Under the World

This is 'a roots rave manifesto / to free literature'. The second installment in Oscar Guardiola-Rivera's Night of the World trilogy, Out of the World continues Hoodoo Girl's adventures, alongside the trickster Ix. This mythopoetic narrative–told in three episodes–is inspired by the Mayan epic Popol Vuh, where ‘plot is overrated' and musicality abounds. Lay your ear to the ground and follow these unearthly threads, the syncopated beats where the colonial encounter animates the Angel of History to reveal the masquerade that surrounds us all.

In this second installment of Night of the World, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera elaborates in kaleidoscopic poetic form his ongoing, multi-scalar inquiry of how the open veins of the Americas are a burrow or cave from which emerge so many critical monsters, creative motions, moral ironies, and cosmos-shaking events. Intertwining touchstones of the Americas (such as the Popol Vuh) with the contemporaneity of their historical crises (colonialism to current trade zones and migrations), this book puts the root-work of the creation of the Americas in front of its legatees, beginnings poised to be instantiated. Black Legend be damned. Guardiola-Rivera’s Under the World: Night of the World is a declarative, ambitious encomium for the emergence of historical Latin America as a present-day unified economic, cultural, and political powerhouse on the world stage. —Edgar Garcia, author of Emergency: Reading the Popol Vuh in a Time of Crisis