In-Progress Book Manuscripts:

Reinventions of Realism: Neoliberalism, Form and Dispossession in the Peruvian and Colombian Novel

Reinventions of Realism reveals how realist forms provide fresh insights into the social memory of indigenous societies by unveiling the structural roots of paramilitary violence, land dispossession, and ecological devastation. In this project I examine how realism plotted the emergence of neoliberalism in both countries through armed conflict. Here I argue that between the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, narrators employed different modes of realism to plot how violence in rural areas and against indigenous/Andean populations paved the way to contemporary capitalism. In this vein, I sustain the idea of “persistence and mutation” to theorize the relation between the realist form and the impact of transitions to and within capitalism in Latin America. In the 1980s, for example, Gustavo Álvarez Gardeazábal’s El divino (1984) and Félix Huamán Cabrera’s Candela quema luceros (1989), partially abandon magic realism to depict the emergence of new social subjects in the countryside, linked to the rise of political violence, while tracing a temporality focused in the immediate present. Moreover, between 2000 and 2015, Julián Pérez’ Retablo (2004) and Daniel Ferreira’s Rebelión de los oficios inútiles (2014) reclaim the historical novel in order to reconstruct the historical arc of dispossession affecting rural societies, thereby foregrounding the historical roots of contemporary violence associated with armed conflict. I conclude by suggesting how mutations of realism may contribute to reinterpretations of Latin American Boom and contemporary novels to apprehend the uneven development in Global South contexts.