“Tremblings of Human Time": Politics of the Novel in Juan Cárdenas

Abstract

The question about the relationship between non-human agents and the novel as a genre denes current debates about literatura and its relationship with the Anthropocene (Ghosh and Nixon, for example.) This article argues that this relationship must be thought fundamentally around the notions of temporality and scale as critical tools to describe the ways in which the novel, putting in tension its own generic matrices, opens up to perspectives, actants, and processes irreducible to the norm of the human. The narrative of Colombian writer Juan Cárdenas offers formal models that allow us to analyze the relationship with the non-human in the contemporary novel. His focus on processes of natural extraction, and his work on silenced memories of Colombian and Latin American culture, allow him to explore narrative forms that harbor the non-human in their own temporalities. is investigation, at the same time, illuminates new terrain for a politics of literature that opens it to new imaginaries of the collective.