Dr. Tamara Mitchell, Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies at UBC, examines how globalization is leveraged by Latin American thinkers and artists to critique and shape world relations.
Tamara Mitchell, Assistant Professor of Spanish Studies
“My project considers how globalization is being leveraged by Latin American thinkers and artists to critique and shape world relations.”
Research
My research focuses on Mexican and Central American narrative fiction in the age of neoliberal globalization. The central question my work addresses is how “national literatures” (Mexican literature, Guatemalan literature, etc.) respond to the transnational exchanges of globalization.
My project, entitled Unbounded: Latin American Literature in the Age of Technological Globalization, considers how globalization is being leveraged by Latin American thinkers and artists to critique and shape world relations.
I examine the narrative fiction of Roberto Bolaño, Horacio Castellanos Moya, and Valeria Luiselli, and the installation art of Teresa Margolles. I posit that these artists exploit the commodity status of their work as part of the global art market to critique and destabilize boundaries between the Global North and South.
Post-National Literature
One of the key terms that my research investigates is the notion of “post-nationalism”. This term signals that, while the nation state is still an important political entity, neoliberalism and globalization are becoming increasingly dominant in terms of structuring world relations. This has a range of effects in our day-to-day lives.
During much of the twentieth century, we witnessed the height of the nation state’s strength in terms of determining laws, disseminating ideologies, protecting borders, and deploying legitimate violence through policing and the military. But, since the end of the Cold War, the sovereignty of the nation state is in decline. In its place, and largely resulting from the deterritorialization of capital, we can observe increased transnational flows of culture, goods, finance, and people.
However, the nation state still exists, as do its ideologies and constructs like national borders, citizenship, and currencies. My project interrogates the tensions and contradictions that arise as national modernity recedes and globalization expands, particularly by analyzing the responses of Mexican and Central American literature to this changing geopolitical milieu.
Tellingly, the authors that I focus on are astonishingly peripatetic—they move from place to place with little regard for a fixed national identity.
As one example, Horacio Castellanos Moya was born in Honduras and moved to El Salvador as a small child. During the early years of El Salvador’s most recent civil conflict, he moved to Toronto to pursue an undergraduate degree. He then returned to Latin America to cover the Salvadoran civil war as a journalist in Mexico and Costa Rica. Since then, he has lived in Japan, Germany, Spain, and El Salvador, and now teaches at the University of Iowa in the United States. Bolaño and Luiselli have led similarly nomadic lives, and this sort of post-national existence engenders rich and complex works of fiction that bring unique perspectives to bear on questions of belonging, immigration, national identity, and geopolitical borders.
Cover illustration of Insensatez by Horacio Castellanos Moya: The Body of Abel Found by Adam and Eve (1826) by William Blake. Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, New York
Approach
A key part of my approach is to attend to my authors’ relationship to the literary tradition that precedes them.
Because the modern novel developed alongside the nation state, it is natural to assume that, if the nation state is in decline, the literary genres that are associated with the nation must also be in flux.
One of the most fascinating takeaways of this project is that my authors both index and participate in the collapse of modern literary genres. As an example, detective fiction is often considered the exemplary popular literature of national modernity, given that this genre comments on systems of power and justice. Latin American detective fiction has always been unique due to its critical attitude toward the state, because the Latin American state is frequently viewed as criminally complicit rather than as a protector of citizenry. However, in recent novels by Bolaño, there is a total breakdown of the critical potential of the detective fiction genre—the police cannot detect, there is no possibility of identifying a murderer, and the crimes just keep piling up—which I interpret as a signal that the very category of the state is no longer a productive target of criticism.
In this way, my work examines how contemporary Latin American authors revisit earlier aesthetic conventions (detective fiction, magical realism, the avant-garde, Bildungsroman) in novels whose settings are firmly situated in a neoliberal, globalized economy. I argue that these returns to the literary tradition shed light on emergent sociopolitical relations and constitute a uniquely post-national literary intervention.
Insights
Throughout national modernity, a common discourse has cast Latin American countries and other “peripheral” nations as underdeveloped and not quite modern enough. This rhetoric attributes political corruption and economic and social discord to underdevelopment or a lack of “progress.”
Interestingly, the works that I examine refuse to accept a similar discourse regarding neoliberal globalization; they insist on Latin America’s full-fledged arrival to neoliberal globalization. This is not a celebratory position, however, and the texts lay bare the differential nature of the present epoch, underscoring the widespread inequality and insecurity of the era.
Impact
In the coming year, I will present my work at international conferences, such as the Latin American Studies Association Conference in Guadalajara, Mexico, the American Comparative Literature Association Congress in Chicago, IL, and the Latina/o Studies Conference at Notre Dame University.
Additionally, I am in the early stages of launching a digital platform, “Latin American Literary Soundscapes,” that will incorporate the sounds of narrative fiction in an open-access website. This project will combine literary analysis and Sound Studies to make the aural aspects of written literature—musicality, dialect, white noise, etc.—perceptible in a meaningful way. So, in a traditional academic article, I would note—in written language—the integral role of aurality and musicality in a narrative text. For instance, Mexican novelist Laury Leite’s En la soledad de un cielo muerto (In the Solitude of a Dead Sky 2017) incorporates meter and repetitive phrasing into its narrative structure in a way that mimics classical music, a genre central to the identity of the novel’s protagonist, a concert pianist.
In contrast, by incorporating this argument on a website that also makes the sonic elements of the narrative audible, the reader-listener could hear the classical music alongside the literary analysis and perceive the significance of sound in narrative fiction in a more meaningful way. “Latin American Literary Soundscapes” seeks to create an inviting and dynamic space that will be appealing to a wide variety of audiences and that sparks renewed interest in Latin American literatures and cultures.
Finally, given that my topic addresses violence, corruption, and economic inequality that stems from neoliberal globalization, I have had opportunities to participate in radio interviews and speak with local communities in Canada and the United States about the hemispheric repercussions of our actions and national policies. Following the Ayotzinapa disappearances in 2014 (in Iguala, Mexico), I co-organized a public forum in Bloomington, IN, that sought to raise awareness of how tourism, recreational drug use, and migration policies in the United States affect Mexico and Central America.
Dr. Tamara Mitchell is a recipient of the Hampton Research Grant and Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society Research Grant (Indiana University).
