Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Spring 2025

Published In

TRANSMODERNITY: Journal Of Peripheral Cultural Production Of The Luso-Hispanic World

Abstract

This article examines the challenges faced by Central American writers during a period of profound cultural, political, and economic change, as Central America transitioned from an era of civil war and revolutionary struggle to one of peace, democracy, and neoliberal state-building, spanning from the 1990s to the 2010s. At the core of this change was a pervasive sense of disenchantment, understood not merely as disillusionment with the failures of the peacebuilding process but as a hollowing out of society’s capacity to envision Central American reality on a broader and more meaningful scale. This deeper, more intractable aspect of disenchantment and its implications for the literary enterprise are the focus of this article. I argue that the forces shaping Central America’s postwar modernity have profoundly undermined the groundwork of affectivity, imagination, and memory that literature’s humanizing potential depends on. As a result, Central American writers face the paradoxical task of upholding their literary vocation when literature’s power to produce aesthetic and emancipatory experiences is in decline.

Keywords

Central America, literature, postwar disenchantment, neoliberalism, modernity

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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This work is freely available under a Creative Commons license.

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