Garcia Santos Gives Paper at NeMLA
At the recent conference of the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), Sarai Garcia, a fourth-year doctoral student in our program, presented her paper “Temporada de Huracanes: A Transnational Challenge to Confront Mediated Violence” as part of the panel Mediatized Violence in Contemporary Latin American Literature and Film (Part 1).
Garcia’s paper analyzes Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season (2017), one of the latest and most unusual narratives about Mexican violence. In contrast to books such as American Dirt, which gained notoriety for being the culmination of a series of inaccurate Mexican stereotypes, Melchor was praised for challenging the mythologies of migration, borders, etc., surrounding a violent imagery of Mexico consumed through media and literature over the years. Sarai Garcia’s paper analyzes the ways in which Melchor’s book was inserted in the same industrial literary mechanism that positioned American Dirt in the market. Through a process of questionable hierarchies applied by literary critics to her achievement in the canon of world literature, this process, although beneficial for Melchor’s oeuvre, phantomizes the real problems of Mexican literature presence abroad and Mexican representation of violence itself.