The second chapter examines heretical re-readings of Borges by Roberto Bolaño and Marcos Peres. Bolaño’s La literatura nazi en América, 2666 and, in particular, Peres’ O Evangelho Segundo Hitler can be read as a function of Harold Bloom’s categories of the ‘anxiety of influence’ amongst poets. Once the authors successfully escape the creative bind of this anxiety, in writing about Nazism, they encounter other challenges to explore such as the dialectical relationship between friend and enemy, and the perceived bind between fascism and resistance to it. In Bolaño’s analysed works, there are two attempted strategies to overcome these binds – the first rhetorical, and the second ethical. The first is explored with reference to Judith Butler’s essay ‘Competing Universals’ from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left and the second in relation to aspects of her reading of Levinas in Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence.

At the turn of the millennium, Jorge Volpi and Ignacio Padilla received criticism from the Mexican literary establishment for ‘renouncing their Mexicanity’ by not dealing with Mexican themes in En busca de Klingsor and Amphitryon respectively. Chapter 3 examines this phenomenon in the context of Mexican cultural and political history. It argues that, with the fall of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) after 71 years, Volpi and Padilla perceived a unique historic opportunity to re-configure the relationship between intellectuals and the state. Through an analysis of the themes of ‘myth’ and Nazism in these novels, as well as in Cambio de piel by Carlos Fuentes and Morirás lejos by Jose Emilio Pacheco, structuralist and post-structuralist understandings of myth are compared. It is further argued that Volpi and Padilla engage in a narrative rehearsal of Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion that literature’s task is to ‘interrupt the myth’ of (national) identity.

Chapter 1 compares two contemporary Argentine novels that deal with Nazism in allegorical ways. Patricio Pron’s El comienzo de la primavera establishes a dialogue between the German and Argentine post-dictatorship contexts. In doing so, Pron highlights the inevitable insufficiency of justice in relation to dictatorship crimes, or that which Brett Levinson calls ‘radical injustice’. The novel’s melancholic register and parallels between two distinct historical moments lend themselves to an examination with reference to Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory. In Wakolda, Lucía Puenzo examines the activities of Josef Mengele in Argentina but, contrary to Pron, rejects parallels with events related to the dictatorship or post-dictatorship. Instead, she foregrounds the foundational reliance of the Argentine nation on forms of ‘immunization’ (Esposito) and ‘necropolitics’ (Mbembe): the exploitative labour of a racialized mass that are rhetorically and materially excluded from the benefits of being ‘Argentine’ in both the past and the present.

Why have so many Latin American authors recently taken up themes of Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust? This introduction re-caps the development of Latin American literary production from the nineteenth century to the present in order to explain why it is a notable trend that can tell us about phenomena as diverse as literary generations, globalization, racism, precarious labour, dictatorship, democracy, ethics and ontology. It investigates whether narratives from Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Colombia and Brazil have anything in common in their approaches to the subject; and whether they are similar or distinct from works by their canonized precursors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes, Carlos Onetti and Ricardo Piglia. Ultimately, this introduction sets out a framework for understanding a gradual shift in Latin American literature, from novels underpinning the ‘imagined communities’ of nations (Benedict Anderson), to authors deconstructing these and instead gesturing towards ‘inoperative communities’ (Jean-Luc Nancy).

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.

Los informantes by Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Diário da Queda by Michel Laub both use family narratives to explore ontological and political relationships. In Los informantes, this chapter demonstrates that the father and son embody Nancy’s notions of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘democracy’ respectively. Their weaknesses reveal weaknesses of such systems of governance, which Vásquez examines in relation to the historic and contemporary Colombian political context. It is through tactile associations and ‘sharing’ emblematized in the character of a physiotherapist, that the possibility of a ‘horizontal’ politics of ‘interdependence’ is explored. Likewise, in Diário da Queda, a lack of touch and familial intimacy frustrates the happiness of a father and son who are the second and third generation, born to a Holocaust survivor who moved to Brazil. This chapter tackles the novel’s radical critique of Holocaust memory used to bind together a Jewish ‘operative’ community, and to justify violence in the present.