My research and teaching focus on Mexican literary and cultural studies, modern and contemporary Latin American literature, critical theory, and political economy. My doctoral dissertation, “Patterns of Accumulation: Capital, Form, and the Spatial Composition of the Mexican Novel (1962-2017)” develops the notion of spatial composition to theorize the relation between literary form and the spatialization of capital. Analyzing changes in the built environment, the private sphere of domesticity, and the relation between society and nature, my dissertation provides a formal account of Mexico’s uneven transition from state-led industrialization toward a new export-oriented pattern of capital accumulation.
Pavel Andrade
Wolf Humanities Center Doctoral Fellow
2021—2022 Forum on Migration
Pavel Andrade
Ph.D. Candidate, Hispanic Studies
Norte, Desierto, Frontera: Migrant Spaces in the Mexican and Latinx Novel of the NAFTA era
This project studies how the economic reconfiguration of the Mexico-US borderland in the immediate aftermath of the entry into force of the North American Free Trade Agreement weighs upon the literary cartography of the Mexican and Latinx novel, particularly how the representation of desert and border as sites of socio-ecological devastation prefigures a new paradigm in the relationship between the environment, migration, and the global circulation of capital. Working at the intersection of literary formalism, critical geography, and the environmental humanities, I argue that the spatial composition of the Mexican and Latinx novel of the NAFTA era produces a countertopography to NAFTA’s ideal of globalization, opening speculative paths to imagine a different ‘world without borders.’