Epilogue

Summary

This book has taken a thematic route through contemporary Latin American literature, which has allowed for a cross-sectional view of a generation of authors that are ostensibly less likely to share commonalities across national and regional boundaries than previous generations. Whilst acknowledging the inevitable internal differences that frustrate any attempt to delineate ‘generations’, I have suggested that there is a useful distinction to be made between the immediate post-Boom generation, and the generation of authors born in the 1960s and 1970s examined here. The broad political, social and economic challenges of the past two decades, and the particular generational experience of the younger authors have produced different necessary responses and emphases in their work, compared to their predecessors. In this regard, I observe two broad tendencies: first, a desire for an end to political memory discourses associated with sources of national trauma that largely took place before the authors were born. This is linked, in turn, to perceptions of the urgency of the conditions for many under neoliberalism in the region including growing and unsustainable levels of inequality and its associated problems of precarity, crime, violence and underlying racism. The second observation involves a turn towards engagements with ethical ontologies and embodied interactions as means of overcoming social divisions, exclusions and sources of conflict. In short, the authors have lost faith in the ability of modern politics to create safe, caring, and dignified associations between people, and have turned to ontology to attempt to build ‘community’ from a different metaphysical starting point than the self-contained Cartesian cogito that has determined our prevailing view of the subject throughout modernity.