Post-Conflict Central American Literature: Searching for Home and Longing to Belong
Yvette Aparicio
2014, Bucknell University Press
168 pages, hardback
THERE is a rich body of material and insight in Yvette Aparicio’s enthusiastic study of literature exploring the notion of homeland in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica following the sub-region’s civil wars. There is also a potentially fertile message – a challenge to the view that the forms of citizenship generated by globalisation always transcend the local process of identity formation. Aparicio explores with undisguised zeal the journeys taken by writers and poets to their notional homes and homelands, and her knowledge and understanding of the region is self-evident. Post-Conflict Central American Literature could have been much stronger and its message clearer, however, if the approach to the arguments had not been framed from the position of US cinema, which may offer a valuable lens with which to observe many cultural phenomena but in this case cannot be the most appropriate one, especially for a book about text. Nonetheless, Aparicio’s scholarship makes a valuable contribution to the study of this sub-region’s literary heritage.
