Post-Conflict Central American Literature: Searching for Home and Longing to Belong studies often-overlooked contemporary poetry. Through the exploration of poetry and a select number of short stories, this book contemplates the meanings of home, belonging, and the homeland in post-conflict, globalizing, and neoliberal El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Aparicio analyzes literary representations of and meditations on the current conditions as well as the recent pasts of Central American homelands. Additionally, the book highlights aesthetic renditions of home at the same time that it engages with and is grounded in contemporary Central American cultures, politics, and societies. In effect, this book contests hegemonic and apparently commonsense views that assert that globalization produces global citizenship and globalized experiences. Instead it argues that a palpable desire for home and belonging survives and thrives in rapidly globalizing Central American homelands.
Yvette Aparicio is associate professor of Spanish and Latin American studies at Grinnell College.
Acknowledgments Introduction Central America in Pieces: Dismembering the Isthmus (Re)membering Central America The Stench of Belonging Touring the Homeland Almost Home: Central America in a Virtual World Conclusion Bibliography
This interesting book concerns representations of home and homeland by contemporary poets and short story writers from postconflict (1990s on) Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Costa Rica. According to Aparicio (Grinnell), memories and associations, positive and negative, during this period express nostalgia for what could have been if the utopian desire for social transformation of revolutionary poets such as Cardenal, Rugama, and Dalton had been realized. Dashed hopes soon become bitter despondency as poets like Salvadoran Susana Reyes contemplate their degraded, 'dismembered' homelands. Some, such as Nicaraguan Juan Sobalvarro, vent their sense of alienation and displacement via naturalistic depictions of poverty, pollution, and decay. Others, including Costa Rican Luis Chaves, become emotionally detached from their decomposing homeland, experiencing it as if they were tourists, while longing to belong somewhere. Nicaraguan Eunice Shade's narrators 'leave' the homeland, but in a virtual sense only, seeking home and homeland in the globalized, digital world of consumerism, the 'banal nationalism' of shopping malls and computer screens. Aparicio's study shows that globalization cannot successfully substitute virtual realities for local belongings, and that although cultural referents have become less local and more global, the need to belong, to feel rooted somewhere, runs deep in Central America. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above. * CHOICE *
