Surveillance, the Cold War, and Latin American Literature

Daniel Noemi Voionmaa

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781009153607
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009191210
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Surveillance, the Cold War, and Latin American Literature examines secret police reports on Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Elena Poniatowska, José Revueltas, Otto René Castillo, Carlos Cerda, and other writers, from archives in Mexico, Chile, Guatemala, Uruguay, the German Democratic Republic, and the USA. Combining literary and cultural analysis, history, philosophy, and history of art, it establishes a critical dialogue between the spies' surveillance and the writers' novels, short stories, and poems, and presents a new take on Latin American modernity, tracing the trajectory of a modern gaze from the Italian Renaissance to the Cold War. It traces the origins of today's surveillance society with sense of urgency and consequence that should appeal to academic and non-academic readers alike throughout the Americas, Europe and beyond.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Seeing It All: Perspectiva, Panopticon, Panorama, and the Archive
• Chapter 2 Latin American Archives and Human Matter
• Chapter 3 Cultural Cold War: Anticommunism, Asturias, Neruda, and the Continental Cultural Congress of 1953
• Chapter 4 Spying and Knowledge: The Stasi and the File of Carlos Cerda
• Chapter 5 Reading Like a Spy: Censorship in Chile
• Chapter 6 Writing Like a Spy: Intelligence Services in Guatemala and Mexico
• Chapter 7 Spying Like a Writer: Gabriel García Márquez, José Revueltas,Otto René Castillo, and Mario Payeras
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index