Can rubber trees, silicone dolls, corpses, soil, subatomic particles, designer shoes, and discarded computers become the protagonists of contemporary literature-and what does this tell us about the relationship between humans and objects? In Things with a History, Héctor Hoyos argues that the roles of objects in recent Latin American fiction offer a way to integrate materialisms old and new, transforming our understanding of how things shape social and political relations.
Discussing contemporary authors including Roberto Bolaño, Ariel Magnus, César Aira, and Blanca Wiethüchter as well as classic writers such as Fernando Ortiz and José Eustasio Rivera, Hoyos considers how Latin American literature has cast things as repositories of history, with an emphasis on the radically transformed circulation of artifacts under globalization. He traces a tradition of thought, transcultural materialism, that draws from the capacity of literary language to defamiliarize our place within the tangible world. Hoyos contrasts new materialisms with historical-materialist approaches, exposing how recent tendencies sometimes sidestep concepts such as primitive accumulation, commodity fetishism, and conspicuous consumption, which have been central to Latin American history and literature. He contends that an integrative approach informed by both historical and new materialisms can balance seeing things as a means to reveal the true nature of social relations with appraisals of things in their autonomy. Things with a History simultaneously offers a sweeping account of the material turn in recent Latin American culture and reinvigorates social theory and cultural critique.
Can rubber trees, silicone dolls, corpses, soil, subatomic particles, designer shoes, and discarded computers become the protagonists of contemporary literature-and what does this tell us about the relationship between humans and objects? In Things with a History, Héctor Hoyos argues that the roles of objects in recent Latin American fiction offer a way to integrate materialisms old and new, transforming our understanding of how things shape social and political relations.
Discussing contemporary authors including Roberto Bolaño, Ariel Magnus, César Aira, and Blanca Wiethüchter as well as classic writers such as Fernando Ortiz and José Eustasio Rivera, Hoyos considers how Latin American literature has cast things as repositories of history, with an emphasis on the radically transformed circulation of artifacts under globalization. He traces a tradition of thought, transcultural materialism, that draws from the capacity of literary language to defamiliarize our place within the tangible world. Hoyos contrasts new materialisms with historical-materialist approaches, exposing how recent tendencies sometimes sidestep concepts such as primitive accumulation, commodity fetishism, and conspicuous consumption, which have been central to Latin American history and literature. He contends that an integrative approach informed by both historical and new materialisms can balance seeing things as a means to reveal the true nature of social relations with appraisals of things in their autonomy. Things with a History simultaneously offers a sweeping account of the material turn in recent Latin American culture and reinvigorates social theory and cultural critique.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Tale of Two Materialisms
Part I: Objects
1. Raw Stuff Disavowed
2. Of Rocks and Particles
3. Corpse Narratives as Literary History
Part II: Assemblages
4. Politics and Praxis of Hyperfetishism
5. Digitalia from the Margins
Conclusions: Extractivism Estranged
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Héctor Hoyos is associate professor of Latin American literature and culture at Stanford University. He is the author of Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel (Columbia, 2015).
In this singular book, Hoyos unveils a world of unexplored
relations between subjects, objects, materiality, and
immateriality. He explores the social pact between words and
things. Through the idea of transcultural materialism, Hoyos
discusses how contemporary Latin American literature mobilizes
cultural meanings to illuminate moments in an exploitative global
economy. The book deploys a sophisticated web of literary
genealogies, as well as theories of materialism, and engages us in
new conversations on literature in the global context.
*Graciela Montaldo, Columbia University*
Things with a History provides a fresh optic on the new
materialisms of our time and on the history of things (rubber, cell
phones, corpses) that have shaped the history of our present.
Héctor Hoyos engages a wonderful range of contemporary Latin
American authors and a powerful tradition attuned to both nonhuman
agency and human responsibility, unwilling to unlearn the lessons
of historical materialism. Grappling with these regional
“literatures of extraction” as a political ecologist, Hoyos
contributes to today’s most pressing critical conversations.
*Bill Brown, author of Other Things*
Ambitiously conceptualized and beautifully written, Things with a
History takes up the formidable task of connecting the humanities
with material science and biology and succeeds in opening up new
spaces for critique. Hoyos offers provocative pairings of
overconsumption and hunger, abundance and scarcity, overextraction
and underutilization. By reading a dazzling array of authors and
thinkers from Latin America and beyond, Hoyos demonstrates, with
uncommon facility, the urgent need for an engaged world literary
politics.
*B. Venkat Mani, author of Recoding World Literature: Libraries,
Print Culture, and Germany's Pact with Books*
In a fine-grained textual commentary, Things with a History follows
the texts’ meanderings, noting their complexities and avoiding
unnecessary reductiveness. Combining critical imagination with
theoretical rigor, Hoyos persuasively breathes new life and meaning
into “new materialism” and its predecessors.
*Aníbal González-Pérez, Yale University*
A great example on how to work beyond the false dichotomy of
representation and practices and to deeply dissect the benefits and
limitations of regional critical takes in the context of a
globalized world.
*ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the
Environment*
Things with a History corroborates and further examines the
fundamental role that Latin American literature has played in
enriching and guiding our understanding of global contexts.
Through
such a perspective, Hoyos connects the dots separating
relationships experienced with objects in the past and in the
present. And these lines serve as maps skillfully showing us how
these relationships have evolved, even when we were unaware of
their existence.
*Recherche littéraire / Literary Research*
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