Distant Lands and Climes: Latin American Criticism, World Literature, and Other Axes for Comparison

The geopolitical transformations that marked the end of the twentieth century, including the end of the Cold War, consolidation of neoliberalism as the dominant economic model, and attendant escalation of debates about globalization, engendered in the early years of the twenty-first include a widespread impulse to think “globally;” that is, across national, regional, or linguistic lines. An ensuing “global” or “transnational turn” unfolded across the humanities and social sciences, and in literary studies (particularly in the United States) was most clearly manifest in renewed interest in the notion of world literature. While early articulations of what Mariano Siskind aptly termed the “rentrée” of world literature (e.g., David Damrosch) or the world-literary field (e.g., Pascale Casanova) gestured back to nineteenth-century European thought—most notably Goethe’s Weltliteratur (1827)—this “new” world literature was very much a product of and for its moment. ¹ Remarking on the explosion of an international market for anthologies of world literature in (largely English) translation in the early years of this century, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak highlighted the extent to which these flattened complex literary traditions, reducing them to a pitilessly limited number of “representative” works. ²

Such were (and are) the dominant mechanisms of the global: reduction and simplification in the name of facilitating circulation, where the “world” was only thinkable as an agglomeration of carefully maintained national, regional, and linguistic distinctions. It was a vision of world literature somewhat removed from that put forth in another nineteenth-century articulation: Marx and Engels’s description in the Communist Manifesto (1848) of world literature as arising from the falling away of “national one-sidedness” and the move toward a context of “universal production” in which the intellectual production of individual nations would become “common property. ³" But what Marx and Engels’s vision shared with the world literature of the early twenty-first century was the underlying sense that it would emerge from a change in the scale of economic activity and an increasing desire for the “products of distant lands and climes”—embodied, for instance, in those anthologies described by Spivak.

My concern in this essay is with the impact of that rentrée of world literature on Latin American literary studies and Latin American criticism in the last twenty-five years, and with what it might mean for the field going forward. In one sense, Latin American literature has been one of those “products of distant lands and climes” incorporated into the framework of world literature, a reality with which Latin Americanist critics have been forced to grapple. These debates, as critics noted, were not entirely new and often pointed back to the legacies of the so-called literary “Boom” of the 1960s and 1970s, as the moment in which Latin American writing gained unprecedented international attention (or, desirability) and which has continued to inflect the international circulation of Latin American writing. Yet, a broader embrace of world literature as a framework within which Latin American writing might be made legible to a broader audience is discernible in the proliferation of volumes concerned with Latin American writers and writing in the MLA’s “Approaches to Teaching World Literature” series, which includes a volume on the Boom, or in Bloomsbury’s “Literatures a World Literature,” which at the time of writing includes volumes on Mexican literature, Brazilian literature, Central American literature, and Roberto Bolaño. ⁴

Over this same period, Latin American literature and criticism would become increasingly interested in their (often long-standing) relationship to other “distant lands and climes,” understood here as spaces other than Europe and North America, which were (and largely remain) the metropolitan centers of global literary reception and dissemination and, consequently, the predominant points of reference for comparison. This shift away from the Euro-American referent opened space for a host of comparative projects that put Latin American literatures, cultural production, and criticism into a range of new perspectives, turning attention toward other putative peripheries and what can be broadly understood as South-South axes for comparison. ⁵ This particular comparative turn includes both scholarship analyzing Latin American engagements with other “Souths” as well as work interested in the ways in which writers and intellectuals in those other Souths have engaged with Latin America—whether directly or via a shared concern with analogous or interrelated questions. As I will discuss in the final section, some of the work in the latter category is by scholars whose primary disciplinary grounding (understood asa matter of academic training or current employment) is not necessarily in Latin American studies. But my proposition is that it represents some of the most exciting developments for the field. In terms of setting an agenda for the next quarter century, these most recent comparative projects demonstrate not only the importance of looking outward and along South-South axes for the study of Latin American literatures, but, more importantly, of thinking expansively about what shapes the contours of the field might take going forward. First, however, it is necessary to track the progressions by which the field came to this point.

Latin America and World Literature at the Start of this Century

Latin America was certainly not absent from turn-of-this-century articulations of world literature. Here, reference to Latin America most often functioned as part of a larger gesture toward the world that lay beyond the literary traditions of Europe, often serving as a bridge. See, for instance, Franco Moretti’s turn to Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967) in his epilogue to Modern Epic (1994). “Let us move to a new horizon,” Moretti declares, acknowledging a shift in the center of gravity of literary creation away from Europe and describing García Márquez’s novel as “half-European. ⁶" Casanova’s La République mondiale des lettres (The World Republic of Letters 1999, trans. 2004), meanwhile, takes the Latin American Boom as exemplary of the processes by which “semi-peripheral” writers might exceed the limitations of their local (whether national or regional) traditions and become “international creators,” revolutionaries whose work is then taken up by “the most subversive writers in [other] deprived spaces. ⁷" Damrosch dedicates a chapter of What is World Literature? (2003) to Rigoberta Menchú and the controversies that followed the international success of her testimonio. ⁸ And Latin America is also a frequent landing point in Moretti’s expansive articulations of distant reading as a method for the study of world literature, as it is for Spivak in Death of a Discipline (2003), which elliptically engages world literature in the context of a larger consideration of the futures of comparative literature—my own disciplinary “home” in terms of training, employment, and practice—as it entered the present century. ⁹

Nor were specialists in Latin American literatures and criticism absent from these early conversations. Efraín Kristal, for instance, authored an early and necessary response to Moretti’s “Conjectures on World Literature” (2000), also published in the New Left Review and highlighting the distorting effect of Moretti’s focus on the novel in non-western literary traditions, fundamental to his thesis about local (or “peripheral”) compromises with metropolitan norms. In Spanish America, Kristal points out, poetry had far greater significance than the novel until at least the 1920s, and Spanish American poetry was influential well beyond the region—a point underlined by his discussion of César’s Vallejo’s influence on Samuel Beckett. ¹⁰ A few years later, the volume América Latina en la “literatura mundial” (Latin America in “World Literature,” 2006), edited by Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, gathered essays by Kristal and several prominent scholars of Latin America, alongside contributions from Moretti and Casanova. ¹¹ Published in Spanish—although not merely because of language choice—the volume largely addressed a Latin Americanist audience and contains some excellent interventions worthy of discussion alongside other key considerations of world literature in the first decade of this century. I note the language of publication to underline the Anglophone monolingualism that predominates the conversation around world literature: just as those early anthologies mentioned by Spivak were marshalling primary texts in English translation, the texts that would become critical touchstones in discussions of world literature were either written or quickly made available in English (Casanova, coming from French, being the principal example). Hispanophone and Lusophone scholarship not available in translation was also largely absent from large-scale, meta-critical models such as Moretti’s “distant reading. ¹²" 

To put the problem a little differently: Latin American criticism (published in the US, in English) around the start of the present century was profoundly interested in what the larger transformations in the global disposition might mean for Latin America and Latin American studies, but not in ways that lent themselves to the emerging conversation around world literature—which was itself also a response to those larger transformations in the global disposition. ¹³ Written in the wake of a larger turn away from literature and toward other forms of cultural production in Latin American studies, many of these works explicitly engaged with the legacies of the Boom and in particular with enduring international interest in “magical realism” (a frustratingly protean term, to be sure), which remained the predominant key in which Latin American writing was read outside of the region. Hence Alberto Moreiras titling one of the chapters of The Exhaustion of Difference (2001) “The End of Magical Realism: José María Arguedas’s Passionate Signifier,” and Sylvia Molloy’s critique of “the magic realist imperative” faced by Latin American (and Latinx) writers (2005). ¹⁴

Perhaps even more important, the very idea of “Latin America” as well as of the nation as cohesive units of study was coming into question. As Jean Franco observed in 2006, the notion of Latin America as a region that could be studied in toto (versus the collectivity invoked by, to give one example, Martí’s “Nuestra América” [1889]) is itself historically specific, dating to the 1960s—the years of the Boom, of course, as well as of the consolidation of the area studies paradigm in its Cold War iteration, particularly within the U.S. academy. ¹⁵ Increasing attention to the dynamics of internal colonization fundamental to the constitution of the post-independence nation-state as well as to figures such as the subaltern, the migrant, and the nomad (a close relation to the figure of the exile in earlier generations) in Latin American studies in this period all presented difficulties for the emergent framework of world literature, because of world literature’s fundamental reliance on nation and region for its organizing matrix. Nor did world literature seem to hold much promise for Latin American studies; as Franco put it, the rentrée of world literature offered little to the situated study of Latin American literatures and cultural production, precisely because of the distortion introduced by its massive expansion of scope as well as its emphasis on literature over and above other cultural traditions. ¹⁶ In his introduction to América Latina en la “literatura mundial,” Sánchez Prado frames the discordance between Latin American criticism and the emerging conversation around world literature in terms of debates internal to Latin American criticism. Acknowledging that the very premise of the volume invited the well-worn question of why Latin Americans should be expected to engage theories formulated in the metropole instead of putting forward their own frameworks, Sánchez Prado posited two lines of response. First, that changes in the global literary market as well as the institutional configurations of Latin American studies (latinoamericanismo) might demand engagement with dominant metropolitan frameworks as a means for visibility or survival. ¹⁷ But, more importantly, that an interest in world literature was itself rooted in the intellectual traditions of the region. From its inception, Sánchez Prado argued, a central tenet of latinoamericanismo has been “the recognition of the region as a legitimate participant [interlocutora] in those cultural debates at the world scale” (my translation). ¹⁸ Latin American thinkers—Sánchez Prado cites Alfonso Reyes and Jorge Luis Borges, as well as Roberto Fernández Retamar—had for decades been engaged with the question of world or universal literature, not simply as a framework within which Latin American writing might gain greater visibility but, precisely, as active participants in shaping the larger critical conversation. Sánchez Prado’s claim on world literature from within Latin American criticism would prove to be fundamental to three key monographs tackling the intersections of Latin American writing (understood at varying scales) with the expansive frameworks of world literature, the global turn, and the world-literary market published in the following decade: Mariano Siskind’s Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America (2014), Héctor Hoyos’s Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel (2015), and Sánchez Prado’s own Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature (2018). ¹⁹

Latin American Criticism Takes on World Literature

The interventions made by Siskind, Hoyos, and Sánchez Prado in their respective monographs unfold at the tripartite intersection of Latin American criticism, world literature, and comparative literature. ²⁰ While the projects of world literature and comparative literature may initially seem complementary—both offering expansion beyond national, regional, or linguistic frameworks—they have long been in tension, not least because of comparative literature’s emphasis on the importance of working in the original language and (crucially) with a deep knowledge of the relevant local literary and critical traditions, both of which run counter to the “flattening” tendencies of world literature described above. ²¹ However, the relationship between Latin American criticism and comparative literature has also been the subject of debate, due to comparative literature’s tendency to treatLatin America as a cohesive region, rather than as an internally-variegated geopolitical agglomeration, which has occluded the comparative work internal to the study of Latin America and latinoamericanismo itself. But, as noted in a conversation about Latin American studies and comparative literature included in the American Comparative Literature Association’s decennial report of the 2010s, Futures of Comparative Literature (2017), the years spanning from the middle of the first decade of this century through the second saw several projects that worked against this flattening tendency and increasing interest in extra-regional comparison by Latin Americanists. ²² The developments I am tracking in this section, therefore, have two major components: first, an interest in Latin American literatures in relation to the large-scale framework of world literature and, second, interest in the relationship of Latin America to the world—those “lands and climes” distant from Europe as well as Latin America—and the role it has played in Latin American writing.

The interplay of the two tendencies I have identified is anticipated in Siskind’s instructive distinction between the “globalization of the novel” (a model of dissemination that sees the novel as originating in Europe and traveling outward to the world’s peripheries, familiar from Moretti but here more clearly linked to the western European imperial enterprise) and the “novelization of the global,” understood as the image of the world produced in specific literary works. Taking the French Jules Verne and the Argentine Eduardo Ladislao Holmberg as examples of the latter, Siskind shows how these two contemporaries produced in their work very different images of the “world,” inflected by their relative positions within the world-system. First laid out in the article “The Globalization of the Novel and the Novelization of the Global: A Critique of World Literature” (2010), the contours of Siskind’s argument form the conceptual core of Cosmopolitan Desires, where a modified version of the essay appears as the first chapter. In the monograph, Siskind’s larger project is framed around the epistemological structure of what he calls a “deseo de mundo” constitutive of Latin American literary modernity: at once a desire for abstract universality and for a particularist account of Latin America in relation to the world.

Cosmopolitan Desires is peopled with restless subjects, whether cosmopolitan individuals (Latin Americans abroad), or, in a more abstract sense, as ideas in motion, with modernismo and magical realism as the principal examples. Siskind’s chapter on magical realism is exemplary of his retort to dominant discourses of world literature. Counter to the reduction of magical realism to the status of an aesthetic characteristic of Latin American writing, Siskind historicizes the concept, tracking its global travels into and out of Latin America and the Caribbean (alongside Carpentier’s “lo real maravilloso,” Siskind takes up the Haitian Jacques Stephen Alexis’s “Du réalisme merveilleux des Haïtiens” [Of the Marvelous Realism of the Haitians, 1956], a remarkable essay still not available in English in full) to its global popularity in the final decades of the twentieth century, where it was closely linked to the rise of the postcolonial novel. ²³ The supposed universality of magical realism (or, at the very least, of its appeal) is in Siskind’s account undercut by attention to the material history of the global dissemination of the Boom writers, and especially of García Márquez’s work. This argument reclaims the “world literary” García Márquez, not just for Latin America but also for the project of a critical understanding of world-literary mappings as grounded in concrete historical, political, and economic relations. It is, moreover, a consideration of how Latin American writing travels in the world, a crucial strain in Cosmopolitan Desires as well as later criticism. Hoyos’s Beyond Bolaño shares several of the key coordinates of Siskind’s argument, although the temporal focus here shifts to the period following the end of the Cold War. That shift underpins Hoyos’s attention to the ways in which Latin American writers have imagined the world and the processes of globalization, here condensed in the phrase “global Latin American novel” and presented as the work of imagining world literature from the ground up. Rather than privilege circulation or the consecration of writers in metropolitan centers as the mark of “worldliness” (to gesture back to Damrosch and Casanova), Hoyos’s emphasis is on what he terms the “emplotment of globalization” in Latin American writing from this period. This is, on the one hand, a matter of grounding the experience of the global, while, on the other, of expanding the horizon of the Latin American novel beyond the telos of Latin America. It also requires a commitment to thinking both through and beyond (to borrow Hoyos’s preposition) the outsized international visibility of certain writers from the region, in this case Bolaño. ²⁴ In Hoyos’s reading, Bolaño becomes “world literary” not as a function of his international prominence, but precisely for the ways in which his texts engage the world. Bolaño was simply one amongst many contemporaries engaged in such imagining, as Hoyos underscores in the first chapter, which reads Bolaño’s interest in the trope of Nazism alongside the same in Jorge Volpi and Ignacio Padilla (then less well-known outside the region). Centering Latin American interest in Nazism also short-circuits the tendency of world literature (and the world-literary market) to see literatures from the putative periphery only in terms of their representation of the “local.” Accordingly, several other chapters in Beyond Bolaño look to circuits of global exchange that to some extent bypass North America and western Europe. 

This brings me to a crucial point of convergence between Siskind and Hoyos’s projects: their attention to the ways in which Latin American writers engage “distant lands and climes.”For Siskind, this takes the form of travel writing, and specifically Enrique Gómez Carillo’s accounts of his journeys to East Asia and the Levant at the turn of the twentieth century. Hoyos, meanwhile, looks to what he terms “novels of South-South escapism” written by Latin Americans, where the narrative journey from one (semi-) periphery to another suggests the possibility of evasion. The examples Siskind and Hoyos discuss do not avoid the mechanics of imperialist fantasy (or, of Orientalism and attendant forms of exoticism), but the point is to read for the ways in which Latin American writers reproduce those discourses with telling differences. Neither Siskind nor Hoyos read Latin American engagements with other “distant lands and climes” uncritically; rather than presume solidarity, they look for what such engagements reveal about Latin American thought and modes of relating to the world. This aspect of Siskind and Hoyos’s thinking builds on contemporaneous projects by scholars such as Ignacio López-Calvo—Hoyos discusses at some length an earlier essay on representations of China in Latin American fiction for a volume edited by López-Calvo—and points forward to such recent projects as Siskind’s reading of “Liberian signifiers” in novels by Bolaño, Martín Caparrós, and Juan Pablo Villalobos, or Sánchez Prado’s tracking of a complementary dynamic in representations of Africa in Mexican literature. ²⁵ In each case, the fact of “worldliness” does not supersede critical attention to the terms in which Latin America imagines its connections to an increasingly multi-centered world. ²⁶

In Strategic Occidentalism, Sánchez Prado brings to these Latin Americanist interventions in debates about world literature a pointedly grounded focus on post-1968 Mexican literature. The periodizing logic here is at once political, with the Tlatelolco massacre in October 1968 taken as the marker of a generational shift, and institutional, tracking changes in Mexico’s literary institutions that at once sought to dislodge a particular tradition of cultural nationalism and were themselves embedded in the larger economic shift toward neoliberalism and the increasing corporatization of the publishing (and broader cultural) industry. World literature in this readingisnot an abstract ideal but rather emphatically grounded in material practices, internal as well as external to the Mexican literary sphere. Sánchez Prado’s insistence on the national is intended to resist the flattening or homogenization of the region, from an external perspective, as well as to illuminate the internal tensions or debates that conditioned the terms of Mexican writers’ engagement with the world.

For Sánchez Prado, writers and their work are not the passive objects of the world-literary system but rather active participants in world literature, regardless of whether their work is received as such. The subjects of Strategic Occidentalism are all “worldly;” that is, actively engaged with literatures far afield from Mexico or Latin America in ways that exceed the paradigm of cultural dependency, and which help to materialize and historicize the concept of “world” in world literature. As in Siskind’s Cosmopolitan Desires, cosmopolitanism is here a key concept, as is what Sánchez Prado terms “strategic Occidentalism.” The latter names a cosmopolitan stance on the part of certain writers that is, admittedly, Eurocentric (oriented toward the European tradition) but also necessarily idiosyncratic in that these writers do not simply replicate the terms of metropolitan influence; instead, they construct their own visions of world literature within—and often against the demands of—Mexican cultural institutions. Such writers were then at once eccentric to the Mexican literary sphere as well as illegible to a global market still looking to Latin American writers for articulations of an imagined “local” authenticity, as Sánchez Prado underlines in his chapter on the Crack group, tellingly subtitled “Cosmopolitanism contra the Magical Realist Imperative.”

In reframing world literature as a set of material practices, Strategic Occidentalism proffers a vision of multiple world literatures, constituted in specific sites and moments, each of which requires deep and localized analysis. Yet the most significant shift between this project and Sánchez Prado’s earlier work on world literature is the expansion of its intended audience. Strategic Occidentalism addresses itself as much to Latin Americanists as it does to scholars (and the predominantly Anglophone paradigms) of world literature, postcolonial literatures, and comparative literature—the latter, Sánchez Prado notes, still being more likely to read German or French than Spanish. ²⁷ Also important to Sánchez Prado’s focus on Mexico is the North-South or hemispheric axis, targeting the negative pigeonholing of Mexicans and Mexican culture in the U.S. And, finally, Sánchez Prado articulates the interventions of this project through explicit attention to the challenges faced by scholars of Latin America and its literatures—not to mention literary studies more broadly—within the institutional ecology of U.S. universities in recent decades. Just at the study of Mexican literature post-1968 cannot be undertaken without attention to its institutions, debates about scholarly method cannot be removed from attention to the material factors that make that work possible (or not). This is a crucial lesson, not just for scholars working within the institutional frameworks of Latin American studies (that is, the various agglomerations of departments of Spanish and Portuguese as well as the area studies-oriented programs and departments focusing on the region), but particularly for scholars engaged with Latin American studies whose primary institutional affiliation may lie elsewhere. 

While my discussion of Cosmopolitan Desires, Beyond Bolaño, and Strategic Occidentalism takes these three monographs as exemplary of Latin Americanist critical engagements with the paradigm of world literature, they do not exist in a vacuum. They represent part of a larger, and international, network of scholars interested in such questions. Gesine Müller’s work, carried out as part of the European Research Council-funded research project “Reading Global: Constructions of World Literature and Latin America” (2015-2021) and extended in the series “Latin American Literatures in the World/Literaturas latinoamericanas en el mundo” published by De Gruyter, is here exemplary. ²⁸ These initiatives have fostered the work of a range of scholars housed at institutions throughout Europe, the U.S., and Latin America on the global circulations of Latin American literature, emphasizing Latin American engagements with the world as much as the material factors that have conditioned the international reception of Latin American literature. ²⁹ The latter in particular opens toward projects that put Latin American literatures into closer conversation with those from parts of the world now known collectively as the Global South; examples here include a more recent essay by Hoyos on the international reception of Bolaño’s work, as well as projects by Susanne Klengel and Alexandra Ortiz Wallner (Sur/South: Poetics and Politics of Thinking Latin America-India [2016]), Rosario Hubert (Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature [2023]), and Ana María Ramírez Gómez (Latin American Sinographies: Travel Writings of a Journey to China (1843-1966) [2025]). ³⁰ Such work is indicative of a growing interest not only in how Latin Americans have engaged with “distant lands and climes” (Hubert, Ramírez Gómez), but with how writers elsewhere have engaged with Latin American literature and criticism (Hoyos, Klengel and Ortiz Wallner)—a comparative orientation that has the potential to push Latin American criticism in significant new directions.

Latin America and/in South-South Comparison

If the first two decades of the present century saw the confrontation of Latin American criticism with the progressively dominant (and contested) paradigm of world literature, the last decade or so has seen the increasing prominence of extra-regional comparative projects that put Latin American writing and cultural production into more explicit conversation with that from other putative peripheries of the world system. That is: projects interested not just in how Latin Americans engage with the world, but also with how the rest of the world has engaged with Latin America, Latin American writing or cultural production, and Latin American ideas. Unlike many of the examples discussed above, these projects do not necessarily take world literature as their frame of reference. Yet they nonetheless benefit from the more expansive possibilities signaled by the rentrée of world literature and build outward from the spaces cleared by the work discussed in the preceding section.

Where extra-regional comparative projects depart from the framework of world literature, they most often turn to material histories of interaction and exchange, whether amongst individuals or under the aegis of internationalist political projects. Anne Garland Mahler’s From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity (2018) is an indispensable example, centering Latin America and the Caribbean in Cold War-era projects of transregional political organizing while keeping in view questions of race and racialized difference as these play out both within and beyond the region. ³¹ Mahler’s project operates along both North-South and South-South axes, offering the Global South (understood as a resistant political imaginary) as the basis for further work in this vein, while also tracking lines of aesthetic influence—as in her analysis of the circulations and reinterpretations of the Tricontinental’s visual vocabulary. ³² Lanie Millar’s Forms of Disappointment: Cuban and Angolan Narrative After the Cold War (2019) similarly takes the material history of Cuban involvement in Angola as the grounds for a comparative analysis of cultural production from both sides of the Atlantic. ³³ She gives attention not just to Angolan engagements with Cuba but with Latin America at large, as in her analysis of the Angolan José Eduardo Agualusa’s O Anoemque Zumbi Tomou o Rio (The Year that Zumbi Took Rio, 2002). Sarah M. Quesada’s The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature (2022), meanwhile, returns to world literature but this time as counterpoint, tracking the “buried” or otherwise occluded evidence of African influence on writers in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Latinx writers in the United States that has been largely overlooked by that framework. ³⁴ In looking to the lasting effects of interactions between Latin America and Africa—most concretely, in the legacies of the trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved people—Quesada’s project also points to the important work of scholars in Afro-Latin American, Caribbean, and Afro-Latinx studies, who have longworked to illuminate the many-faceted imbrications of the region with the African continent, even as their work has largely been excluded from the mainstream of Latin American criticism.

Taken together, such studies destabilize the separation assumed by the “distant” in the formulation “distant lands and climes.” Latin America is not just part of the world, but deeply enmeshed with other places, whether these connections are mediated by the movement of populations (forced and otherwise), transregional political organizing,or by the experience of analogous conditions wrought by the unevenness of the larger world-system. My own work on the dictator novel in Latin American and African literatures shares these investments, grounding its reading of the genre across geographic and historical contexts in an analysis of the geopolitical dynamics that undergirded authoritarian regimes on both continents. ³⁵ The account I give of the dictator novel unfolding across time and space is not one of circulation and influence (this is a small piece of the story, but not in the sense that would be familiar to the frameworks of world literature); rather, it is one of largely separate developments that, when put into conversation, become mutually-illuminating. ³⁶ What I am describing can be heuristically visualized as a continuum of comparative approaches to and with Latin American literatures, which make possible new readings of the region’s traditions via South-South comparison. Such projects often exceed the traditional parameters of Latin American criticism—understood as grounded in the geographic space of Latin America, as enshrined in the disciplinary (and disciplining) logic of area studies and only sometimes expanding to include diasporic populations—but nonetheless make important interventions in and contributions to the field. Take, for instance, Roanne Kantor’s South Asian Writers, Latin American Literature, and the Rise of Global English (2022), a project primarily focused on South Asian writing that takes as its horizon the global prominence enjoyed by South Asian Anglophone writing toward the end of the twentieth- and in the early decades of the present century. ³⁷ At the core of this monograph is an analysis of the many-faceted exchanges between Latin American and South Asian writers over the course of the twentieth century, and of the ways in which these shaped post-independence South Asian writing. ³⁸ Accordingly, it takes up recognizably “world literary” Latin American writers (Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz) as well as narrative modes (in an excellent chapter on magical realism) and genres (the dictator novel) strongly associated with the region.

Yet Kantor’s project is not simply concerned with South Asian uses of Latin American writing (although this would itself be worthwhile), but rather with the fact that influence always flows in multiple directions. In looking to Neruda’s time as a consular functionary in British India (1927-1929) and Paz’s time as Mexican ambassador to India (1962-1968, preceded by a prior assignment helping to establish the embassy in 1951), Kantor also shows how these experiences impacted their work. And perhaps the most provocative claim of South Asian Writers, Latin American Literature, and the Rise of Global English comes in its opening pages, where Kantor argues that the study of “global” literature written in English is “haunted”—a fantastically suggestive turn of phrase—by “a long-standing relationship to Latin America that it does not acknowledge, one that binds it indelibly to literary traditions outside itself and its carefully cultivated coterie of linguistic others. ³⁹" Echoing Kristal’s response to Moretti, Kantor’s project effectively counters this tendency to occlude the influence or importance of Latin American writing and, in the process, illuminates a much larger and multi-dimensional map of world-literary exchange.

A second example: Waïl S. Hassan, a prominent scholar of Middle East studies, has for more than a decade been working on exchanges between Brazil and the Arab world, culminating in the recent monograph Arab Brazil: Fictions of Ternary Orientalism (2024). ⁴⁰ In essays parallel to this research, Hassan has described his work as unfolding against an institutional ecology of disciplinary organization where the designation of “Latin America” and “the Middle East” (like “Latin America,” itself an internally-variegated geopolitical agglomeration within which scholars have long engaged in nuanced comparative work) as separate “areas” of study has forestalled attention to the many and rich exchanges between these regions. ⁴¹ Against these limits, Hassan articulates the possibility of a multidimensional South-South comparison that at once acknowledges the mediating role of the global North (and its various imperialisms) and decenters it. ⁴² But, to recall several of the examples discussed above, Hassan does not approach the intersections of Brazil and the Arab world uncritically. At the center of his work, and particularly the monograph, is attention to what Hassan describes as a Brazilian form of Orientalism that serves to illuminate anxieties and contradictions within Brazilian ideologies of national identity.

Finally, Stefan Helgesson, by formation a scholar of southern African and postcolonial literatures, has followed a trajectory analogous to Hassan’s in turning attention to Brazilian literature and criticism at mid-career. In Helgesson’s case, this shift has flowed along the Lusophone axis, connecting his earlier work on Angola and Mozambique to Latin America, culminating in the monograph Decolonisations of Literature: Critical Practice in Africa and Brazil after 1945 (2022). ⁴³ Here, Helgesson reads the work of the São Paulo school, particularly Antônio Cândido and Roberto Schwarz, alongside debates about post-independence writing, literary study, and, indeed, world literature unfolding across the African continent in the second half of the twentieth century. In this contrapuntal juxtaposition (the echo of Edward Said’s notion of contrapuntal reading is no accident), Helgesson also puts forth a critique of the São Paulo school, highlighting these critics’ lack of attention to questions of race, blackness, and the region’s on-going relationship to the African continent. This is an argument deeply consonant with critical conversations in Brazil today, and as such can help to amplify their importance and reach. Helgesson also returns to debates about world literature, but in a very different vein from the versions articulated at the turn of the present century. At stake for Helgesson is the “worlding of literature as a concept,” unfolding at the intersection of individual thinkers’ cosmopolitan orientations and vernacular commitments. This is not so much a vision of world literature “from the margins” as a rethinking of literature across the putative peripheries of the world system—a line of argumentation that reflects, refracts, and ultimately extends the interventions made by Siskind, Hoyos, and Sánchez Prado. At their root, the projects I have highlighted have much in common: having established (material or otherwise comparative) connections, none of these readings takes those connections necessarily as a sign of mutual recognition or solidarity. But they exist and, particularly in the extent to which they have been occluded by a conceptual privileging of center-periphery relations as well as by the logic of disciplinary segmentation, they demand scholarly attention.

Some of the work discussed in the preceding paragraphs might not, in stricto sensu, be immediately legible as part of Latin American studies or Latin American criticism. However, my point is precisely that all these projects participate in and contribute to the work of the field. Even as their arguments move in significantly different directions, taking up traditions and critical questions perhaps not immediately familiar to Latin American criticism in the process, their conceptual underpinnings are undoubtedly complementary tothose that undergird the lines of critical inquiry I have traced within Latin American criticism in the last twenty-five years. Moreover, my proposition is not just that scholars working at the edges—or, to more directly borrow from Beatriz Sarlo’s writing on Borges, the “shores” (orillas)—of Latin American criticism have the potential to extend the field in new and significant directions, but precisely that their interventions might also serve to prompt a self-critical reevaluation of the field’s boundaries.

To be very clear: I am by no means arguing that any instance of engagement with Latin American literature (or criticism, although this often requires a stronger knowledge of the relevant languages than is generally at play) should unquestioningly be validated as part of the field. The history of critical mishandlings of Latin American literature (so often in translation and with attendant inattention to Latin American criticism) is appallingly long. Drawing a lesson from Sánchez Prado’s framing of his project in Strategic Occidentalism, I also understand that, at the institutional level, the conditions of ever-increasing scarcity that have effectuated the constriction (if not outright elimination) of literary and language studies in U.S. universities (with analogous conditions unfolding elsewhere) reasonably motivates protectionist impulse. After all, what does Latin American criticism do if not set the measure for the study of Latin America? Precisely because of my own grounding in comparative literature—albeit a version of the discipline (increasingly) different from the one described by Sánchez Prado—I have no interest in contesting this.

What I am arguing for, instead, is to understand those recent critical engagements with Latin American literature and criticism not as expressions of the reductive and simplifying expressions of world literature as articulated at the turn of the present century, but rather as the fruitful outcomes of the same post- or transnational impulses that paved the way for the rentrée of world literature as a predominant paradigm in literary studies in the last twenty-five years, but which have developed along markedly different, and more pointedly critical, lines. The rentrée of world literature at the turn of the present century, as I have tracked in this essay, motivated important work within Latin American studies and, in a second wave, has informed an increased openness toward extra-regional comparison. From this second wave emerges the beginnings of a third, oriented toward comparative engagements with the field from without. This includes attention to the ways in which Latin American writing and thought have been received elsewhere as well as the ideas, aesthetic experiments, and critical projects they have helped to foster. These, too, are part of the purview of Latin American criticism, precisely because there is much for the field to learn from what happens with and to Latin American literatures, cultural production, and thought in those (not always so) distant lands and climes.

Latin American literatures, in many senses, exceed their geography, and the criticism must follow those multifaceted itineraries. There are, I acknowledge, many challenges to such work, not least of which are the increasingly weighty institutional challenges materially manifest as the restriction (if not disappearance) of available resources for building the necessary knowledge—that is, knowledge of languages, literary, and critical traditions, as well as of a meta-disciplinary understanding of the forces governing how different areas have been segmented and studied—for working across different fields. A more significant challenge, at least at the conceptual level, is the fact that attention to the reception and uses of Latin American writing elsewhere often has the undesirable effect of yet again centering writers, moments, and aesthetics that the field has worked hard to displace from functioning as default representatives of Latin American literature in the world-literary sphere; this includes the Boom (as a phenomenon restricted to the work of a small group of lettered elites), writers such as García Márquez and, more recently, Bolaño, the aesthetic of magical realism, and even genres such as the dictator novel. The monographs by Siskind, Hoyos, and Sánchez Prado discussed above each register this problem, resisting thatflattening tendency (characteristic of but not exclusive to turn-of-this-century models of world literature) by engaging with and dislocating its underlying logic, in both conceptual and material terms. Another effective tactic has been attention to the worldly (or, internationalist) engagements and circulation of less studied and marginalized (particularly racialized) figures, as in recent or forthcoming work by Millar, Estefanía Bournot, and Ramírez Gómez, who are also working with the legacies of Afro-Hispanic criticism. ⁴⁴ But perhaps the most salient point is that several of the more recent examples of scholarship discussed in this section (Quesada, Kantor, Hassan, Helgesson) are, to varying degrees, less interested in re-centering those canonical figures than they are in reading against the grain of the terms under which they were canonized in the first place, drawing on very different critical archives in order to do so. This, too, is part of the work of unmaking the canon.

Going forward, and by way of conclusion, I will propose that one of the things that remains to be done is the work of bringing those crucial debates within Latin American criticism that marked the turn of the present century into more direct conversation with the influence Latin American literatures have had elsewhere. This is not simply because it is important to register the reasons why Latin American criticism wished to unburden itself of the major figures or moments that have characterized the world-literary image of the region, but because those debates are potentially instructive (even transformative) for conversations unfolding elsewhere. And, of course, because Latin American criticism may itself learn from and be enriched by re-encountering those debates in a new moment and under new light. This requires, as I have been suggesting throughout, a more expansive conception of the contours of the field—a “Latin America” less bound by geography or the disciplinary imperatives of area studies and open to understanding itself in and through its relationship to other Souths. There is much precedent for such a conceptual reconfiguration in the field, and so the task will be one of seeing that potential more fully realized.

Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at The Pennsylvania State University. She has published extensively on post-independence Latin American and African literatures and within the growing field of South-South comparison. She is the author of The Dictator Novel: Writers and Politics in the Global South (2019) and is currently at work on a book examining how the legacies of the Latin American literary "boom" of the 1960s and 1970s have inflected the international circulation and reception of literature from other regions of the Global South. She is also co-director of the digital platform Global South Studies (globalsouthstudies.org) and the current recipient of a Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers from the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung (Germany) (2023-2026).