McCrack: McOndo, el Crack y los destinos de la literatura latinoamericana ed. by Brescia, Pablo and Oswaldo Estrada

Abstract

Reviewed by: McCrack: McOndo, el Crack y los destinos de la literatura latinoamericana ed. by Brescia, Pablo and Oswaldo Estrada Ryan Long Brescia, Pablo, y Oswaldo Estrada, editores. McCrack: McOndo, el Crack y los destinos de la literatura latinoamericana. Albatros Ediciones, 2018. 270 pp. Pablo Brescia and Oswaldo Estrada’s anthology opens and closes with the contributions of Pedro Ángel Palou, Edmundo Paz Soldán, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Naief Yehya. Its final section is a group interview that took place just after ¿Nuestra América? Pasado y futuro de la nueva narrativa latinoamericana, the 2016 conference whose presentations became the starting point for the anthology. In the interview, Palou recalls that, during two public presentations of the Crack, including the initial reading of its manifesto in 1996, Ignacio Padilla was absent and that his brother stood in for him, apparently unannounced and in an effort to convince audiences that he was, in fact, the Padilla they came to see. Attention to historical details and the effects of mistaken identities are useful starting points for evaluating the anthology’s important contribution to recent and contemporary Latin American literary history and criticism. The book’s first section consists of four chapters written, respectively, by Paz Soldán, Palou, Yehya, and Rivera Garza. The chapters that make up the remaining three sections are written by students, professors, and other scholars from Europe and the Americas. Framing the anthology with texts and interview statements by writers foregrounds one of the book’s central contributions, its detailed history of the ways in which several forces overlap in the formation of literary fields. These include primarily academia, publishing houses, cultural journalism, original language and translation markets, and the two group efforts identified in the anthology’s title, the Crack and McOndo. Brescia’s chapter emphasizes how much Latin American literature has been defined as a field from within the United States. Brescia’s emphasis thus complements Rivera Garza’s observations in her chapter about how important it is to recognize that many contemporary writers are also academics in the US, including Palou, Paz Soldán, and herself. The institutional boundary crossings germane to this fact are similar to the other complexities related to defining Latin American literature in the present, which several chapters address. The importance of the Spanish publishing industry and US academia call into question, for example, the coherency of traditional geographically bound ways of conceiving Latin America as an organizing principle for literary history. The cosmopolitanism and attention to Latin Americans living in the US that helped define the Crack and McOndo from the beginning are thus prescient. On the other hand, chapters by Rita De Maeseneer and Catalina Quesada-Gómez, about the Caribbean and Colombia, respectively, demonstrate the need for considerations of local and regional contexts, whose specificities might otherwise be blurred by discussions of hemispheric and global trends, be they aesthetic or, as is more often the case, economic. The historical details elucidated and questioned by the writers who contribute to the anthology—from Yehya’s critique of the so-called culture of excellence that began to permeate the UNAM in the 1980s to Rivera Garza’s description of [End Page 859] the Crack and McOndo anthologies as “hechas por hombres para ser consumidas por hombres” (259)—put the eponymous movements in their places more than most of the literary historical chapters do. For example, De Maeseneer argues convincingly that the movements’ relevance is at least as much a product of critics and historians as it is of the texts their authors have written, including founding anthologies and manifestos. Here is where the question of mistaken identity arises. Are the Crack and McOndo strong enough phenomena, as foundational moments, to sustain a literary history organized around them? Or, with all due respect to Bob Dylan, are some critics seeing them less for what they are then what they’re not? Tomás Regalado López’s history of the Crack proves that it deserves the attention he gives it, for the writers who comprise it and for, again, that observation that, in part, guides the whole anthology, “la función de la crítica como instancia mediadora clave” (87...