English Department Colloquium
University of Illinois at Chicago
Spring 2016
Friday, April 22, 2016, 3pm
Room 2028, University Hall
601 S. Morgan Street
“Boom! Roa Bastos and the Multitude”
This paper offers a reassessment of the Latin American literary efflorescence of the 1960s and 1970s via a re-reading of the work of Augusto Roa Bastos, whose novels Son of Man (Hijo de hombre, 1960) and I, The Supreme (Yo el Supremo, 1974) bookend the Boom by showing how Roa Bastos’s interest in machinic processes opens out on what I call a “multitude,” a polyvalent and expansive subject that challenges the stress on the people that otherwise dominates discussion of Latin American politics and culture.