Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America's Export Age

(Paperback)

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Between 1870 and 1930, Latin American countries were incorporated into global capitalist networks like never before, mainly as exporters of raw materials and importers of manufactured goods. During this Export Age, entire regions were given over to the cultivation of export commodities such as coffee and bananas, capital and labor were relocated to new production centers, and barriers to foreign investment were removed. Capital Fictions investigates the key role played by literature in imagining and interpreting the transformations unleashed by Latin America's first major wave of capitalist modernization.

Reviews

"Linking economics and culture, "Capital Fictions "makes a serious contribution to the field of Latin American studies. Ericka Beckman takes us on a beautifully written tour of a number of texts, both canonical and marginal to the Latin American tradition, to expose a writerly anxiety for the new economic age that has opened Latin America to the vicissitudes of the commodity market and to the tropes that come with the exchange, sale, display, and consumption of commodity form. The result is a deeply satisfying text that alerts us to new possibilities of interpretation and critique." --Francine R. Masiello, author of "The Art of Transition: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis"

Author Bio

Ericka Beckman is assistant professor of Spanish and comparative literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.