Epics and Anti-epics of Agrarian Transformation in Twentieth Century Latin America (Yale Agrarian Studies)

Ericka Beckman is Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Graduate Chair in Hispanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses primarily on narratives of capitalist modernity and modernization in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America. Her first book, Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age (Minnesota, 2013), studied how literature represented the incorporation of the region’s economies into world commodity markets at the end of the nineteenth century. Her current book project, tentatively titled “Agrarian Questions: Latin American Literature in the Age of Development,” examines how twentieth-century literary fiction by authors such as, Rosario Castellanos, Juan Rulfo, José Donoso and José María Arguedas, registered capitalist transitions in the countryside, primarily in relation to three overlapping processes: agricultural commercialization and mechanization, urban out-migration, and land reform.

The Agrarian Studies Program presents a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme. Invited specialists send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium.

For more information, and to receive a copy of the pre-circulated paper, see https://agrarianstudies.macmillan.yale.edu/colloquium.