Periodicals in Latin America. Interdisciplinary Approaches to Serialized Print Culture (original) (raw)

The Latin American Publishing Circuit in the 21st Century: Following the Trajectory of César Aira

Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures

This essay poses a question about the identity of Latin American literature in the 21st century. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Latin America Boom received recognition both locally and internationally, becoming the dominant means of defining Latin American literature up to the present. This essay explores new ways to understand this notion of Latin America in the literary scene. The case of the Argentine writer César Aira is relevant for analyzing alternative publishing circuits that connect various points of the region. These publishing houses foster a defiant way of establishing the value of literature.

Taking Form, Making Worlds: Cartonera Publishers in Latin America

University of Texas Press, 2022

Winner of the 2023 LASA Visual Culture Studies Section Book Prize, 'Taking Form, Making Worlds' is the first comprehensive study of cartonera, a publishing phenomenon and artistic project born in the wake of Argentina’s 2001 economic crisis. Infused with a rebellious spirit, cartonera has exploded in popularity, with hundreds of publishers across Latin America and Europe making colorful, low-cost books out of cardboard salvaged from the street. The ethnography draws on 18 months of fieldwork across Brazil, Mexico and Argentina to show how this hands-on practice has fostered a politically-engaged network of writers, artists, and readers. More than a social movement, cartonera uses texts, workshops, encounters, and exhibitions to foster community and engagement through open-ended forms that are at once artistic and social. For various groups including waste-pickers, Indigenous communities, rural children, and imprisoned women, cartonera provides a platform for unique stories and sparks collaborations that bring the walls of the ‘lettered city’ tumbling down. In contexts of stigma and exclusion, cartonera collectives give form to a decolonial aesthetics of resistance, making possible a space of creative experimentation through which plural worlds can be brought to life.