Adrian Kane, professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages, recently published “Inverting the Discourse of Civilization and Barbarism in World at the End of the World and An Old Man Who Read Love Stories by Luis Sepúlveda” in Forma: A Journal of Latin American Criticism. In this article he argues that “Un viejo que leía novelas de amor” and “Mundo del fin del mundo” propose that being modern at the turn of the 21st century is no longer to demonstrate mastery over non-human nature as in the great novels of the 19th century and the early part of the twentieth century. Instead, the redefinition of modernity offered in Sepúlveda’s novels would be a heightened ecological awareness in which capitalist surplus is no longer privileged over the well-being of ecosystems.
Kane also presented “Constructing Historical Memory in U.S. Central American Literature” at the Latin American Studies International Congress in Vancouver, BC over the summer. This presentation offered an analysis of the ways in which several texts from the 2017 multi-genre anthology “The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States,” edited by Leticia Hernández Linares, Rubén Martínez and Héctor Tobar, move toward the construction of a U.S. Central American identity. He argued that this volume sheds light on the relation between the deeply intertwined histories of the U.S and Central America and the waves of migration to the U.S. that have ensued over the last forty years.