Anti-Humboldt: A Reading of the North American Free Trade Agreement

Author: Hugo García Manríquez

Publisher: Litmus Press (2015)

In 2010, Hugo García Manríquez set out to work through the North American Free Trade Agreement in Spanish and English. The result is a bilingual artifact that interrupts and re-politicizes NAFTA’s neoliberal language, becoming a space of transnational encounter that strangely falls on the same continuum as the work of 19th-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt—a continuum upon which the institutions of Law and Science dream of stabilizing the flux of contingency into the language of the market. No longer univocal in meaning, the remains in Anti-Humboldt resist being situated, making evident the madness of language and rationality: words that—to echo George Oppen—”have run mad / In the subways / And of course the institutions / And the banks.”

Hugo García Manríquez is the author of the chapbooks Two Poems and Painting is Finite, and two books in Spanish: No oscuro todavia and Los materiales. His work as a translator includes William Carlos Williams' Paterson, published in Mexico in 2009, and, in 2014, Mecha de Enebros, his translation of Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld by Clayton Eshleman. He has also translated essays and poems by Charles Bernstein, George Oppen, and Myung Mi Kim.