This panel will engage with the concept of the individual in Latin American culture. The individual is a contested and ambivalent figure, often opposed to concepts such as community or collective, people or nation, but equally often also standing in for those broader notions, especially in allegorical readings of classic texts. In recent years, individualism has been challenged by other concepts that purport to indicate particularity: the self or the singular, for instance, or even the subaltern as what resists incorporation into the whole. But we suspect that the individual continues to haunt Latin American culture, and that its reign is yet to be overthrown.

For good or ill, then, individualism is a key element both in the literary canon, and also in counter-canons that claim to do away with its negative associations. We must only think of the central place of individualism in, for example, the dictatorship novel, auto-fiction, diaries, memoirs, crime fiction, autobiographical accounts, or testimonio. Engagement with individualism is fundamental at a time in which the construction of the self exceeds the literary field, manifesting itself in other aspects of the public sphere, such as in the growing appearance of personalist leaders in mainstream politics or the commodification of the self in social media.

Walt Whitman, who had a remarkable impact in twentieth-century Latin American literature, famously opens his “Song to Myself” with a celebration of individualism, only to conclude with a paradox: “I contain multitudes.” Following Whitman’s imagination of a self who cannot be separated from the multitude, this panel will address the ways Latin American culture deals with the thin line that separates the individual from the singular, the subject, and the person. Other points of reference might range from studies such as Vilém Flusser’s Post-History (1983), Ian Watt’s Myths of Modern Individualism (1996) and Roberto Esposito's The Third Person (2012).

Justin Read will open this panel, building on Flusser’s “programmatic” vision of the post-historical world. His presentation will focus on the “post-historical” individual as elaborated in a recent Mexican literary work, Yuri Herrera’s novel, Señales que precederán al fin del mundo (2009), which tests political and psychological borderlands. The plot follows something of a steam-punk protagonist, Makina, as she seeks to cross the border illegally from the fictional La Ciudadita to a “promised-land” called Gran Chilango. Birth as a female does not prevent Makina from becoming male; to the contrary she embodies a “political transsexuality.” Read will examine Herrera’s novel, more than as an allegory of national bildung or subjective becoming, as a text that lays bare the cultural programs by which the Latin American individual splays itself across multiple selves and subjectivities.

Jon Beasley-Murray will continue by offering a re-reading of testimonial narratives, from Biografía de un cimarrón (1966) to Rigoberta Menchú (1983), to examine the strategies which these texts establish the figure of an exemplary individual, whose story is both exceptional and common, particular and shared. In his presentation, Beasley-Murray will suggest that the resulting tensions account in part for the apparent demise of the genre, but also offer new ways to read testimonio beyond the assumption of collective identity.

Fabricio Tocco will focus on two crime narratives, focusing on how they reproduced the ways classic European literature had shaped the notion of individualism. Tocco will examine how Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote informs contemporary narratives such as the Brazilian Rubem Fonseca’s Agosto (1990) and the Chilean Roberto Bolaño’s Estrella distante (1996). Building on Leo Spitzer’s reading of the multiple names that Cervantes ascribes to Don Quixote and on a close reading of the iconic scene in which the Knight Errant unilaterally releases galley slaves that had been imprisoned by the rule of the Spanish King, Tocco will explore the rewriting of individualism in the form of fragmentariness of the subject and depersonalisation.

Finally, Alejandro Soifer will look at the way two Argentine novels portray extreme individualism in the late 1990s, as a product of a series of neoliberal transformations were explicitly adopted by the government, following the policies prescribed by the Washington Consensus. Soifer will analyze Rodolfo Fogwill’s Vivir afuera (1998) and Salvador Benesdra’s El traductor (1998), both originally published during the same year that inaugurated the recession that would end with a popular revolt and the worst political turmoil of the country’s history, in December 2001. Soifer will examine the nihilistic style that these novels exhibit to portray individuals and the way they must transform their subjectivity, to survive within a new political and economic order.