XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Infectious World-Building: Contagion and Collaboration in Corpos Secos (2020)

• In Event: Recasting Brazilian and World Literature Perspectives I

Abstract

Corpos secos (2020), the collaborative project of Luisa Geisler, Marcelo Ferroni, Natalia Borges Polesso, and Samir Machado de Machado, imagines a zombie epidemic caused by contact with pesticides used on the soy farms of Brazil’s center-west region. Characters from the nation’s diverse regional territories band together and traverse the nation in search of a safe harbor, staging a species of participation – one which is reified by the collaborative nature of the work’s production – as a necessary component of surviving the end of the world. Not only does the novel blend authorial voice among its collaborators and the characters they stage, but it also boasts a wide range of literary genres that include speculative fiction, suspense, apocalyptic fiction, terror, gore, and travel narrative. This bricolage suggests forms of contagion which are simultaneously formal, authorial, and diegetic. Such contamination offers us a metaphor for reading circulation in the novel, not just the circulation of infectious disease, but the circulation of voices and discursive registers that alludes to a mode of world literature, one that imagines new models of accumulation that signify the work’s participation in diverse regions and traditions and extend it beyond its place of origin. Ultimately, the zombie becomes a polyphonic device that might allow readers to see connections across not just literary genre, but across the very borders that the undead straddles, allowing us to imagine new spatio-temporal collectivities, ways of being in the world, and ways of reading world literature when confronted with the emergencies the twenty-first century.

Author

• Chloe Hill, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill