Novel Distortions: Postnationalism and Literary Form in Mexico and Central America (Illuminations)

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. Read more