About

Gavin Arnall is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, where he also serves as the Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. His research and teaching interests converge at the intersection of aesthetics, politics, and philosophy, with a specialization in modern and contemporary Latin American literature and culture. His expertise includes Marxism and psychoanalysis; critical, literary, postcolonial, and translation theory; francophone Caribbean and continental European philosophy; and Black and Indigenous Studies. Arnall's scholarly work includes his first book, Subterranean Fanon: An Underground Theory of Radical Change, which analyzes a latent division in Frantz Fanon's writings, exploring contrasting modes of thinking about change. He is working on a second book, Translating Universality: Marxism and Indigenous Radicalisms in Latin America, examining the encounters between Marxist and Indigenous worldviews and practices. He is also the co-editor of two forthcoming volumes and the translator of Emilio de Ípola’s Althusser, the Infinite Farewell. Arnall leads the Marxism Lab, an international research team focused on the history and current practice of Marxist theory. His research has been supported by fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and other institutions. He has served on the MLA’s Forum on Marxism, Literature, and Society and as a faculty mentor for the Marxisms Collective.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Social Science
• Philosophy
• Political Science
• Law
• Epistemology
• Environmental ethics

Selected publications

• The Many Tasks of the Marxist Translator

  Historical Materialism · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Epistemology
  • Social Science

  Abstract This article examines numerous conceptions of translation within the Marxist tradition. It begins with Antonio Gramsci’s theorisation of the concept before turning to the problem of Marxism in Latin America and how the Zapatistas have dealt with this problem. The aim is to shed light on a critical school of Marxist thinking, which requires that Marxism’s universalist claims be translated in response to changing historical conditions so that they may become concrete formulations capable of speaking to and intervening in concrete situations. Yet the Zapatistas go further by maintaining that translation must also occur between the universalist claims of Marxist theory and the competing universalist claims of indigenous Maya cosmology. The article thus underscores what can be gleaned from different modes of translation in terms of Marxism’s future and its capacity to enter into mutually beneficial alliances with distinct worldviews and ongoing social movements.

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• Writing Revolution in Latin America: From Martí to García Márquez to Bolaño by Juan E. De Castro

  Revista de estudios hispánicos · 2022-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Writing Revolution in Latin America: From Martí to García Márquez to Bolaño by Juan E. De Castro Gavin Arnall De Castro, Juan E. Writing Revolution in Latin America: From Martí to García Márquez to Bolaño. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt UP, 2019. 262 pp. In recent years, Latin America has become a site of immense social upheaval and political mobilization: from the encuentros and escuelitas of the Zapatista movement to the communal forms and persistent rhythms of the Andean pachakuti; from the roadblocks and recuperated factories in Argentina to the student protests and estallido social in Chile; from the antiausterity demonstrations in Puerto Rico to the thousands upon thousands chanting "Fora Bolsonaro" in Brazil; from the widescale organizing of Ni Una Menos to the International Women's Strike; and from the Pink Tide to the Green Wave to what is likely another Pink Tide. With all that has been going on, it is not difficult to feel "a gale of revolution in the air."1 Yet these and related developments in the region seem to have had no real impact on the argument put forward in Juan E. De Castro's Writing Revolution in Latin America: From Martí to García Márquez to Bolaño. Besides a brief discussion of Gabriel García Márquez's influence on Subcomandante Marcos and two polemical footnotes—claiming that Zapatismo "has faded almost completely from public influence" and that the appeal of the Pink Tide has "completely faded"—it is as though these complicated events and processes, many of them still underway, had never occurred at all (De Castro 178-179n5, 218-219n65).2 Instead, this study presents a literary history of Left melancholia and defeat, of "the appearance, rise, and fall of the 'structure of feeling' that believed in revolution as the answer to the region's problems" (De Castro 5).2 It selects case studies that are deemed to be representative of the different phases in this trajectory, which runs "from widely shared utopian expectations to neoliberal reaction," and maintains that the texts analyzed reflect the beliefs and values of their time (De Castro 2). Chapter One explores the appearance of the aforementioned structure of feeling. It compares José Martí's "ambivalent" reception of Marx and his commitment to reform as the best path for nuestra América with José Carlos Mariátegui's "creative adaptation" of Marxism and his insistence on revolution as the only way to topple the existing order and usher in a new, socialist society (De Castro 15, 21). According to De Castro, Martí and Mariátegui "represent the attitudes of Latin Americans before 1959" with respect to this emergent culture of socialist revolution and its actively lived meanings and values (De Castro 15). [End Page 311] But, as the previously cited passage suggests, De Castro registers a major shift in the region after 1959, which is to say after the onset of the Cuban Revolution. Not only is belief in and enthusiasm for revolution on the rise throughout the 1960s but, in Latin America, revolution increasingly feels like an immanent possibility, like an event that could be triggered at any moment by the catalytic intervention of a guerilla foco. This historical context frames the discussion in Chapter Two of the Latin American Boom and its approach to navigating the relationship between literature and revolutionary politics in theory and in practice. The chapter first turns to a series of texts by Julio Cortázar and Mario Vargas Llosa that respond to increasing skepticism on the Left concerning the political value of producing literature. As De Castro shows, both figures defend such literary pursuits insofar as said pursuits contribute, independently of a given author's intentions, to the creation of a new language, a new culture, and a new way of seeing the world in line with the new man of the Revolution. The chapter then considers the practice of the Boom—the actual novels produced by its writers—in light of these theoretical debates, focusing on Carlos Fuentes's The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962) and García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). In De Castro...

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• Subterranean Fanon: An Underground Theory of Radical Change

  2020 · 8 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Environmental ethics

  "The problem of change recurs across Frantz Fanon's writings. As a philosopher, psychiatrist, and revolutionary, Fanon was deeply committed to theorizing and instigating change in all of its facets. Change is the thread that ties together his critical dialogue with Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche and his intellectual exchange with Césaire, Kojève, and Sartre. It informs his analysis of racism and colonialism, négritude and the veil, language and culture, disalienation and decolonization, and it underpins his reflections on Martinique, Algeria, the Caribbean, Africa, the Third World, and the world at large. Gavin Arnall traces an internal division throughout Fanon's work between two distinct modes of thinking about change. He contends that there are two Fanons: a dominant Fanon who conceives of change as a dialectical process of becoming and a subterranean Fanon who experiments with an even more explosive underground theory of transformation. Arnall offers close readings of Fanon's entire oeuvre, from canonical works like Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth to his psychiatric papers and recently published materials, including his play, Parallel Hands. Speaking both to scholars and to the continued vitality of Fanon's ideas among today's social movements, this book offers a rigorous and profoundly original engagement with Fanon that affirms his importance in the effort to bring about radical change."

• The missed encounter of turupukllay: Marxism, indigenous communities and Andean culture in Yawar Fiesta

  Radical Americas · 2020-06-27 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This article takes as its point of departure a discussion of José María Arguedas’s engagement with Marxism, the ideas of José Carlos Mariátegui and the journal Amauta . It argues that Arguedas’s distance from official party politics should not be confused with an abandonment of politics as such. It also underscores Arguedas’s reflections on the relationship between lived experience, socialist theory and literary writing. This sets the stage for an exploration of a core problem in Arguedas’s oeuvre: the missed encounter between Marxist organisations and indigenous communities, which is to say, the failure to form an alliance between these groups based on mutual understanding and reciprocal enrichment. The article turns to Arguedas’s first major novel, Yawar Fiesta (1941), and traces its portrayal of such a missed encounter as it occurs around the celebration of turupukllay , an Andean translation of a Spanish bullfight that commemorates Peru’s independence from colonial rule. The wager of the article is that Yawar Fiesta ’s capacity to illuminate key contributing factors of the missed encounter enables Arguedas to advance an immanent critique, a critique of a certain tendency of Marxism from within Marxism itself, and that, as a result, the novel supplements socialist theory by simultaneously exposing its limits and enhancing its claims.

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• Latin American Marxisms: Reading José Carlos Mariátegui and José Aricó Today

  Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies · 2020-07-02 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This review essay reads Mike Gonzalez’s In the Red Corner: The Marxism of José Carlos Mariátegui alongside Martín Cortés’s Translating Marx: José Aricó and the New Latin American Marxism.

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• Subterranean Fanon

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2019-12-31 · 9 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  The problem of change recurs across Frantz Fanon's writings. Gavin Arnall traces an internal division throughout Fanon's work, contending that there are two Fanons: a dominant Fanon who conceives of change as a dialectical process of becoming and a subterranean Fanon who experiments with an even more explosive underground theory of transformation.

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• Chapter Three. Writings on the Algerian Revolution

  Columbia University Press eBooks · 2019-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Remembering the Sixties: On Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch and Time

  MLN · 2019-01-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Remembering the Sixties: On Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch and Time Gavin Arnall Subjects that have long been investigated and appropriated by scholars need to be emancipated from the forms in which such scholarly acquisition took place, if they are still to have any value and any defined character today. – Walter Benjamin1 We live in times of remembrance.2 The past decade has been one of countless public gatherings and academic conferences, new editions and special issues, art installations and even Hollywood films observing the fiftieth anniversary of the many great books, figures, and events of the sixties. This has been the case particularly during the recent flurry of activities surrounding the anniversary of the 1968 global uprising, although every year of the 2010s has included various opportunities to memorialize what happened during the corresponding year in the 1960s. How the past is remembered is nevertheless far more important [End Page 360] than the simple fact that its remembrance is widespread. As Fredric Jameson has observed, “[n]ostalgic commemoration of the glories of the 60s and abject public confession of the decade’s many failures and missed opportunities are two errors that cannot be avoided by some middle path that threads its way between” (“Periodizing” 483). These two modes of remembering the sixties are the most common among today’s Left, and I share Jameson’s sentiment that both are ultimately misguided. When the nostalgic Left longingly recalls the sixties as “the good old days,” it forecloses a sober evaluation of what the period was not able to accomplish, its still unfulfilled potential. Analogously, when the repentant Left abjectly confesses to how misguided it once was, it cannot but lose sight of past hopes and desires that remain—to paraphrase Ernst Bloch—not yet realized (Principle 246–49).3 The solution to these two errors is not to combine them into some sort of middle term. This is because, to a certain extent, they are already combined. They make up what Jameson elsewhere characterizes as a “union of bad opposites,” which is to say, “two distinct symptoms united in a single cause” (“Three Names” 28).4 To overcome both terms of the dialectic would therefore require a third form of remembrance that would present a genuine alternative to their shared ground. The wager of this article is that underlying both nostalgic commemoration and its opposite is a shared conceptualization of time that Walter Benjamin and his readers have characterized as historicism.5 In Enzo Traverso’s words, “[h]istoricism means khronos: a [End Page 361] purely linear, quantitative, and chronological vision of history as an ensemble of events put on the plane of a measurable elapsed time” (223). By conceptualizing time in this way—as a homogenous and unidirectional continuum—the past becomes “a closed continent, a definitively finished process. The past of historicism [is] nothing but cold, dead matter ready to be archived or put into a museum” (222).6 This understanding of the past unites the nostalgic and repentant Left. While these groups harbor opposite valuations of the sixties, they construe the period’s temporality in the same way, as a fixed point on a line that—for better or for worse—has been surpassed, left behind, such that it is now separated from the living present by the measurable distance of fifty-some years. As a result, both camps are “merely backward-looking,” unable to participate in the kind of remembrance that would “contain within itself the seeds of a new futurity” (Osbourne 142). To make these opening propositions more concrete, I will turn to the case study of this article, Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch [Rayuela], and examine how it is remembered today. Dubbed by Jean Franco “the signature Latin American novel of the 1960s” (Decline 201), it is no surprise that a special edition of Hopscotch was released in 2013 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of its publication.7 The anniversary was observed in other ways as well, including international roundtables, press releases in major newspapers, and even an extensive exhibit of specially commissioned artwork from over 50 contemporary artists.8 Argentina’s Ministry of Culture then announced that 2014 would be the “Year...

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• TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  2018-05-03

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Repeating Translation, Left and Right (and Left Again): Roberto Bolaño’s <i>Between Parentheses</i> and <i>Distant Star</i>

  CR The New Centennial Review · 2017-11-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Research Article| November 01 2017 Repeating Translation, Left and Right (and Left Again): Roberto Bolaño’s Between Parentheses and Distant Star Gavin Arnall Gavin Arnall University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Gavin Arnall is an assistant professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He received his PhD and MA in comparative literature from Princeton University in New Jersey and his BA (summa cum laude) in the College Scholar Program and philosophy from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. His work has appeared in several edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals, including Theory and Event, Critical Inquiry, and the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. His translation of Emilio de Ípola’s Althusser, the Infinite Farewell is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google CR: The New Centennial Review (2017) 17 (3): 237–263. https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.17.3.0237 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Gavin Arnall; Repeating Translation, Left and Right (and Left Again): Roberto Bolaño’s Between Parentheses and Distant Star. CR: The New Centennial Review 1 November 2017; 17 (3): 237–263. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.17.3.0237 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressCR: The New Centennial Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © Michigan State University Board of Trustees2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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Frequent coauthors

• Enea Zaramella

  1 shared

• Laura Gandolfi

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Fellowship support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
• Fellowship support from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation
• Fellowship support from UM’s University Musical Society
• Fellowship support from Princeton University’s Center for Hu…