Southern Cone Studies

Fernando A. Blanco has published Neoliberal Bonds. Undoing Memory in Chilean Art and Literature (Ohio State University Press, 2015). This text analyzes the sociocultural processes that have reshaped subjectivities in post-Pinochet Chile. By creatively exploring the intersections among memory, gender, post-trauma, sociology, psychoanalysis, and neoliberalism, Neoliberal Bonds draws on Lacan's notion of perversion to critique the subjective fantasies that people create to compensate for the loss of the social bond in the wake of a dictatorship founded on individualism, competition, and privatization.

Víctor Goldgel has published Cuando lo nuevo conquistó América. Prensa, moda y literatura en el siglo XIX (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2013),awarded the Premio Iberoamericano by the Latin American Studies Association. The book reconstructs the emergence ofthe new as a modern criterion of value in Latin America.

Francesca Lessa published the book ¿Justicia o impunidad? Cuentas pendientes en el Uruguay post-dictadura in August 2014, in which she reconstructs the memory struggles and the enduring accountability efforts to bring to justice the atrocities committed during the dictatorship (1973-1985) in Uruguay. Moreover, her 2013 monograph Memory and Transitional Justice in Argentina and Uruguay: Against Impunity was released as paperback in December 2014. Focusing on post-dictatorship Argentina and Uruguay, in this comparative work Francesca Lessa analyses across time the dynamic evolution of and shifts in transitional justice policies and the emergence and replacement of dominant memory narratives in the context of enduring struggles for justice and against impunity. This monograph was shortlisted for the "Best Recent History and Memory Book Contest" of the Latin American Studies Association.

Cara Levey, Daniel Ozarow, and Christopher Wylde have published Argentina Since the 2001 Crisis: Recovering the Past, Reclaiming the Future (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) an edited volume which brings together contributions from a multi-disciplinary and international group of experts to explore the effects and legacies of Argentina's 2001-2002 social, economic, and political implosion. Interrogating its nature and effects, the contributors reject the dichotomy of 'old' and 'new'; instead, they argue that responses to the crisis and the factors that precipitated it are a combination of pre-existing and emerging problems, many of them ones that were perceptible in the 1990s and earlier."

Karina Miller ha publicado Escrituras Impolíticas: Anti representaciones de la comunidad en Juan Rodolfo Wilcock, Osvaldo Lamborghini y Virgilio Piñera (Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2014). Escrituras Impolíticas explora la relación entre literatura y política desde una interrogación central: ¿Fue posible para la literatura latinoamericana de los 1960s y 70s escapar de la lógica de lo político (formulada por Carl Schmitt como el amigo oposición-enemigo) sin abandonar el terreno de la política? A través de lecturas de Juan Rodolfo Wilcock, Osvaldo Lamborghini y Virgilio Piñera, este libro examina la representación de emociones y afectos negativos como la soledad, la estupidez, el miedo y el asco, los cuales crean una distopía afectiva que imposibilita la idea de comunidad como plenitud.