Author: Alfred J. López, Department of English, Purdue University - Google Scholar, ORCID, ResearchGate

Abstract: »This essay reads the landscape of Roberto Bolaño’s fictional Santa Teresa through a new materialist lens. In the fourth section of Bolaño’s epic novel 2666, “The Part about the Crimes,” the bodies of 112 women, victims of a series of unsolved murders, accumulate as part of a postglobal dystopic narrative of material and existential waste. Critics have especially noted the text’s clinical narration of events, which effectively reduces the victims’ bodies to interchangeable parts of a larger assemblage that also includes the factories (maquiladoras) where the women work, the northern capital that funds them, the police force that repeatedly fails to solve the murders, and the trash heaps and landfills where many of the bodies appear. It is, however, the women’s inert, mutilated bodies that animate Bolaño’s novel. Dehumanized by the text, the bodies’ materiality paradoxically gives human heft to an otherwise mechanistic account of undifferentiated carnage.« (Source: Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry)

Wikipedia: History of the Americas: History of Mexico | Literature: Chilean literature / Roberto Bolaño, 2666 | Violence against women: Femicide / Femicides in Ciudad Juárez