Latin American Fiction and the Politics of the Present

In The Return of the Contemporary: The Latin American Novel in the End Times, Nicolás Campisi, assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University, examines a constellation of contemporary Latin American novels that defy linear and chronological frameworks, exploring how they respond to a present marked by political crises and the climate emergency but also to old forms of dispossession. Indeed, one of the book's central critiques is aimed at the “presentism” of neoliberalism, an economic model that in Latin America has signaled a temporal condition defined by a recursive past of violence and a darkened future that “creates a paralysis in the exercise of imagining perspectives of change” (155). Against this backdrop, the “contemporary” emerges not as a stable periodization but as a contested category that heralds “the re-politicization of the present through our attentiveness to archaic and anachronistic temporalities” (96). In this view, contemporary Latin American authors are so because they experiment with history, aesthetics, and politics, disrupting the temporal norms and reactivating past forms that range from oral traditions to avant-garde techniques.The novels analyzed in The Return of the Contemporary do not merely represent the present or speculate about the future; they unravel linear time itself, assembling hybrid genealogies and plural archives in the face of planetary emergency. They revisit both old and new forms of dispossession—from colonialism, slavery, and political violence to consumerism and agribusiness—always bearing in mind that “the return of the past is the most distinct aesthetic and political device of the literatures of the present” (4). Studying “anachronism” and “critical returns” as literary devices, Campisi emphasizes the temporal setbacks and disruptions in fiction and analyzes untimely “points of connection between an unfinished past and a potential future” (24). In this way, Campisi advances a notion of political literature that is not just about commitment but about discovering the gaps in history and participating in the expansive field of postautonomous literature, where authors become archivists and editors and reflect about their own work through storytelling.The book comprises five chapters divided into two parts: “Deep Histories of the Present” and “Returns of History and Memory.” In the first part, Campisi explores how recent novels, ranging from speculative fiction to magical realism, deal with the neoliberal end-times by unearthing stories buried in the longue durée of history and even in the geological past. In the second part, Campisi analyzes postmemory writings from dislocated geographies, which creates a critical cosmopolitanism that is helpful for the future of literature. Campisi focuses on two authors in each chapter, covering a wide range of geographies (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, and Brazil) in connection with other recent and past authors in a way that shows how this study operates within an expansive critical field. In both parts, the authors analyzed by Campisi “work with remains, material traces, and residual objects to weave new filiations and invent original genealogies after the arrival of the end times” (4). This is an important claim that influences much of the book's argument, opening doors for the future of Latin American literary studies.In chapter 1, “The Return of Nature: The Novel of the Crisis,” Campisi analyzes how Latin American fiction engages with the ecological and historical ruptures of the neoliberal era by turning to speculative narratives that traverse temporal boundaries. Focusing on Pedro Mairal's El año del desierto (The Elements; Argentina, 2005) and Rita Indiana's La mucama de Omicunlé (Tentacle; Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic, 2015), Campisi traces how these novels reimagine the present by invoking both environmental collapse and colonial violence. In El año del desierto, a crucial novel of the post-2001 crisis in Argentina that Campisi also reads within the genre of “climate fiction,” a natural phenomenon that causes “the desert gradually to invade the city of Buenos Aires” and “time to move backward from the twenty-first-century present to the colonial era” is an example of the influence of nonhuman forces in the present, while the act of going backward of the narration makes it possible to recycle cultural manifestations that can be relevant for surviving in the wake of a catastrophe (32). The dialectic of present and past in Mairal's novel becomes a tentacular time narrative in Indiana's La mucama de Omicunlé, an eco-queer-speculative novel set in the Dominican Republic about a former prostitute (Acilde Figueroa) and a failed artist (Argenis Luna) who both gain the capacity to travel in time and have the chance to save the world from an ecological disaster. While Acilde chooses not to save the world, Argenis finds, in the margins of the Spanish Empire in the seventeenth century, a community of outlaws that, despite being subjected to violence, allow him to develop his artistic talents. In both novels, concludes Campisi, “the writer . . . traffics with artistic materials and foundational events of the modern nation to reconstruct the social edifice and the literary tradition” (60).Chapter 2, “A Toxic History of the Present: The Novel of Ecohorror,” reflects on how recent fiction stages the ecological risks that pervade contemporary societies. The texts analyzed here are Guadalupe Nettel's El huésped (The Host; Mexico, 2006) and Samanta Schweblin's Distancia de rescate (Rescue Distance; Argentina, 2014), two novels that Campisi understands as instances of “ecohorror,” a category “to refer to works that inspire negative emotions such as anxiety, disgust, and uncertainty in order to delineate landscapes of contagion and toxicity” (63). In the case of Nettel's novel, a young woman from Mexico City is haunted by the presence of a parasitic being that seems to inhabit her body, while Distancia de rescate tells a supernatural story of toxic contamination and maternal fears against the backdrop of the soy fields in rural Argentina. While the novels have been read within the gothic tradition, Campisi is more interested in how they build “a critical reflection around extractive capitalism, the depletion of natural resources, and the exploitation of Indigenous labor” (69). Thus, Campisi stresses the urban aspect of Nettel's novel, where the subterranean spaces of Mexico City express both modern anxieties and geological fears, while his analysis of Distancia de rescate underlies the way it “uncovers the inner workings of a system of agricultural exploitation controlled by the invisible hand of corporations” (79). In this fashion, Campisi reflects on the act of representing the omnipresent and yet ungraspable toxicity of the food industry.In chapter 3, “The Contemporary Plantation: Memories of Slavery and the Oral History Novel,” Campisi examines how contemporary Latin American fiction confronts the legacies of slavery by fusing archives with oral traditions in an experimental perspective. He focuses on Juan Cárdenas's Elástico de sombra (Shadow Elastic; Colombia, 2019) and Itamar Vieira Junior's Torto Arado (Crooked Plow; Brazil, 2019), two novels that recuperate Afro-Latin American traditions through embodied storytelling, transforming the authors into mediators of “counter-histories of our neoliberal present” (103). In Elástico de sombra, this is visible in the practice of machete fencing, an Afro-Colombian tradition that leads the main characters through a journey in the Cauca Valley that blends oral memory, myth, and even political contingency. In Torto Arado, it is also a knife, inherited from slave owners in the backlands of Bahia, that leads two sisters to accidentally lose their capacity to speak, thus forging a silent bond between them as they navigate the afterlives of the plantation economy and the ongoing struggle for land rights. Here, Vieira Junior invokes jarê, a spiritual practice of Yoruba origin to channel ancestral temporalities that resist the linear, extractive logic of the plantation. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter's “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” Campisi emphasizes how both novels function as “oral history novels,” resisting the silences of official archives by reviving Afro-diasporic modes of storytelling. In this framework, literature becomes a space where oral traditions, rituals, gestures, and cultural practices produce a collective memory and an expanded notion of humanity.In chapter 4, “The Children Return: The Novel of Postmemory,” Campisi turns to autofiction through two hybrid novels—A resistência (Resistance; 2015) by Brazilian writer Julián Fuks and Conjunto vacío (Empty Set; 2015) by Mexican writer Verónica Gerber Bicecci. Both authors are children of Argentine exiles, and their narratives trace a personal and aesthetic journey into the fractured landscapes of family origins and national belongings—and the role of writing in reconstructing adopted memories. In A resistência, which oscillates between fiction and testimony, the narrator probes the legacy of Argentina's dictatorship by concentrating on the adoption of his brother in unknown circumstances, an effort that confronts the narrator with the ethical dilemmas of representing the pain of the others, the silence of historical trauma, and the tension between familial love and political violence. Conjunto vacío, by contrast, is a visual-textual novel that uses Venn diagrams to articulate the fragmented experiences of exile, absence, and loss through the lens of Verónica, an artist from Mexico City who revisits her mother's disappearance by organizing the archive of another Argentine exile. Campisi reads these two novels through the lens of “critical cosmopolitanism,” highlighting how they reflect “dislocations that make them conceive of the contemporary as a period of permanent instability” (122). Combining critical cosmopolitanism with Marianne Hirsch's concept of postmemory, Campisi underlines the archaeological dimension of the novels, which recovers “sediments or temporal layers that form a constituent part of the present” (147). Thus, rather than just erasing the aesthetic frame of fictionality, Campisi highlights how the novels’ opacity—their “illegible writing, silhouettes, and blank spaces” (155)—actually exposes the unconscious of the present through “the lens of orphanhood” (147).In the final chapter, “Ways of Being Contemporary: The Novel After the End of History,” Campisi explores how contemporary literature grapples with the so-called “end of history” by turning to novels that foreground the detachment from the past in a way that, surprisingly, underlines the relevance of storytelling in the present. He analyzes Los ingrávidos (Faces in the Crowd; Mexico, 2011) by Valeria Luiselli and Bonsái by Alejandro Zambra (Chile, 2006), two early works by now-canonical authors that illustrate how fiction can confront the weight of the past without relying on traditional narrative forms and instead create new paths for writing fiction. In Los ingrávidos, for example, Luiselli intertwines the narrative of a contemporary Mexican translator in New York with imagined episodes from the life of early twentieth-century poet Gilberto Owen, a member of the Contemporáneos movement, thus creating a dual narrative that facilitates a transmission across temporal divides: “Luiselli invents a new sensorium of the contemporary in which the coexistence between the living and the dead . . . pierces the hypertrophied present of the new millennium and restores the possibility of transmission” (170). Zambra's Bonsái, on the other hand, offers a minimalist counterpoint, focusing on the remains of literature through the story of Julio and Emilia, two Chilean literature students whose intense relationship is marked by shared readings and personal secrets until it eventually fades, giving way to a reflection on how stories of loss—personal and political—are constructed and remembered. Campisi contends that these two texts show how Latin American societies remain unable to fully enter the new century without reckoning with the ghosts of the pasts, but in doing so, they offer a way “to reconceive literature after the end of history” (183).In The Return of the Contemporary, Campisi offers an analysis of some of the most urgent topics in contemporary Latin American literary studies: the legacies of state terror, the climate emergency in connection to different forms of extractivism, the neoliberal crisis, and Afro-Latin American traditions, among others. But above all, he interrogates literature itself—its structures, its relation to reality, and its role in a posthistorical world where the work of art is no longer autonomous but entangled with other media, materialities, and political and ecological challenges. Indeed, Campisi conceives of the contemporary Latin American writer as not only an archivist but also a DJ or bricoleur who mixes antagonistic traditions: the oral and the written, art and politics, the human and the nonhuman. In this fashion, literature emerges in Campisi's book as a form of sampling, of bricolage, drawing on both historical memory and natural elements—water, trees, fungi—to imagine new modes of relationality. Still, a central tension in the book lies in the weight placed on the “end of times” as a master narrative of history for a notion of the contemporary that resists beginnings or ends. This framing can obscure somewhat the stylistic differences among the novels analyzed. For instance, Distancia de rescate's hesitant style, where the narration struggles to progress, stands in total contrast with Elástico de sombra's almost epic narrative. Similarly, the playfulness of certain authors, such as Rita Indiana, who seems to take literature less seriously, stands in contrast to the book's sometimes solemn tone.Campisi's book offers a groundbreaking analysis of how twenty-first-century Latin American novelists resist the temporal logic of neoliberalism by forging nonlinear relationships with history. Campisi shows how these authors, rather than succumbing to apocalyptic fatalism or the flattening effects of presentism, turn to the past as a site for reimagining the future—transforming readers into active participants in “the history of the present” (189). Curiously, many of the novels that Campisi explores are stories of filiations and genealogies often narrated from a place of orphanhood. In this way, the readers of the book are also left exposed to the hostile outdoors, wondering where to find refuge in the intemperie of the contemporary. Campisi's book reorganizes the field and demands critics, authors, and readers to start sketching answers.