Telling Ruins in Latin America

As a merger of past, present and future, and as a material embodiment of change, the ruin offers a fertile locale for competing cultural stories about historical events, political projects, and the constitution of communities. A fascination with pre-Columbian ruins already marked Latin American nineteenth-century nation-building projects as well as early twentieth-century artistic experiments that linked avant-garde originality with imagined new beginnings. This book highlights the ruin’s prolific resurgence in Latin American cultural life at the turn of the millennium and sharply reveals a stirring creative drive by artists and intellectuals toward ethical reflection and change in the midst of ruinous devastation.

Michael J. Lazzara (Ph.D. Princeton University) is Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Luz Arce: despues del infierno (2008) and Chile in Transition: The Poetics and Politics of Memory (2006).

Vicky Unruh (Ph.D. University of Texas at Austin) is Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at the University of Kansas. She is the author of Latin American Vanguards: The Art of Contentious Encounters (1994) and Performing Women and Modern Literary Culture in Latin America (2006).