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Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive (2019) explores how to find “lost children” who are forced to migrate and interrogates relationships among works of literature, archives, and archiving. Taking place contemporaneously with its publication, the novel follows Ma, Pa, and their two children who are stepsiblings on a road trip from New York City to the US Southwest. Along the way, characters take photographs, and, more unusually, record their own voices and the sounds of the environments they pass through. This article extends explorations of how sound works in the novel to how sound works as the novel by comparing the written text with the audiobook version. After situating the novel among discussions of how literature can contribute to archive making, employing Anne Gilliland and Michelle Caswell's notion of “impossible archival imaginaries” and Erica Johnson's notion of the “neo-archive,” the article shows that readers and audiobook listeners ultimately experience a different narrative. This comparison exposes a third layer of information that prompts questions about what can — and can't — be learned from written and oral records on their own. The article concludes proposing that this third layer of information suggests new possibilities for how literature can contribute to understandings of how archives can include the experiences of marginalized communities with more nuance and complexity.
Valeria Luiselli's Lost Children Archive (2019) explores how to find “lost children” who are forced to migrate and interrogates relationships among works of literature, archives, and archiving. Taking place contemporaneously with its publication, the novel follows Ma, Pa, and their two children who are stepsiblings on a road trip from New York City to the US Southwest. Along the way, characters take photographs, and, more unusually, record their own voices and the sounds of the environments they pass through. This article extends explorations of how sound works in the novel to how sound works as the novel by comparing the written text with the audiobook version. After situating the novel among discussions of how literature can contribute to archive making, employing Anne Gilliland and Michelle Caswell's notion of “impossible archival imaginaries” and Erica Johnson's notion of the “neo-archive,” the article shows that readers and audiobook listeners ultimately experience a different narrative. This comparison exposes a third layer of information that prompts questions about what can — and can't — be learned from written and oral records on their own. The article concludes proposing that this third layer of information suggests new possibilities for how literature can contribute to understandings of how archives can include the experiences of marginalized communities with more nuance and complexity.
There are ghosts in the barn, or at least Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus leads one to believe so. Instances of spectrality abound in the novel, suggesting a fundamental connection between Viramontes’s figurative appeal to the “ghostly” and her more openly political and economic concerns in telling a story about the poverty, exploitation, and violence suffered yearly by farmworkers at the hands of US agribusiness. This essay argues that Viramontes’s turn to spectrality in Under the Feet of Jesus aims to lay bare the fundamental fetishism and phantasmagoria surrounding the value form and the products of labor under capitalism—what Karl Marx suggestively calls “all the magic and necromancy” shrouding capital accumulation. Capitalism inescapably conjures its own phantoms and so remains haunted by the spectral figures of “dead labor” occulted under the sign of value. Accordingly, Under the Feet of Jesus depicts a California agricultural landscape haunted at every turn by disavowed “dead labor,” both in Marx’s figurative sense and in a tragically literal sense.
This essay argues that Tomás Rivera’s seminal Chicano text . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra is a polyvocal and deeply communal work whose formal inventiveness illuminates the imaginative lives of migrant workers. Contesting the dominant critical reading of the book as an allegorical treatment of political consciousness and its development, the essay contends that a close reading of the novel’s narrative framework, as well as its emphasis on listening and memory, suggests that important aesthetic and political considerations need not be precisely tied to allegory in order to create a communal text. Ultimately, the essay argues that the literary can help illuminate the workings of ethnic identity by exploring new forms for imagining community belonging.
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