Latin America, and the world more broadly, has been mired in crisis throughout the first quarter of the 21st century. From economic downturns to ecological disasters to legacies of racism and enslavement, the neoliberal trends of past decades have permeated our daily lives with instability amid longstanding narratives of constant progress. If, as we are told, our society is constantly progressing, why has precarity abounded? In The Return of the Contemporary: The Latin American Novel in the End Times, Nicolás Campisi explores the ways in which contemporary Latin American authors confront these realities, focusing on the genre of the novel.

A cottage industry of academic research on Bolivia has flourished over the past twenty years. Unleashed by popular mobilizations and political transformation around the turn of the century, social scientists have dissected and debated Bolivia’s “plurinational” state-building project, which came to define President Evo Morales’s regime (2006-2019). Of course, Bolivia had long been the object of scholarly curiosity, thanks to its robust Indigenous movements, neoliberal experiments in multiculturalism, eruption of anti-global uprisings and the postcolonial turn in public discourse.