Can rubber trees, silicone dolls, corpses, soil, subatomic particles,
designer shoes, and discarded computers become the protagonists of
contemporary literature--and what does this tell us about the
relationship between humans and objects? In Things with a History,
Héctor Hoyos argues that the roles of objects in recent Latin American
fiction offer a way to integrate materialisms old and new, transforming
our understanding of how things shape social and political relations.
Discussing contemporary authors including Roberto Bolaño, Ariel Magnus,
César Aira, and Blanca Wiethüchter as well as classic writers such as
Fernando Ortiz and José Eustasio Rivera, Hoyos considers how Latin
American literature has cast things as repositories of history, with an
emphasis on the radically transformed circulation of artifacts under
globalization. He traces a tradition of thought, transcultural
materialism, that draws from the capacity of literary language to
defamiliarize our place within the tangible world. Hoyos contrasts new
materialisms with historical-materialist approaches, exposing how recent
tendencies sometimes sidestep concepts such as primitive accumulation,
commodity fetishism, and conspicuous consumption, which have been
central to Latin American history and literature. He contends that an
integrative approach informed by both historical and new materialisms
can balance seeing things as a means to reveal the true nature of social
relations with appraisals of things in their autonomy. Things with a
History simultaneously offers a sweeping account of the material turn
in recent Latin American culture and reinvigorates social theory and
cultural critique.
