Raynor’s first book, Latin American Literature at the Millennium, focuses on a series of contemporary Latin American novels and a theatrical production to explore how representations of the human experience unsettle conventionally understood links between locality and geographical place. Her monograph analyzes the relationship between local and global forces in contemporary Latin American cultural production, arguing that contemporary Latin American literature offers distinct narrative modes that configure transformative practices of locality in a globalized world. As such, she attests that contemporary representations of human experience expand the idea of the local by unsettling the conventionally understood link between locality and geographical place. Local becomes a plural concept that plays out in language, memory, hybridity, and affective attachments to places. Raynor’s monograph fills a gap between social theory on the effects of globalization and the narrative representations of local and global planes, striving to expand the relevance of literary studies to broader discussions of social and cultural change.
Raynor’s second book, Digital Encounters: Envisioning Connectivity in Latin American Cultural Production, co-edited with Rhian Lewis, brings together leading scholarly voices on Latin America to tackle questions around the creative fabric of digital networks, including crowdsourced forms of production, discussion, and distribution, exploring the influence of an increasingly networked world on contemporary Latin American cultural production. The volume’s contributors provide compelling insights into the forms of connection that emerge from the digital encounter: some examples include code that is borrowed and re-constituted into an entirely new digital project, snippets of interactive poetry that are linked through hypertext, and hashtags that broadcast personal narratives to a transnational discussion. Through a holistic approach to the study of connectivity, this edited collection illustrates how various forms of connection– between analog and digital, human and machine, print text and pixel– alter our conceptions of self, Other, and world.