7 - Some Postmodern Developments

Summary

These final remarks on some postmodern developments are intended as a postscript to the previous chapters. They concentrate on a number of new developments in contemporary Latin American literature and analyse a representative sample of works from those new genres. As we saw in Chapter 6, the decade of the 1960s witnessed a boom of Spanish American literature such as had never been seen before. As a result of a number of developments – among which should be mentioned political events such as the Cuban Revolution, economic events such as the commodification of literature, and cultural events such as the growth of the New Latin American Cinema – there emerged a new sense of a common cultural voice in Latin America. Paradoxically enough, following close on the heels of the creation of a new Latin American literary canon in the 1960s, new dissident voices became audible. The canon became gradually more diversified, the old hegemony of white, male, middleclass literature came more and more to be questioned, until, certainly by the 1980s, it became difficult to talk of a single canon. New canons, such as women's writing, Afro-Hispanic writing, Latino and Brazuca literature, gay literature and testimonio, to give a few examples, began to emerge and claim space exclusively for themselves.

The Post-Boom Novel

While there is much debate about the difference between the Boom and the post-Boom novel (some critics have even gone as far as to deny that there is any difference), it is clear that the progression from Boom to post-Boom constitutes a change of paradigm. As Philip Swanson has suggested:

[F]rom, roughly, the late sixties/early seventies, the Latin American novel began to experience a shift away from complex, even tortuous narrative forms towards more popular forms, often (though not always) relatively straightforward and sometimes, too, more directly political: a shift from the Boom to the post-Boom. The new novel had acquired an official air, lapsing into stereotype and a kind of heavy neo-classicism. The re-evaluation of popular culture (meaning, again, broadly speaking, mass culture rather than a form of indigenism) […] brought a wind of change. (Swanson 161)