Tamara Mitchell - Böcker

The novel emerged in lockstep with the nation-state, serving as the cultural counterpart to political form in the modern era. However, these dynamics are unraveling as the raison d’être of the contemporary state veers from its people to the neoliberal market. In Novel Distortions, Tamara L. Mitchell analyzes recent (1996–2019) Mexican and Central American fiction and theorizes this emergent epoch through the lens of postnationalism, which describes the altered but still active role of the patriarchal nation-state in society and culture, as well as the way in which novelistic form inscribes and is a symptom of these changes. Within this context, Mitchell examines narrative fiction that mobilizes a postnational aesthetics to illuminate the distortionary effects of neoliberalism and state violence on modern literary and political forms. As Mexico and Central America confront this new reality, this corpus dramatizes the state’s incapacity to guarantee the security of its people and territory. At the same time, the works’ postnational aesthetics lend imaginative definition to forms of relationality, care, and storytelling that defy the individuality and exclusion fomented by emergent neoliberal logic.

Novel Distortions analyzes recent (1996-2019) Mexican and Central American novels through aesthetic, economic, and political lenses to interrogate two interrelated crises: the decline of national modernity and the shifting role of the novel as a genre that shapes national identity, instructs citizens in proper conduct, and conveys ideology to the reading public. Considering works penned both domestically and in the diaspora, Mitchell proposes that a contemporary understanding of culture and society must account for the waning of the nation-state alongside burgeoning globalization as the dominant ordering system of world relations. Without romanticizing the nation-state, which has always been a fraught institution in Latin America, Mitchell recognizes the power and structural vacuum that has emerged as the epoch of national modernity recedes. As Mexico and Central America confront this new reality, this corpus lends imaginative definition to the state’s incapacity to respond to the challenges of neoliberalism and to guarantee the safety and security of its people. Mitchell explores how contemporary Mexican and Central American authors mobilize a neoliberal aesthetics to unsettle the category of national literature as a means of representing and responding to the emergence of a distinctly postnational epoch.