Sovereignty, finances, and the novel
This chapter proposes that a corpus of Latin American novels published during the nineteenth century which focus on issues of finance, external debt, and gold parity, also articulated the limits of both collective and individual sovereignty. In these novels, sovereignty and finance formed an interlocking mechanism through which the newly independent polities became part of an interoceanic extractive capitalist system, particularly when read against the extensive archive of contemporaneous financial writings by local and foreign authors. The connection between the novels and this new interlocking system is traced back to John Locke's reformulation of the nature of money (1695), which both superseded absolutist claims (to control the coin) and reasserted them through imperial, racial, and patriarchal assumptions inherent in the new liberal discourse and its soon-to-be global practice. Through a discussion of two of these Latin American novels (Martín Rivas [1864] by Chilean Alberto Blest Gana and Blanca Sol [1889] by Peruvian Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera), this chapter makes the claim that their apparent formal shortcomings actually reveal the "cracks" in the sovereign/finance discourse that fostered a civilizational arrangement that still prevails today.
