Description:

In the half-century running between 1910 and 1970, Latin American literature acquired, more than at any moment before or since, a pronounced rural and agrarian bent.  Drawing from my forthcoming book, Agrarian Questions:  The Latin American Novel on the Road to Capitalism, this talk explores how and why the twentieth-century novel began to gravitate toward the rural world, not simply to record age-old “tradition,” but to track epoch-making transitions within capitalism.  When approached from the vantage of the so-called agrarian question, which asked how and under which conditions capitalism might take hold of agriculture, the Latin American novel emerges as a valuable but overlooked site of inquiry into the remaking of agrarian societies across the 20th century, the far-reaching consequences of which remain very much with us today.  After providing an overview of the book, I zero in on examples of how fiction posed and answered questions about the possible course of peasant freedom in Mexico, in works by Mariano Azuela and Juan Rulfo.  
 
Bio: Ericka Beckman an associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Pennsylvania.  Her scholarly work reinterprets Latin American literature capitalism in relation to major phases of capitalist expansion in the region. Her first book, Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) studies how literature represented the region’s first major experiment with economic liberalism in genres such as stock market novels and poetic import catalogues. Her second book, Agrarian Questions: The Latin American Novel on the Road to Capitalism (forthcoming Verso 2026), reinterprets the 20th-century Latin American novel as a form that narrated the uneven incorporation of hacienda-based and subsistence economies into national capitalist markets between 1910 and 1970. She recently co-edited, with Oded Nir and Emilio Sauri, an issue of Modern Fiction Studies on “Peripheral Literatures and the History of Capitalism,” and is currently serving as co-President (with Bret Benjamin and Neil Larsen) of the Marxist Literary Group.