"The Legacies of the Latin American "Boom": Gabriel García Márquez and Contemporary African Writing "

This talk explores the ways in which Gabriel García Márquez's writing, particularly the immense success of Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967), has influenced the writing and international circulation of literature from other regions of the Global South. The focus will be on contemporary African writing, which in recent years has experienced an explosion of readerly, critical, and scholarly interest comparable to the so-called Latin American literary boom of the 1960s and 1970s. Taking this comparison as a starting point, Armillas-Tiseyra will look at, first, the ways in which García Márquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude have been invoked in the reception and marketing of recent writing from the African continent. The talk will also address how writers themselves might anticipate and grapple with such comparisons in their work, with specific attention to two recent examples: Fiston Mwanza Mujila's Tram 83 (Democratic Republic of Congo, 2014) and Namwali Serpell's The Old Drift (Zambia-United States, 2019).

Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra is an associate professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University. Her research and teaching cut across Latin American and African literatures, with particular interest in large-scale comparative frameworks such as the Global South. Her first book, The Dictator Novel: Writers and Politics in the Global South (2019), is a comparative study of novels about dictators in Latin American and African literatures. She is currently at work on two new projects. The first analyzes the ways in which the Latin American literary "boom" of the 1960s and 1970s has influenced the international circulation of writing from the Global South; the second is a study of genre fiction in contemporary writing from the African continent and its recent diaspora.

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Co-hosted with: Africana Studies, Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies (OWNER), English, Romance Languages and Literatures

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