Alia Trabucco Zerán, award-winning author of The Remainder (La Resta), and Women Who Kill (Las Homicidas), and Sophie Hughes, Alia’s translator and finalist for the International Booker Prize talk with Novel Dialogue host Chris Holmes about a novel that has shaped their lives as writers and thinkers: The Hole by José Revueltas. Sophie and Alia discuss how The Hole, written while Revueltas was held in the infamous Lecumberri prison, purposefully makes readers feel lost in a small, confined space. Reading a section from her co-translation of The Hole, published in 1969 as El Apando, Sophie considers how the novel’s intense feelings of confinement and limitation prompt a contemplation of what exactly defines freedom. The conversation turns on how the novel does not spare you from having “been victim of a violent book yourself,” and that literature which confronts our shared inhumanity toward prisoners should make you feel uncomfortable. In a series of thoughtful exchanges, the novelist and her translator confront the difficulties of preserving the immersiveness of the novel’s affect while being attuned to the precise choices and sacrifices of drawing out the novel in English. The episode ends with our season’s signature question, and a wonderful example of untranslatable Chilean Spanish from Alia.

Mentioned in this episode:

Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics.

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In 2011, an Ecuadorian court issued the world’s largest environmental contamination liability: a $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron. Within years, a US federal court and an international tribunal determined that the Ecuadorian judgment had been procured through fraud and was unenforceable.

In The Small Matter of Suing Chevron (Duke University Press, 2022) Dr. Suzana Sawyer delves into this legal trilogy to explore how distinct legal truths were relationally composed of, with, and through crude oil. In Sawyer’s analysis, chemistry proves crucial. Analytically, it affords a grammar for appreciating how molecular, technical, and legal agencies catalyzed distinct jurisdictional renderings. Empirically, the chemistry of hydrocarbons (its complexity, unfathomability, and misattribution) significantly shaped competing judicial determinations. Ultimately, chemical, scientific, contractual, and litigating techniques precipitated this legal saga’s metamorphic transformation, transmuting a contamination claim into an environmental liability, then a racketeering scheme, and then a breach of treaty.

Holding the paradoxes of complicity in suspension, Dr. Sawyer deftly demonstrates how crude matters, technoscience, and liberal legality configure how risk and reward, deprivation and disavowal, suffering and surfeit become legally and unevenly distributed.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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On part #2 of Technocracy Now, we tell stories of cybernetic technocracies.

First, we hear the story of Charles A. McClelland, a liberal political scientists who proposed a cybernetic computer system that claimed to predict conflicts before they happened. With this information, US policy makers could usher in a new age of peace and stability (and forever ensure a US-dominated global order). The project never accomplished everything it set out to do, but it is now being resurrected behind closed doors by Lockheed Martin. It's a techno-utopian dream of mathematical certainty in an uncertain world.

Then, why not cyber-socialism? In Salvador Allende's Chile, they were building a cybernetic computer network that connected factories to state planners. It seems technocratic, but these cyber-revolutionaries saw it as anything but. The short-lived Cybersyn Project promised using science to develop a more rationally-ordered economy. However, it also promised to guarantee the freedom and autonomy of workers. The project was destroyed in the brutal coup of 1973. However, did it work, and is it a dream worth resurrecting?

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The World That Latin America Created: The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America in the Development Era (Harvard University Press, 2022) tells the story of how a group of intellectuals and policymakers transformed development economics and gave Latin America a new position in the world. Making an innovative and provocative intervention across the fields of global history, Latin American history, and economic thought, Margarita Fajardo reconstructs the origins of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America, or CEPAL. Cepalinos challenged the orthodoxies of development theory and policy, outpacing the United States and the International Monetary Fund as the agenda setters for a region traditionally held under the orbit of Washington and its institutions. Their story interlocks with the emergence of dependency theory in Latin America, whose diverse history Fajardo recasts in pioneering fashion.

Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser).

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Warzones are sometimes described as lawless, but this is rarely the case. Armed insurgents often replace the state as the provider of law and justice in areas under their authority. Based on extensive fieldwork, Rebel Courts: The Administration of Justice by Armed Insurgents (Oxford University Press, 2021) by Dr. Réne Provost offers a compelling and unique insight into the judicial governance of armed groups, a phenomenon never studied comprehensively until now.

Using a series of detailed case studies of non-state armed groups in a diverse range of conflict situations, including the FARC (Colombia), Islamic State (Syria and Iraq), Taliban (Afghanistan), Tamil Tigers (Sri Lanka), PKK (Turkey), PYD (Syria), and KRG (Iraq), Rebel Courts argues that it is possible for non-state armed groups to legally establish and operate a system of courts to administer justice. Rules of public international law that regulate the conduct of war can be interpreted as authorising the establishment of rebel courts by armed groups. When operating in a manner consistent with due process, rebel courts demand a certain degree of recognition by international states, institutions, and even other non-state armed groups.

With legal analysis enriched by insights from other disciplines, Rebel Courts is a must read for all scholars and professionals interested in law, justice, and the effectiveness of global legal standards in situations of armed conflict.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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As a collective effort, The Middle Classes in Latin America: Subjectivities, Practices, and Genealogies (Routledge, 2022) locates the formation of the middle classes at the core of the histories of Latin America in the last two centuries. Featuring scholars from different places across the Americas, it is an interdisciplinary contribution to the world histories of the middle classes, histories of Latin America, and intersectional studies. It also engages a larger audience about the importance of the middle classes to understand modernity, democracy, neoliberalism, and decoloniality. By including research produced from a variety of Latin American, North American, and other audiences, the volume incorporates trends in social history, cultural studies and discursive theory. It situates analytical categories of race and gender at the core of class formation. This volume seeks to initiate a critical and global conversation concerning the ways in which the analysis of the middle classes provides crucial re-readings of how Latin America, as a region, has historically been understood.

Rachel Grace Newman is a historian of modern Mexico with particular interests in migration, childhood and youth studies, and social inequality. She is Assistant Professor of History at Colgate University.

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Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname in the Atlantic World, 1651-1825 (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020) explores the political and social history of the Jews of Suriname, a Dutch colony on the South American mainland just north of Brazil. Suriname was home to the most privileged Jewish community in the Americas where Jews, most of Iberian origin, enjoyed religious liberty, were judged by their own tribunal, could enter any trade, owned plantations and slaves, and even had a say in colonial governance.

Aviva Ben-Ur sets the story of Suriname's Jews in the larger context of Atlantic slavery and colonialism and argues that, like other frontier settlements, they achieved and maintained their autonomy through continual negotiation with the colonial government. Drawing on sources in Dutch, English, French, Hebrew, Portuguese, and Spanish, Ben-Ur shows how, from their first permanent settlement in the 1660s to the abolition of their communal autonomy in 1825, Suriname Jews enjoyed virtually the same standing as the ruling white Protestants, with whom they interacted regularly. She also examines the nature of Jewish interactions with enslaved and free people of African descent in the colony. Jews admitted both groups into their community, and Ben-Ur illuminates the ways in which these converts and their descendants experienced Jewishness and autonomy. Lastly, she compares the Jewish settlement with other frontier communities in Suriname, most notably those of Indians and Maroons, to measure the success of their negotiations with the government for communal autonomy. The Jewish experience in Suriname was marked by unparalleled autonomy that nevertheless developed in one of the largest slave colonies in the New World.

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When Europeans came to the American continent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they were confronted with what they perceived as sacrificial practices. Representations of Tupinamba cannibals, Aztecs slicing human hearts out, and idolatrous Incas flooded the early modern European imagination. But there was no less horror within European borders; during the early modern period no region was left untouched by the disasters of war.

Sacrifice and Conversion in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2022), edited by Maria Berbara, illuminates a particular aspect of the mutual influences between the European invasions of the American continent and the crisis of Christianity during the Reform and its aftermaths: the conceptualization and representation of sacrifice. Because of its centrality in religious practices and systems, sacrifice becomes a crucial way to understand not only cultural exchange, but also the power struggles between American and European societies in colonial times. How do cultures interpret sacrificial practices other than their own? What is the role of these interpretations in conversion? From the central perspective of sacrifice, these essays examine the encounter between European and American sacrificial conceptions—expressed in texts, music, rituals, and images—and their intellectual, cultural, religious, ideological, and artistic derivations.

Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender.

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Latinx Studies has long been overdue for a revamp – a different orientation to the questions with which we concern ourselves. Critical Dialogues in Latinx Studies: A Reader (New York University Press, 2021) is a leap toward this direction by offering the field nine distinct díalogos around which various established and junior scholars from different disciplines present their own writings to these conversations. Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas and Mérida M. Rúa, the co-editors of the anthology, ground the book in the work of Jesús Colón’s A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches. “By opening this anthology with Jesús Colón we aim to highlight the role that history, memoir, and even autobiographical fiction invariably play in most empirically sound and theoretically sophisticated Latinx humanistic social sciences,” Ramos-Zayas and Rúa write (3). From this vantage point, they pry open the field of Latinx Studies and expose its expansiveness and depth by highlighting its methodological innovation, intersectional critique, various geopolitical scales that decenter the U.S. nation-state, and critical takes on seemingly established paradigms.

In this New Books Latino Studies interview, we focus on díalogos numbers 1, 2, 8, and 9. These four critical dialogues offer listeners only a glimpse into the 39 articles that make up the anthology.

Over 538 pages, 39 articles, and 9 dialogues, Critical Dialogues in Latinx Studies provides different ways to access, define, disrupt, and embody Latinidades. Scholars, teachers, and anyone interested in Latino Studies will find something of interest in the anthology.

Jonathan Cortez is currently the 2021-2023 César Chávez Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. You can follow Jonathan on Twitter @joncortz

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How did superpower competition and the cold war affect writers in the decolonizing world? In The Aesthetic Cold War: Decolonization and Global Literature (Princeton UP, 2022), Peter Kalliney explores the various ways that rival states used cultural diplomacy and the political police to influence writers. In response, many writers from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean—such as Chinua Achebe, Mulk Raj Anand, Eileen Chang, C.L.R. James, Alex La Guma, Doris Lessing, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Wole Soyinka—carved out a vibrant conceptual space of aesthetic nonalignment, imagining a different and freer future for their work.

Kalliney looks at how the United States and the Soviet Union, in an effort to court writers, funded international conferences, arts centers, book and magazine publishing, literary prizes, and radio programming. International spy networks, however, subjected these same writers to surveillance and intimidation by tracking their movements, tapping their phones, reading their mail, and censoring or banning their work. Writers from the global south also suffered travel restrictions, deportations, imprisonment, and even death at the hands of government agents. Although conventional wisdom suggests that cold war pressures stunted the development of postcolonial literature, Kalliney’s extensive archival research shows that evenly balanced superpower competition allowed savvy writers to accept patronage without pledging loyalty to specific political blocs. Likewise, writers exploited rivalries and the emerging discourse of human rights to contest the attentions of the political police.

A revisionist account of superpower involvement in literature, The Aesthetic Cold War considers how politics shaped literary production in the twentieth century.

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