Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture ed. by Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno, and Inés Ordiz (review)

This timely volume attests to the undeniable ascendancy of the Gothic as an object of inquiry within Latin American Studies. This ascendancy is itself an echo of the increasing prestige and dominance of the Gothic in Latin America and the larger global cultural arena. Consider a telling example: two of the most visible—and talented—Latin American writers today, the Argentines Samanta Schweblin and Mariana Enriquez, jumped to global fame on the strengths of two Gothic books, the nouvelle Fever Dream (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize), and the short story collection Things We Lost in the Fire (translated, so far, into more than twenty languages).

In Latin America, as the editors of this volume correctly point out, the label gótico coexists with others: horror, terror, fantástico (closer to the French fantastique than to the English fantasy). This plurality poses in itself an interesting question, that speaks to the traditionally dubious prestige of the Gothic, and to how literature, as an institution in Latin America, was conceived until quite recently. This erasure poses a number of tasks for scholars: 1) to explain why the Gothic has not, until recently, assumed its own name as such and why it does now; 2) to reconstruct a lineage of the Gothic in Latin America; 3) to define Gothic's preoccupations, topics, and formal traits; and 4) to assess its specificity, both at the regional level (for example, what does the Gothic have in common throughout Latin America, and what differentiates it from metropolitan instances of the Gothic, or the more deterritorialized global Gothic?) and within particular areas or nations (e.g. how is the Argentine Gothic different from, let's say, Mexican or Caribbean Gothic?). These are not easy tasks: the object of inquiry is conceptually—and perhaps inherently—ill-defined. Is the Gothic a genre defined by specific topics, themes, and narrative twists, is it a mode, or is it just a constellation of tropes—such as the past that returns, pollution, the creature in-between, and so forth—that inflects multiple discursive practices, both fictional and non-fictional? Since the object is arduous to define, the corpus to be studied is therefore not easily isolated. Furthermore, the problems that could define the Gothic in the Latin American context are only now becoming visible.

Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture is one of the first books, and probably the most comprehensive so far, to tackle these challenges. The seventeen contributors in this volume are particularly adept to the tasks at hand: this is not a hastily assembled group of academics, who jumped on the bandwagon of a fashionable topic. For the most part, the contributors are scholars who have been working and publishing on different aspects of the topic for years, and who have been interacting with each other at conferences and publications. They, therefore, bring a collective depth of knowledge to the volume in their respective geographical areas or topics. This, and the carefully balanced regional/national distribution of the chapters, gives Latin American Gothic a coherence that is rare in these types of enterprises, and for this, the editors should be congratulated.

After the well-thought-out introduction, in which the editors establish the theoretical parameters of the volume, there are a few well-defined preoccupations that permeate the book's chapters. Several engage deliberately in the partial or comprehensive reconstruction of Gothic lineages, mostly (but not exclusively) at the national level, such as Inés Ordiz and Soledad Quereillac's consideration of Argentina, Olga Ries's of Chile, Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodríguez's of Colombia, and Rosa María Díez Cobo's of Peru. Of course, to a certain degree, most of the articles engage in such a task, even when focusing on specific authors or works. Some examples are Antonio Alcalá Rodríguez's work on Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, Adriana Gordillo's study of Carlos Fuentes...