The Book In Movement: Autonomous Politics and the Lettered City Underground by Magalí Rabasa

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Book In Movement: Autonomous Politics and the Lettered City Underground by Magalí Rabasa Jane D. Griffin Rabasa, Magalí. The Book In Movement: Autonomous Politics and the Lettered City Underground. The U of Pittsburgh P, 2019. 210 pp. Magalí Rabasa's 2019 monograph, The Book In Movement: Autonomous Politics and the Lettered City Underground, is an exceptional contribution to the field of print culture studies in contemporary Latin America. In this study, Rabasa creates a new vocabulary through which to understand the relationship between what books say and how they exist as material objects. Following Antonio Gramsci's concept of the organic intellectual, Rabasa ingenuously coins the term "organic book," which she describes as a concept, a practice, and also a material object in which there is no difference between materiality and ideas (175). The organic book is also inextricably linked to autonomous politics. Using the Zapatista movement in Mexico as her point of reference, Rabasa explains that autonomy is not achieved by overthrowing oppressive institutions such as capitalism, neoliberalism, patriarchy, colonialism, or the nation-state. Rather, autonomy exists in the never-ending practice of struggling against such institutions through acts of making and re-making everything from ideas to social relations to material objects, such as books. The organic book is both a product of autonomous politics and also a practice through which such politics emerge. Consequently, the organic book and autonomous politics exist in a constant state of becoming and are always in motion. By tracing how organic books are made and remade across Mexico, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile, Rabasa likewise maps autonomous politics across Latin America and ultimately depicts the continent itself in movement and in a never-ending act of becoming. The Book In Movement employs a more interdisciplinary and transnational methodology than is normally found in book studies scholarship. Rabasa describes her methodology as object-oriented ethnography combined with textual analysis, [End Page 815] and she skillfully supports her arguments through research in cultural studies, postcolonial theory, anthropology, science and technology studies and, most importantly, contemporary political theory produced from Latin America and by Latin Americans. The latter is especially important to Rabasa's goal of "provincializing Europe," as called for by subaltern studies scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty. This goal is apropos within the fields of print culture and book studies, where Europe has historically played an outsized role. The Book In Movement understands the organic book as a form of praxis and is therefore organized around specific methods of book production and distribution. Chapters one and two look at forms of book production—writing the text and turning it into a material object—whereas chapters three and four look at forms of productive consumption—specifically re-editing and distribution. Chapter one, "Becoming the Book," examines three organic books: Dispersar el poder (Zibechi 2006), Pensar las autonomías: Alternativas de emancipación al capital y el estado (Jóvenes en Resistencia Alternativa 2011), and Caleidoscopio de rebeldías (Korol 2006). These books document how communities produce new forms of knowledge through collective acts of doing, or what Rabasa refers to as "autonomous knowledge practices" (38). They are organic in that the act of writing them was itself an autonomous knowledge practice that stemmed from the authors' own participation in the kinds of collective action documented in the books. Organic books thus challenge the Western concepts of "authorship" and "knowledge" as tied to the individual and redefine both terms as tied instead to the social collective. Chapter two, "The Workshop Book," analyzes autonomous knowledge practices through the acts of printing, assembling, and binding books in the workshop setting. The workshops Rabasa studies in La Paz and Buenos Aires are spaces of experimentation where books are made to be useful, which means they are cheap and widely accessible. Rabasa uses the concepts of craft and experimentation to describe processes of book production that collapse the distinction between intellectual and manual labor (96). Chapter three, "The Unbounded Book," studies the paratext of organic books—the cover, copyright pages, prologues, forwards, and epilogues—to show how they change materially as books are re-edited by different presses. This chapter analyzes the paratext of Contra el copyright (Stallman et...