Read more
"This book is a cultural and aesthetic analysis of the complex relation between state police agencies and intellectuals and writers in Latin America during the Cold War. What did agents care about when they spied on writers and artists? Did state surveillance impact the creation of writers; and, if so, how? What did it mean to live and write in a society torn between anticommunist paranoia and revolutionary rhetoric?"--
List of contents
1. Seeing it all: Perspectiva, panopticon, panorama, and the archive; 2. Latin American archives and human matter; 3. Cultural Cold War: Anticommunism, Asturias, Neruda, and the continental cultural congress of 1953; 4. Spying and knowledge: The Stasi and the file of Carlos Cerda; 5. Reading like a spy: Censorship in Chile; 6. Writing like a spy: Intelligence services in Guatemala and Mexico; 7. Spying like a writer: Gabriel García Márquez, José Revueltas, Otto René Castillo, and Mario Payeras.
About the author
Daniel Noemi Voionmaa is a scholar of Latin American literature and culture at Northeastern University. He has written about avant-garde, realism, and poverty. His most recent book, En tiempo fugitivo (2016) is a 'fundamental essay' about contemporary literature. He also writes for newspapers in Chile. He is currently working on a project about football and literature.
Summary
A new take on Latin American literature that analyzes secret police reports on writers and advances readings of their novels, short stories, and poems. It examines modernity, and the modern gaze, from the Italian Renaissance to the authoritarian regimes in Cold War Latin as the origins of today's surveillance society.
