LATIN AMERICA’S AGRARIAN NOVELS CHRONICLED THE BIRTH OF A NEW WORLD
Between 1910 and 1970, Latin America experienced a rapid and radical transformation. Rural societies became urban, and peasants found themselves forced into precarious wage labor. The Latin American novel became the key witness to this upheaval, revealing capitalism’s violent remaking of country and city alike.
In Agrarian Questions, Ericka Beckman shows how these novels illuminate an epochal reshaping of land and labor—gifting readers with insights that continue to resonate in a world of increasing urban precarity.
What People Are Saying
"A landmark work of literary economy and a fascinating dive into how the power of Latin American fiction emerged out of the combined and uneven development and misery of rural Latin America. Beckman’s prose is politically alive, illuminating both Latin America’s literary traditions and its capitalist development." Greg Grandin, author of America, América
"Constitutes the most significant study of the relationship between rural decline, capitalism, and the novel form in any literary tradition." Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, author of Strategic Occidentalism
"If I had to pick one book to pair with Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums for the twenty-first-century sequel to Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City, it would undoubtedly be Beckman’s Agrarian Questions." Colleen Lye, coeditor of After Marx
"Ericka Beckman once again makes evident the richness of literary studies and its relevance for historical and contemporary analysis of our global geopolitical order." María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, author of Indian Given
"With Agrarian Questions, Ericka Beckman is proven to be one of the foremost representatives of a tradition of historical-materialist Latin Americanist scholarship and criticism." Neil Larsen, author of Determinations
