Writing in the Aftermath of War
Literature and Disenchantment in Postwar Central America
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 13038259 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Nanci Buiza (0000-0003-2645-9891, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 13 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2025-06-25 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | TRANSMODERNITY Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2154-1361 • E-ISSN: 2154-1353 |
| Publisher | California Digital Library (CDL) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.5070/t4.48796 |
| OpenAlex | W4411631427 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 4 |
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
Disenchantment · Economic history · Political science · Politics · History · Latin American Literature Studies · Law
| Highly cited | No |
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