Publications

Books in Progress

Worldly Situations: Form, Space, and the Mexican Novel’s Countertopographical Imagination

In Worldly Situations, I argue that the 1960s mark the moment when the Mexican novel becomes worldly, when against the grain of its national concerns, its formal patterns for the first time produce a situated perspective on the uneven configurations of global capitalism. I call this perspective the novel’s countertopographical imagination, a formal faculty arising from the world-building practices through which the novel form mediates spatiality across scales. Thinking countertopographically allows the Mexican novel of the 1960s to produce a unique form of situated knowledge that registers the spatial paradoxes and imperial practices of global capitalism vis-à-vis the collapse of Mexico’s national-popular state. This newly found aesthetic sensibility led the Mexican novel to represent spatial situations that, although resolutely national, rely on the scale-bending properties of modernist form to compose a new sense of worldly sociality. The book is structured around two spatial situations: the threshold and the interior, which I use to account for the spatial dynamism of the Mexican novel between 1958 and 1973. Countering the general absence of Mexican literature in current debates on new formalisms and world literature, Worldly Situations argues that the Mexican novel of the long sixties produces a uniquely peripheral perspective on the contradictory expansion of the capitalist system at the onset of globalization.

Latinamericanism and the Novel

Through a formalist reading of the sui generis modernism associated with the so-called Latin American literary “Boom,” Latinamericanism and the Novel shows how the vanguardist novel of the 1950s and 60s provides formal answers to questions of scale, transition, and singularity that enthralled Latin American social theorists in the mid-decades of the twentieth century. Under contract with Cambridge UP.

Peer-Reviewed Articles

Acapulco and the Literary Geography of Underdevelopment

Literary Geographies, vol. 11, no. 1, 2025, pp. 1-20. Print.

The Prolific Roads of Reedification: Literature, Architecture, and Autonomy in Post-Revolutionary Mexico

FORMA: A Journal of Latin American Criticism and Theory, vol. 3, no. 2, 2024, pp. 37-58. Web. Print.

Capitalist Thresholds: La muerte de Artemio Cruz and the Mapmaking of Modern Mexico

Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, vol. 76, no. 3, 2022, pp. 127-140. Print.

Nothing But Workers: Reading Class Struggle in Diamela Eltit’s Mano de obra

Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, vol. 30, no. 3, 2021, pp. 399-415. Print.

Translation

Hacia la novela como crítica, by Anna Kornbluh

Nuevas poligrafías: revista de teoría literaria y literatura comparada, no. 12, 2025, pp. 149-166. Print.

Book Reviews

Mexico, Interrupted: Labor, Idleness, and the Economic Imaginary of Independence, by Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón. Romance Quarterly, vol. 72, no. 3, 2025, pp. 216-217. Print.

After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Colleen Lye and Christopher Nealon. Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, vol. 78, no. 1, 2024, pp. 26-28. Print.

Embodied Archive: Disability in Post-Revolutionary Mexican Cultural Production, by Susan Antebi. Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, vol. 57, no. 1, 2023, pp. 118-120. Print.

Developmental Aspirations contra Internationalist Solidarity: Mexico and the Global Economy. Review essay of The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties, by Eric Zolov, and Revolution in Development: Mexico and the Governance of the Global Economy, by Christy Thornton. Chasqui: revista de literatura latinoamericana, vol. 50, no. 2, 2021, pp. R15-R18. Print.

Infrapolitical Passages: Global Turmoil, Narco-Accumulation, and the Post-Sovereign State, by Gareth Williams. Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, vol. 9, no. 6, 2021, pp. 151-156. Print.