Agrarian Questions: The Latin American Novel on the Road to Capitalism
Ericka Beckman (University of Pennsylvania) in conversation with Santiago Acosta and Katherina Frangi
Between 1910 and 1970, Latin America underwent one of the most rapid and consequential social transformations in its history: rural societies became urban, peasants were displaced into precarious wage labor, and the countryside was remade by the demands of capitalist modernization. In Agrarian Questions: The Latin American Novel on the Road to Capitalism (Verso, 2026), Ericka Beckman argues that the Latin American novel became a key witness to this epochal transition. Moving from José María Arguedas and Rosario Castellanos to Jorge Amado and Juan Rulfo, Beckman traces how novelists across the region gave form to the uneven but momentous restructuring of land and labor, producing a body of work whose insights into rural dispossession and urban precarity continue to resonate today. Drawing on critical theory and political economy, the book offers a landmark contribution to Latin American literary studies, the history of the novel, and the environmental humanities.
