The Return of the Contemporary - (Illuminations) by Nicolás Campisi (Hardcover)

About the Book

A Study of the Twenty-First-Century Latin American Novel in an Era of Apocalyptic Catastrophe

Book Synopsis

In The Return of the Contemporary, Nicolás Campisi combines the fields of post-dictatorship studies and environmental humanities to analyze Latin American cultural production in the neoliberal age. Each chapter pairs two authors from different parts of Latin America and the Caribbean who create a common vocabulary in which to frame the various crises of the region's present and recent past, such as climate change, forced migration, the collapse of state institutions, and the afterlives of slavery. By situating his argument at the intersection of ecocritical and environmental humanities, affect studies, and the politics of memory and postmemory, Campisi presents new comparative methods to show how Latin America's neoliberal crisis prompted significant changes in how the novel as a form imagines a different future.

Review Quotes

The Return of the Contemporary acts as an antidote to ecocritical analysis that takes the apocalypse as the enemy to defeat, a stance that too often results in doomism. Campisi interrupts this understanding with multifield insights that incisively counter the danger of facile moves toward both historicism and presentism.-- "Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment"

The Return of the Contemporary's main contribution derives from its ability to connect a diverse array of texts in order to convincingly establish a coherent corpus of novels that address crisis, presentism and the contemporary. The book takes the unique approach of interpreting its corpus as neither cynical nor optimistic, but as the novelists' means of grappling with the complex emotions of living through abounding crisis and employing literary techniques to consider future horizons.-- "ReVista, Harvard Review of Latin America"

The Return of the Contemporary is a beautifully written book with a strongly articulated and original argument. Ambitious in its geographical reach and timely in its subject matter and corpus, its abiding question of how and why Latin American writers over the past twenty years have engaged with a present marked by crisis--not only environmental but also economic and political--is rigorously and compellingly examined.--Lesley Wylie, University of Leicester

About the Author

Nicolás Campisi is assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Georgetown University. His research focuses on contemporary Latin American literature, environmental humanities, and memory studies. His work has appeared in journals such as Revista Hispánica Moderna, Revista Iberoamericana, and A Contracorriente.