My interest in Paraguay dates to a memorable graduate seminar on Augusto Roa Bastos taught by John Kraniauskas years ago and which led to a full third of my dissertation. When it was cut from my first book project I fully intended to write a subsequent book on Paraguay; for various reasons it has never quite made it to book form but remains scattered in various essays.  

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Part of my interest in Paraguay is driven by, what I described in one essay as "the way it sits askance dominant narratives about Latin American history and culture, its invisibility a product of the way it looms as a counterstory shaped by repeated disasters from which there is no teleological overcoming or exit. It sits outside stories of defeat and disaggregation that are joined to a hydra-headed resistance, stories of overcoming or of compensations wrought through the lettered city (or cinematic traditions). We find in Paraguay the counterhistory of a scar at the heart of Latinamericanism; it is what remains of a territory and several overlapping populations cut down by its neighbors through war. Iterations of war, hot and cold, track across the territory we call Latin America: civil war, revolutionary wars, dirty wars, drug trafficking wars, water wars, wars of independence. Yet in no other country will war—war without a qualifier—loom so centrally to its history that the situation of a couple whose child has gone off to an indirectly named war be deemed so recognizable as in Paz encina's La hamaca paraguaya. Paraguay, we might then say, is one example of the “repressed topographies” (Achille Mbembe calls them) of the deathworlds in our contemporary world, “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead."

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From Paraguay one looks back on and reckons with Brazil as an imperial and colonizing formation in its own right - and not only in the 19th century.

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A Paraguayan counterhistory also involves a particular configuration of media, by which I mean both the status of the Guaraní language (which has a subterranean presence elsewhere), but also the thinner presence of written forms, and the efflorescence of visual and oral cultures.

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The opportunities to interview Carlos Colombino, to translate the work of Ticio Escobar, and talk to Paz Encina, - their generosity and brilliance - have also been absolutely formative to the particular place Paraguay holds in my thinking.

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Writings:

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“Paraguayan Counterlives.” In Authoritarianism, Cultural History and Political Resistance in Latin America: Exposing Paraguay, edited by Federico Pous, Alejandro Quin, and Marcelino Viera. Palgrave

Macmillan Press, 2017.

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“The Wings of Carlos Colombino: Architect, Artist, Writer (An Interview)” Co-written with Horacio Legras. In Authoritarianism, Cultural History and Political Resistance in Latin America: Exposing Paraguay, edited by Federico Pous, Alejandro Quin, and Marcelino Viera. Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2017.

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“Narratives and Deep Histories: Freyre, Arguedas, Roa Bastos, Rulfo.” In A Companion to Latin American Culture and Literature, edited by Sara Castro-Klaren, Blackwell Publishing, 2008.

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“Cara Feia al Enemigo: The Paraguayan Press and the War of the Triple Alliance.” Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies. Vol. 4, Fall 2006: 169-185.

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Translations:

Ticio Escobar. The Curse of Nemur: On the Art, Myth and Rituals of the Ishir Peoples of the Paraguayan Great Chaco. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. Spanish to English

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Ticio Escobar “The Strongest Thread: On the Artwork of Feliciano Centurión.” In Feliciano Centurión. Americas Society. 2020 [https://www.as-coa.org/articles/feliciano-centurion] Spanish to English.

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