The Latin American Literary Boom and U.S. Nationalism during the Cold War by Deborah Cohn (review)

The Latin Americanist, June 2015 legal rights for women, but in other realms (e.g. property) women developed their own concepts of liberty and citizenship. Did rural women of all classes have more or less latitude in legal and traditional realms than their urban, central Venezuelan counterparts? Finally, Zahler argues, as many have in the past, that Indians were numerically and socially insignificant in the nineteenth century. No more than 29 percent of the total population was indigenous (24), but the indigenous population was not evenly distributed , meaning some regions had sizeable, socially engaged indigenous populations (e.g. Linder, The Americas, 1999; Morse, The Americas, 2003). What is left to analyze is what law, the constitution, liberty, liberalism, and patriarchy meant to indigenous populations and how those populations may have manipulated those concepts to serve their purposes. Research into all of these questions places Venezuela squarely in the Latin American historiographical mainstream, not the margins, exactly what Zahler has done with this book. Ambitious Rebels is a study that works equally well for Latin Americanists interested in the topics of law, liberalism , liberty, patriarchy, and honor as is does for Venezuelanists who welcome new research into the complexities of the Venezuelan middle period. Kim Morse Department of History Washburn University THE LATIN AMERICAN LITERARY BOOM AND U.S. NATIONALISM DURING THE COLD WAR. By Deborah Cohn. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012, p. 264, $34.95. If the search for the great (North) American novel goes on, the great Latin American novel was thought discovered in 1970. That was the year that the English translation of Gabriel Garcı́a Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude appeared and became a sensation in the English-speaking world. It was the second work by a Latin American writer to make the New York Times bestseller list (after Jorge Amado’s Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon), and it represented the height of the “boom” in Latin American letters. The literature of the boom generation, for good and for ill, continues to provide readers from around the world with metaphors and points of reference for understanding Latin American politics, society, and history. But, as Deborah Cohn argues in this subtle and rewarding book, the boom happened neither precisely by accident nor by design. It was the complex result of multiple factors, including the work of Spanish publishing houses and literary agents, the solidarity of a small group of talented Latin American writers, the international appeal of the Cuban Revolution, and the Cold War politics of institutions and foundations in the United States. It is the U.S. Cold War politics of the boom that are the primary subject of Cohn’s book, and they form a particularly rich vein for thinking through 90 Book Reviews problems of cultural transmission. Most of the authors of the boom were resolutely left-wing—sympathizers and defenders of the Cuban Revolution . Garcı́a Márquez would be famous for his decades-long friendship with Fidel Castro. And many of the novels of the boom explored the decadence of the Latin American bourgeoisie and had clear anti-capitalist interpretations. Yet U.S.-based foundations and organizations with anti-revolutionary Cold War outlooks contributed to making the boom possible. As Cohn writes, “Latin American literature’s circulation in the United States thus paradoxically benefited from both hegemonic and anti-hegemonic forces—that is, from endeavors that stemmed from commitments to anti-revolutionary and revolutionary politics alike” (4). To make the argument, Cohn moves through investigations of a number of institutions that had Cold War agendas at work in the background but were made into something more complex than that by their participants. She begins with a description of the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, which denied visas to foreigners with suspected ties to Communism, a provision that caused intermittent problems for many Latin American writers. The subsequent three chapters cover the meeting of International P.E.N. in New York in 1966, the growth of Latin American literature studies in U.S. universities in the 1960s, the translations sponsored by grants from the Association of American University Presses, and the Ford- and Rockefeller-funded Center for Inter-American Relations (CIAR). The...