrote fiction related to this crisis and the drug culture; Fernando Vallejo’s La virgen de los sicarios (), set in the periphery of Medellín, was one of the most widely read. One significant cultural factor in the s globalization has been the effect of multinational publishing companies on the novelistic production of Latin America. The expansion of these multinational publishing firms has shrunk the space for new writers and innovative fiction. Two young writers, the Chileans Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez, responded to this situation with a volume of fiction titled McOndo (),3 which they deem an anti–magic realist set of fictions. In the s, several Latin American nations were still paying the political and social and economic costs of the dictatorships of the s and s, particularly in Chile and Argentina. In DecemTseng 2003.2.4 07:37 6754 Williams / THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY SPANISH AMERICAN NOVEL / sheet 220 of 280 The Latin American Novel in the 1990s 207 ber , leftist and conservative candidates for the presidency...