Ericka Beckman

Contact
Office Location: 
510 Williams Hall
Email: 
ebeckman@sas.upenn.edu
Associate Professor
On leave: Fall 2024 and Spring 2025

My research focuses primarily on narratives of capitalist modernity and modernization in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America.  My first first book, Capital Fictions:  The Literature of Latin America's Export Age (Minnesota, 2013), studied how literature represented the incorporation of the region's economies into world commodity markets at the end of the nineteenth century.  I am currently finishing a book project titled "Agrarian Questions:  The Latin American Novel on the Road to Capitalism," which examines how, over the course of the twentieth century, the novel became a privileged vehicle for evoking uneven but at the same time momentous historical transitions to capitalism in agriculture.   

Research Interests: 

19th- and 20th- century Latin American literature and culture

  • literature and economics
  • Marxism and critical theory
  • rural modernity and modernization
  • colonialism and neo-colonialism
Selected Publications: 

Book

  •  Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America's Export Age. University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Edited Volume

  • Special Issue of Modern Fiction Studies, “Peripheral Literatures and the History of Capitalism,” co-edited with Oded Nir and Emilio Sauri.  68:1 (Spring 2022).      

 Journal Articles and Book Chapters

  •  “Latin American Literature and Dependency Theory Today.” After Marx, eds Colleen Lye and Christopher Nealon.  Cambridge University Press, 2022: 176-191. 
  •  “The Historical Novel in Peru: José María Arguedas’ Yawar fiesta.” Mediations.  Fall 2019-Spring 2020. (https://mediationsjournal.org/articles/historical-novel-peru)
  • “José María Arguedas’ Epics of Expropriation.” e-misférica, 14:1 (2018) [http://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/emisferica-14-1-expulsion/14-1-essays....
  •  “Rosario Castellanos’ Southern Gothic:  Indigenous Labor, Land Reform and the Production of Ladina Subjectivity,” Mexican Literature in Theory,ed. Ignacio Sánchez Prado, 2018:  139-158
  • “Unfinished Transitions: The Dialectics of Rural Modernization in Latin American Fiction,” Modernism/modernity, Volume 23, Number 4, November 2016, pp. 813-832.
  •  “Jorge Isaacs’ María and the Space-Time of Global Capitalism,” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 56:3 (2016): 539-559. 
  •  "Fables of Globalization: Race, Sex and Money in Nineteenth-Century Latin America." Tesserae: Journal of Latin American and Iberian Studies 19.2 (2013): 99-116.
  •  "Fiction and Fictitious Capital in Julian Martel's La bolsa." Hispanic Review 81.1 (2013): 17-39.
  •  "An Oil Well Named Macondo: Latin American Literature in the Time of Global Capital". PMLA 127.1 (2012): 145-151
  •  "The Creolization of Imperial Reason: Chilean State Racism in the War of the Pacific"." Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 18.1 (2009): 73-90.
Education: 

PhD, Stanford (2005)