The Return of the Contemporary

The Latin American Novel in the End Times

The Return of the Contemporary is a beautifully written book with a strongly articulated and original argument. Ambitious in its geographical reach and timely in its subject matter and corpus, its abiding question of how and why Latin American writers over the past twenty years have engaged with a present marked by crisis—not only environmental but also economic and political—is rigorously and compellingly examined.

Lesley Wylie, University of Leicester

In The Return of the Contemporary, Nicolás Campisi combines the fields of post-dictatorship studies and environmental humanities to analyze Latin American cultural production in the neoliberal age. Each chapter pairs two authors from different parts of Latin America and the Caribbean who create a common vocabulary in which to frame the various crises of the region’s present and recent past, such as climate change, forced migration, the collapse of state institutions, and the afterlives of slavery. By situating itself at the intersection of ecocritical and environmental humanities, affect studies, and the politics of memory and postmemory, Campisi presents new comparative methods to show how Latin America’s neoliberal crisis prompted significant changes in how the novel as a form imagines a different future.

328 Pages, 6 x 9 in.

December, 2024

isbn : 9780822948391

Series

Illuminations: Cultural Formations of the Americas

Subjects

Literary Criticism / Caribbean & Latin American

about the author

Nicolás Campisi is assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University. His research focuses on contemporary Latin American literature, environmental humanities, and memory studies. His work has appeared in journals such as Revista Hispánica Moderna, Revista Iberoamericana, and A Contracorriente.

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