Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age by Ericka Beckman (review)

The central contention of Ericka Beckman’s book, Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age, is that Latin American economies and societies between 1870 and 1930 were characterized by an elite who believed that “integration into the world order of capital [was] not only desirable, but inevitable” (p. ix). Her study sets out to explain why and how this was the case. The crux of her argument rests on understanding two principal aspects of this intellectual phenomenon: (1) what precisely this elite had to believe in order to articulate a liberal fundamentalism in nineteenth-century Latin America and (2) the mechanisms these elites developed to maintain the belief in the inevitability of “progress” amid the speculative bubbles and economic crises that contradicted that belief. The book argues that these dual phenomena can be explained with a single concept: the title’s “capital fictions.”

Beckman fleshes out this concept in two ways. Building on the models of materialist critique developed by a series of Marxist cultural critics and historians of economics, the first sense of the term articulates “fictions generated by capital” (p. x) (such as Ricardian comparative advantage and specialization or the promises of equality and democracy through the free market). The second sense of the term is associated with “expressions of those fictions within an assembled corpus of images and texts” (p. x), or, more specifically, novels, poetry, bank notes, advertisements, “rhetorical styles” (p. x), and “narrative solutions” (p. x). Beckman argues that “capital fiction” as a conceptual framework makes it possible for scholars to read treatises on liberal economics together with the novels, poems, and commercial objects published throughout the period as a way to understand how fictions of capital and fictions about capital mutually produced the periods of “Boom” (chapters 1 and 2) and “Bust” (chapters 3, 4, and 5) that structure her study.

Part 1 examines the promise and prosperity of the liberal period through two rhetorical articulations of the commodity fetish: the production-oriented “export reverie” (Chapter 1) and the consumption-oriented “modernist import catalogue” (Chapter 2). Beckman defines “export reverie” as “a discourse that melded political economy, civic rhetoric, and aesthetics to present dream visions” (p. 6) of “regional wealth before it had actually materialized” (p. 5). Focusing principally on two texts—Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s political-economic essay, Argirópolis (1850), and José Martí’s political pamphlet, Guatemala (1878)—Beckman argues that the discourse of dreams of future wealth generated from the export of raw materials were central to the development of a consensus around the “radical reorganization of material and social relations” (p. 20) along liberal principles. This is secured in texts like Martí’s by separating the realities of production (such as the coercion of indigenous labor and dispossession of collective land holdings for the purpose of scaling up of coffee production in Guatemala) from the perpetual possibilities and promise represented by seemingly autonomous and inexhaustible commodities such as coffee, bananas, sugar, tobacco, wheat, ore, and so on. In a similar way, the commodity fetish that separates production processes from the commodity as it appears on the market is also what underscores what Beckman calls the “modernist import catalogue” in Chapter 2. Focusing on works by the poets Rubén Darío, Julián del Casal, and José Asunción Silva, Beckman argues that modernista poetry, known for its rejection of commercial language and embrace of “art for art’s sake,” actually became a mechanism for promoting “luxury consumption within a field of rapidly expanding transnational commercial relations” (p. 65). Like the utopian visions of coffee or sugar promoted by liberal reformers, these idealized commodities populating modernista poetry continued to produce desire for economic liberalism by producing desire for the luxury items that constituted both international trade and the modernistas’ aesthetic utopias.

The “Bust” section of the book examines the collapse of the futures that were supposedly guaranteed by liberal...