Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature by Ignacio Sánchez Prado (review)

Territorially based literary histories can hide fascinating lines of inquiry. World literature does not reliably solve this problem. Global commonalities obscure local specificities. Entire traditions become exceptions to a dominant, allegedly universal system. The first chapter of Ignacio Sánchez Prado’s groundbreaking history of Mexican literature from the 1960s to the present is about Sergio Pitol. It proves that a single author’s career can illuminate more than studies with plainly national, regional or global ambitions often do by investigating a range of topics within which an author functions as a nodal point of material practices, ideas, and texts. Sánchez Prado’s emphasis on Pitol’s work as a translator decenters discussions of Mexican politics and culture that tend to focus too much on the United States, Western Europe, and Latin America. For example, Pitol’s translations of Lu Hsun and Boris Pilniak reflects his interest in reading and making accessible writers whose work challenges official culture. These writers’ uneasy or even fatally dissenting relations (in the case of Pilniak) to their governments and established cultural norms appeal to Pitol because they demonstrate literature’s capacity for resistance and because they are similar to iconoclastic and cosmopolitan writers and movements in Mexico. Pitol’s engagement with and promotion of literary traditions not often associated with Mexico or Latin America places him in literary circuits decentered in a way similar to the political circuits that motivated his translations, which Sánchez Prado shows in readings of Pitol’s story, “Nocturno de Bujara,” written in Moscow in 1979 and 1980, and the novel El desfile del amor, written in Czechoslovakia and Spain in 1983 and 1984.

Pitol’s work for pioneering Spanish publishing houses, Tusquets and Anagrama, provides a transition to the book’s second chapter about Jorge Volpi, Ignacio Padilla, and Pedro Ángel Palou. Sánchez Prado contextualizes the Crack in the consolidation of the publishing industry that began to intensify in the 1980s. He reads Volpi’s En busca de Klingsor (1999), Padilla’s Amphytrion (2000) and La Gruta del Toscano (2006), and Palou’s Paraíso clausurado (2000), in order to situate them at the intersections of multiple traditions, themes, and forms, including the Contemporáneos, Renaissance literature, Nazism, and the thriller. Sánchez Prado explicates the Crack’s coherency, while distinguishing its practitioners. Volpi writes a global novel; Padilla challenges the representational foundations of the witness, and Palou defines the loss of certain literary voices and traditions as “a politics of representation” (138) that demarcates aesthetic limits and possibilities. His original and insightful readings of Volpi’s, Padilla’s, and Palou’s texts help Sánchez Prado place them in relation to both Pitol’s cosmopolitan genealogy and the topic of his final chapter, Mexican women writers and the 1990s “Boom femenino.”

Strategic Occidentalism juxtaposes the remarkable success of late twentieth-century women writers to the exceptional status afforded them previously. Nellie Campobello, Elena Garro, and Inés Arredondo, for example, were outliers in a definitively masculine field. It is especially valuable for understanding Mexican literary history amidst global changes in publishing and a dismaying consistency in the worldwide reception of Latin American literature (such as an expectation of exoticism fulfilled by latter day magical realism), as is Sánchez Prado’s analysis of the market pressures exacerbated for women writers, such as pigeonholing and marketing their work in typically disrespected genres like the romance novel. Strategic Occidentalism elucidates strategies for negotiating these pressures by focusing on three writers: Carmen Boullosa, Ana García Bergua, and Cristina Rivera Garza. Boullosa’s pirate novels, Son vacas, somos puercos (1991) and El médico de los piratas (1992), showcase her transformation of a non-national source text and her skill at presenting historical language as a product of power relations specific to a certain time and place. García Bergua’s...