Latin American Literary History Research Articles

Latin American Adventures in Literary Journalism by Pablo Calvi

Reviewed by: Latin American Adventures in Literary Journalism by Pablo Calvi Jeffrey Peer Latin American Adventures in Literary Journalism University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019 By Pablo Calvi Many celebrated writers in the history of Latin American letters found work as journalists and first published some of their best known writing in newspapers, yet the central role of literary journalism in Latin American literary history has at times escaped the notice of North American scholars. Pablo Calvi's Latin American Adventures in Literary Journalism offers a broad look at that history, "noticing a few lines connecting authors and periods" (228) stretching from foundational texts like Domingo Sarmiento's Facundo (1845), [End Page 201] through the rise of the mass media at the turn of the twentieth century, up to the advent of the testimonio genre during the 1960s. By considering authors across two centuries, Calvi gives a big-picture view. He also takes some unexpected and entertaining turns and reveals the benefits of his hemispheric perspective and his background as a journalist and scholar of journalism studies. Calvi's first surprise is to begin with the little known story of a scandal in Chile in 1844. Francisco Bilbao (1823-1865) was just twenty-one when he published "Sociabilidad chilena," a "thirty-four-page Saint-Simonian-Rousseauian tirade against Spain's religious monarchy" (19) and the "monarchic mentality" (26) of post-colonial Chilean society. The article was attacked by ultra-Catholic conservatives and its author was charged with blasphemy, immorality, and sedition. But a growing liberal, intellectual middle class defended Bilbao, and his trial became a cause célèbre, with antagonistic crowds either supporting him or cheering for the prosecutor, who sought a long prison term and the destruction of all copies of the newspaper, to be burnt by "an executioner" (28). According to Bilbao's brother, the drama was comparable only to "a volcanic cataclysm," "the sudden collapse of a population [or] a lightning bolt striking at their feet" (25). Calvi's interpretation is instructive; "the trial signaled the emergence of an unprecedented audience—a nascent postcolonial readership" (20). In this distant episode of Chilean history, he finds the early signs of a liberal Latin American press, as well as a first example of "certain constants" (227) in the long history of the form he sets out to trace. According to Calvi, Latin American literary journalism would thereafter be political, committed to "democratic values, freedom of expression, the public good, justice, and truth" (227). The first line between authors that Calvi draws leads to a much more recognized figure. Domingo Sarmiento (1811-1888) published Facundo while in exile in Santiago, just a year after the Bilbao trial, from which, according to Calvi, he may have learned the lesson, "Do not write to the elites who oppose your views. Write to the masses who will support you" (55). Calvi emphasizes Facundo's allegorical referentiality (as an attack on Rosas in disguise), and how Sarmiento's claims of "irreproachable accuracy" (56) were subordinated to his political aims. "Sarmiento thus inaugurated Latin American literary journalism as a political-allegorical genre that obliquely refers to the present by narrating past events," he writes (59). But the next author Calvi turns to did not refer so obliquely. The crónicas of José Martí (1853-1895), especially his "Escenas norteamericanas, cartas desde Nueva York," openly advocated for Cuban independence and a pan-Hispanic 'Our America' opposed to the imperial ambitions of Washington. His crónicas set out to expose the ugly underbelly of North American economic and social progress. Calvi, a good storyteller, shows us Martí behind his desk at his office near Wall Street, with a fur rug on his feet in the winter, portraits on the wall of Victor Hugo, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and Simón Bolívar, eager to frustrate the machinations of US Secretary of State's James Gillespie Blaine during an ill-fated Pan-American conference in 1889. Calvi's next surprise is to turn toward Argentine journalist Juan José de Soiza Reilly (1880-1959), whose true-crime writing captivated the public imagination when Buenos Aires was undergoing dynamic urban and social expansion at the turn of the twentieth century...

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

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...

American Alternatives: Participatory Futures of Print from New York City’s Nineteenth-Century Spanish-Language Press

This essay situates the Spanish-language literary monthly La Revista Ilustrada de Nueva York, which was published in New York City in the 1880s and 1890s, at the forefront of a wave of experimentation with news and timely literary prose that surged during the same period. I argue that the encounter between New York–based writers of Latin American descent and the period’s new print and electric media technologies powered La Revista’s efforts to promote democracy in Latin America and to advance the region’s cultural status on the world stage. As New York’s popular English-language press banked its future on mass circulation enabled by those technologies and on a clear dividing line between producers and consumers, La Revista emphasized quality over quantity, ideas over entertainment, and, most importantly and experimentally for the time, reader participation over passive consumption. My analysis contributes to recent investigation of the origins of Latinx writing and to related efforts to unsettle the boundaries of US and Latin American literary history. It also sheds new light on José Martí’s “Nuestra América” (“Our America”), which first appeared in La Revista in January 1891—at the height of the magazine’s efforts to extend its own print and publishing capacity.

The Latino Nineteenth Century ed. by Rodrigo Lazo, Jesse Alemán

Reviewed by: The Latino Nineteenth Century ed. by Rodrigo Lazo, Jesse Alemán Elena V. Valdez LAZO, RODRIGO, and JESSE ALEMÁN, eds. The Latino Nineteenth Century. New York: New York University Press, 2016. 384pp. $89.00 cloth; $30.00 paperback. The fifteen essays in The Latino Nineteenth Century illuminate for literary scholars a complex and often overlooked legacy of Latinidad that has largely remained absent from critical discussions in mainstream nineteenth-century American literary studies and Latina/o studies, although scholars involved in the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project have been writing about nineteenth-century Latina/o literature for, in some cases, more than two decades. Editors Rodrigo Lazo and Jesse Alemán have brought together some of the most active scholars in these fields to produce The Latino Nineteenth Century, an innovative volume that offers a variety of methods and terms for literary critics and historians to better grapple with the “Latina/o dimension” of American literary history and its implications for our contemporary moment. Most if not all the essays in the volume make the case that the key to expanding our knowledge about the American nineteenth century in general and the Latino nineteenth century in particular is to rethink the linguistic and formal boundaries of the American literary archive. Central to most if not all of the essays in The Latino Nineteenth Century is the premise that the inclusion of Spanish-language texts in the archive of American literature is no longer a question but a necessity. Lazo underscores this point by stating [End Page 567] in the introduction that besides having to deal with a “dispersed” and “incomplete” collection of materials, scholars examining the literary history of Latinas/os must also deal with its linguistic diversity, which “raises questions about the notion of an archive (singular) versus archives that are not always and not easily accessible” (9, 10). Although the advantages of consulting a multilingual archive are somewhat obvious for many scholars of Latina/o studies, Chicana/o studies, ethnic studies, and other related disciplines—especially for scholars involved in the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project—the volume’s insistence on “reading Spanish-language texts” demonstrates for a broader academic audience some of the tensions, contradictions, and networks such a multilingual American literary archive reveals, as well as the questions it generates (Alemán viii). To what extent, for example, does Spanish-language print culture change the way we view historical figures we thought we knew well? How do we reconcile the nineteenth-century Latina/o archive’s formal and linguistic differences with existing categories and paradigms that fail to account for the conditions that produced them? Contributors to the volume take up the issue of the archive in different ways, some more directly than others. Raúl Coronado writes that Latina/o history should not limit itself to an “object of knowledge (‘American literature’)” that was determined by the “logic of the nation” (50). One strategy for avoiding the impeding effects of nationalist logic on the writing of Latina/o literary history, he argues, is by consulting “alternative, minoritized—as it were—documents that yield different narratives of belonging” and approaching it as a “history of textuality” (51, 54). For him, this means being as aware of Latin American literary history as we are of the literary history of the United States, consulting Spanish-language texts, and focusing on local articulations of Latinidad (54). Carmen E. Lamas makes a similar argument about the importance of knowing the Latin American literary archive in her essay, which shows through a case study of Cuban intellectual Raimundo Cabrera’s writing how the Latin American literary archive helps scholars recover the heterogeneity of Latina/o identity. The terms “Latino/Latina” are directly related to the issue of the archive in The Latino Nineteenth Century, of course, for they encompass a range of experiences and identities. Although some audiences may be skeptical about the applicability of “Latino/a” in a nineteenth-century context and its utility as an organizing term, Lazo explains that it enjoyed widespread usage throughout the Americas, where people used it to “reference themselves” but sometimes in a way that...

Domesticating empire: enlightenment in Spanish America

Why has the work of writers in eighteenth-century Latin America been forgotten? During the eighteenth century, enlightened thinkers in Spanish territories in the Americas engaged in lively exchanges with their counterparts in Europe and Anglo-America about a wide range of topics of mutual interest, responding in the context of increasing racial and economic diversification. Yet despite recent efforts to broaden our understanding of the global Enlightenment, the Ibero-American eighteenth century has often been overlooked. Through the work of five authors--Jose de Oviedo y Banos, Juan Ignacio Molina, Felix de Azara, Catalina de Jesus Herrera, and Jose Martin Felix de Arrate--Domesticating Empire explores the Ibero-American Enlightenment as a project that reflects both key Enlightenment concerns and the particular preoccupations of Bourbon Spain and its territories in the Americas. At a crucial moment in Spain's imperial trajectory, these authors domesticate topics central to empire--conquest, Indians, nature, God, and gold--by making them familiar and utilitarian. As a result, their works later proved resistant to overarching schemes of Latin American literary history and have been largely forgotten. Nevertheless, eighteenth-century Ibero-American writing complicates narratives about both the Enlightenment and Latin American cultural identity.

Originary Debt (1816)

“Originary Debt (1816)” attempts to begin a negative genealogy of Spanish American letters from the nineteenth century to the present by arguing that from its origins, Spanish American literature imposes duty-debt (deber) as the principle of its order. From the very prologue of what is arguably the first Latin American novel, El periquillo sarniento (Fernández de Lizardi, 1816), literature marks itself as traversed and constituted by the exigencies of economy and thus by a necessary relation to a reading public that through consumption will restitute the original financial expenditure of writing and publication. It is this monetary and moral inscription, as obligation, that organizes Latin American literary history. Fiction is submitted to the demand of money as the figure of its relation to what it hopes to bring forth: the people. Centering on a reading the prologue to Lizardi’s novel, this article suggests that this reading public, the people—as a truth that is both extrinsic and intrinsic to the work—forms the reason or duty of the modern literary enterprise.

Rewriting Latin American Literary History

Paper presented at the conference 'Literary Histories and the Development of Identities' sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada involving members of the I.C.L.A. Coordinating Committee at Queen's University, Canada, in the Fall of 2001.

The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning (review)

In The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning, Idelber Avelar conjugates an impeccably researched and wide-ranging historical sensibility with a philosophically engaged approach to literary texts produced in the aftermath of the recent dictatorships in the Southern Cone of Latin America. Drawing on a range of thinkers including Nietzsche, Freud, Plato, Benjamin and Derrida, Avelar analyzes the fictions of such challenging novelists as Argentines Ricardo Piglia and Tununa Mercado, Brazilians Silviano Santiago and João Gilberto Noll, and Chilean Diamela Eltit. The result is a stimulating, subtly argued study that not only assesses the task of mourning undertaken in the literary texts by these authors, but that also interrogates assumptions about Latin American literary history and provides an original account of the cultural history of dictatorship.

Gender, Empire and Revolution in "La Victoria de Junin"

AFTER Simon Bolivar's triumph at the Battle of Boyaca in 1819, a Bogotano painter named Pedro Jose Figueroa hurriedly painted over a portrait of a Spanish or colonial official (perhaps Bolivar's royalist foe Commander Pablo Morillo) and painted the Liberator with his arm around feminine liberty (Pineda 5). In time, however, the phantom of the painting's first subject began to emerge, haunting the Liberator's superimposed image by appearing horizontally to it. In Bolivia, coins with Bolivar's profile were similarly fashioned by altering a pre-existing image of king Ferdinand VII. I begin with these instances of colonial residue in the discourse of Independence because they are useful metaphors for this article's re-reading of the most canonical literary text to come out of the Latin American Wars of Independence: Jose Joaquin Olmedo's epic poem about Simon Bolivar, La Victoria de Junin (1825). A close reading of Olmedo's famous poem of Independence alongside his earlier monarchical poetry reveals that may also be viewed as superimposing the image of Bolivar onto a colonial canvas or silhouette. This transposition of old and new, of emergent and residual,' is carried out through a gendered trope of dawn, which presents political authority in terms of marriage and insemination, and which maintains the structure of monarchical authority by replacing the formula of God/ king/viceroy with Sun/Huayna Capac/Bolivar. In order to re-read Olmedo, however, we need to rescue him from the relative obscurity of his vexed position in Latin American literary history, negotiating between nationalist paeans and ambivalent and dismissive assessments of its worth as a work of art. Many critics, among them J. J. Mora, who first reviewed the poem in 1826, and Ricardo Palma, author of the Tradiciones Peruanas (1872-1906), have celebrated as a republican, foundational figure. The words of Augusto Tamayo Vargas succinctly summarize this critical posture: Olmedo puso en juego los sentidos y las visiones de America en armas contra la opresion; y fue la suya poesia patriotica como alta expresion literaria de la Emancipation Americana (18). Olmedo's political service to the homeland during the era of independence and the early national period resulted in his canonization in Ecuador as a national thinker and poet upon his death (17). On the other hand, the literary merits of his masterpiece have been seriously challenged from the very inception of the work, resulting in a tarnished, secondary position in a canon that acknowledges him but rarely comments upon his work in a substantive fashion. In his first communication to Bolivar regarding his composition, in January of 1825, complained bitterly about the stops and starts of the creative process. Borro, rompo, enmiendo, writes the poet, siempre malo (Olmedo, Epistolario 244). Upon completing the poem in May of 1825, himself confessed to Bolivar that he considered the poem to be long and cold, and worst of all, mediocre (252-3). Bolivar seconded the poet's doubts in an extensive critique dated July 12, 1825, faulting the poem for being rushed and defective in design. Drawing from Boileau, Bolivar found the poem bombastic: La introduccion del canto es rimbombante: es el rayo de Jupiter que parte a la tierra a atronar a los Andes que deben sufrir la sin igual fazana [sic] de Junin. Aqui de un precepto de Boileau, que alaba la modestia con que empieza Homero su divina Iliada; promete poco y da mucho. Los valles y la sierra proclaman a la tierra: el sonsonete no es lindo; y los soldados proclaman al general, pues que los valles y la sierra son los muy humildes servidores de la tierra. (Lecuna 38) Most importantly, however, Bolivar doubted the verisimilitude of having the Inca Huayna Capac praise the cause of the patriots and took to task for having the distinguished Inca talk too much: Tambien me permitira usted que le observe que este genio inca, que debia ser mis leve que el eter, pues que viene del cielo, se muestra un poco hablador y embrollon (38). …

Shifting Tendencies in Latin American Literary History

Shifting Tendencies in Latin American Literary History

Eva Luna: Writing as History

The Bildungsroman of Eva Luna's development as a writer reflects—in a somewhat fragmented manner—important developments in Latin American literary history. Her personal quest was paralleled by an aesthetic quest, manifested in the trying on and taking off of various genres, literary movements and myths characteristic of Latin America; she even goes so far as to allude explicitly to specific authors and their individual works. Although some of these are simply lightheartedly parodied, others are reworked and reinterpreted in the light of the feminist enterprise of the past twenty-five years. Eva Luna transgresses fundamentally by having an intellectually strong, sexual, nurturing, very feminine protagonist, setting up an initial rupture with the dichotomy so clearly demarcated by Octavio Paz between "the mother and the whore." Four primary categories suggest themselves: myth and the mythic consciousness; magical realism; Boom writers; and then a miscellaneous grouping that subsumes a host of other significant literatures and literary themes: the picaresque, the neo-romantic, novels of the dictators, the ever-present conflict between civilization and barbarism, and testimonial literature.