Writing in the Aftermath of War: Literature and Disenchantment in Postwar Central America

This article examines the challenges faced by Central American writers during a period of profound cultural, political, and economic change, as Central America transitioned from an era of civil war and revolutionary struggle to one of peace, democracy, and neoliberal state-building, spanning from the 1990s to the 2010s. At the core of this change was a pervasive sense of disenchantment, understood not merely as disillusionment with the failures of the peacebuilding process but as a hollowing out of society’s capacity to envision Central American reality on a broader and more meaningful scale. This deeper, more intractable aspect of disenchantment and its implications for the literary enterprise are the focus of this article. I argue that the forces shaping Central America’s postwar modernity have profoundly undermined the groundwork of affectivity, imagination, and memory that literature’s humanizing potential depends on. As a result, Central American writers face the paradoxical task of upholding their literary vocation when literature’s power to produce aesthetic and emancipatory experiences is in decline.