Food Studies in Latin American Literature: Perspectives on the Gastronarrative

Abstract

text, da Cunha’s “essay of national interpretation seeking to offer a historical or social explanation of the specific features that characterize the country’s dynamics” is paradigmatic (214). Uriarte remarks on da Cunha’s references “to the figure of the traveler, the walker, or the observer who roams the region of the sertão,” which in the second part of da Cunha’s book will characterize the Conselheiro himself as a nomadic figure (215). In each case, this traveler’s agency is defined by the challenge of making sense of places conceived as ravaging landscapes, hosting an even more brutal war between the government and local resistances. Uriarte goes back to works he previously analyzed in this study to underline a fluid, mobile, and totalizing reality that needed to be subjected, “organized,” by the state once it is cleaned up from the disruptions caused by the process of transformation and consolidation of the same state (222). The final stage of that organization, however, as Uriarte previously demonstrated with regard to Burton, Hudson, and Moreno—created over the void assured by the war or articulated over a war-like background—becomes the ruins, or the ruined expression of the progress that would come with the war. The initial forces and programs culminating in a long colonial and national construction process would face challenges, both expected and unexpected, over the course of the following century. Uriarte’s book is a great contribution to specialized and non-specialized readers of the XIX Century Latin American literature, history, and political process as well as interdisciplinary approaches to war and national construction processes.