Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Generation of ‘72: Latin America’s Forced Global Citizens ed. by Brantley Nicholson, and Sophia McClennen

2015; American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese; Volume: 98; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/hpn.2015.0047

2153-6414

María E. Mayer,

Labor Movements and Unions

Reviewed by: The Generation of ‘72: Latin America’s Forced Global Citizens ed. by Brantley Nicholson, and Sophia McClennen María E. Mayer Nicholson, Brantley, and Sophia McClennen, eds. The Generation of ‘72: Latin America’s Forced Global Citizens. Raleigh: A Contracorriente, 2013. Pp. 288. ISBN 978-0-98537-154-8. A Contracorriente is a North Carolina publishing house that operates through the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at North Carolina State University. The Generation of ‘72: Latin America’s Forced Global Citizens is the fifth book of its literature and culture series. Generation of ‘72’s focus on the Southern Cone results from the presence, in the Language Departments of North Carolina, Washington DC, and Virginia universities, of professors from Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, expatriates whose exodus began in the 1970s when military juntas took over their countries. This focus warrants cohesiveness and depth of discussion, since literary theory and other western trends of thought have long been adopted in that sophisticated part of South America. Generation of ‘72 looks into the neglected body of literary production of a generation of writers who could not enjoy the golden cosmopolitanism of the Latin American Boom, which took roots in Barcelona’s editorial houses and Ivy League universities. Instead, caught up between generations, the thinkers of the Generation of ‘72 travailed through countries, publishing houses, academic departments, and television programs. Here is the eloquent jeremiad of poet Cristina Peri Rossi to a girlfriend: “If I have gotten this high up so far, it’s because I’m much stronger than the others Here [in Barcelona] instinct reigns supreme…[;] it is an impious society, of thugs and usurers, [and] … absolutely dehumanized” (280; my translation). Generation of ’72 consists of twelve essays (ten in the main body, two in the postdata), three fourths of which deal with authors from the Southern Cone who relocated in the United States or in Europe; one-third, with queer authors. In the expert words of David William Foster, endorsing the book on the back cover, “The organizers of this project have perceived a wider sociopolitical displacement than the traditional paradigms within which the boom authors still moved: the effects of globalization and, as part of globalization, the displacement of Latin American society toward nontraditional settings (the United States, the Netherlands, and, for women and queer writers, an alien Mexico).” The nine authors included in the project are from Chile (Ariel Dorfman, Diamela Eltit, and Antonio Skármeta), Argentina (Ricardo Piglia, Osvaldo Soriano, Luisa Valenzuela), Uruguay (Cristina Peri Rossi), Colombia (Fernando Vallejo), and Cuba (Reinaldo Arenas). The essays are veritably telling and their quality impeccable, though an index would have been useful. Eltit and Peri Rossi are granted special, extensive attention. The introduction offers an informative essay by two young scholars: Brantley Nicholson, whose doctoral dissertation at Duke marked the start of the “theorization of the Generation of ‘72” (22), and Sophia McClennen, director of the Center for Global Studies at Pennsylvania State University. Cedomic Goic’s Mitos degradados (1992) is cited as the source of the term “Generación de 1972” (13). Patrick Dove opens up this collection with his essay on Piglia, a Princeton professor and literary critic of Noir Literature, who left Argentina with the fall of Peron. “Literary Futures: Crime Fiction, Global Capitalism and the History of the Present” is about Piglia’s reputation as creator of the Latin American Detective Novel, of the concept of “literature as plagiarism” (35), and of “the future of narrative” (37). The contrast of global itinerancy versus global citizenship is analyzed in the works of Soriano, Eltit, and Peri Rossi. Under the forces of neoliberalism, the social contract that bounds nation to citizen collapses, and the individual is forced to wander around, looking for a job, like a ghostly gaucho. The Argentinean Soriano’s shady characters, in Una sombra ya pronto serás (1990) and La hora sin sombra (1995), echo Don Segundo Sombra (1926), the masterpiece of gaucho literature (‘sombra’ meaning shadow/shade). Soriano says, “Without money and alone in the midst of a no man’s land, the protagonist begins his wandering through the Argentine countryside … his final destination is obscure” (56). Argentineans lose their...