Latin American Literatures in the World / Literaturas Latinoamericanas en el Mundo

This book offers a contribution to contemporary discussions in the field of Latin American critical theory and literary dialogues by incorporating understudied archives and opening new lines of inquiry from a global perspective. Organized around the central themes of transatlantic and transpacific connections, the construction of world literary canons that include the Latin American continent, and the cultural tensions between local and global intellectual practices, this volume provides a comprehensive examination of several key theoretical and literary interventions. Essays in this volume discuss issues of translatability, geographical imaginaries, local iterations of orientalist discourses, the construction of editorial networks, and the global circulation of cultural commodities.

"Our culture – the ancient, glorious culture of the Occident – finds itself in a state of exception today." These are the first lines of the foreword to the cultural journal Realidad, which was published in Buenos Aires from 1947. This study analyzes this ambitious albeit short-lived cultural project as a southern contribution to postwar discourse, offering a critical miniature view of global intellectual history for a world shaken by crises.

This book studies the trajectory of the Shanghai literary group (1982–2010), which included prominent Argentine writers such as Alan Pauls, Sergio Chejfec, Martín Caparrós, Luis Chitarroni, C.E. Feiling and Matilde Sánchez. Through an in-depth analysis of publishing markets, literary prizes, cultural magazines, as well as the agents and institutions involved in the visibilization, legitimization and globalization of Latin American literature, it redefines the concept of intelectual networks. From a transdisciplinary perspective that also draws on digital humanities, the book examines the many factors influencing the circulation and reception of cultural productions from the Global South at the turn of the 20th century.

Latin America has been a paradigmatic region for the observation of ecosystemic phenomena since the early modern period. Against the horizon of the Anthropocene, the contributions gathered in this book explore how art has tackled the many processes of exploitation and capitalization characterizing the continent's social, economic and ecological configurations throughout history, as well as their epistemological and technological dimensions.

The digital era is transforming the way we preserve, publish and research our cultural heritage: archives and libraries are being reorganized, heritage collections are being resurrected in new forms. This volume presents the output of the "Proyecto Humboldt Digital" (Havana/Berlin) and the results of a 2022 conference which brought together librarians, archivists, academics and heritage institutions from the Cuban and Ibero-American context.

The study writes a cultural history of transatlantic relations of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Using the example of the Neo-Spanish Dominican fray Servando Teresa de Mier (1763–1827), it examines how Hispanic American writers of the transition between the early modern and modern period transgressed geographic, cultural, and discursive border regimes, thereby preparing the political and literary independency of the previous Spanish colonies.

During early modern European expansion, America emerged as dynamic meeting ground, continuously forging multidirectional global encounters. Relating Continents dismisses the semantics of ‘encounter’ which, in the politics of naming, euphemistically substitutes invasive violence, but invests in the notion’s dimension as an enactment of literary, cultural, and social relations, fusing people, goods, texts, artifacts, ideas, and senses of belonging.

Understanding the practice of relating as both connecting and narrating, this anthology investigates the linking of continents in Romance literary and cultural history, as well as the tales of entanglement produced in the process. The contributors revisit the worldwide impact of distant or in-person negotiations between conquerors and local actors; they assess how colonial interventions shift hemispheric native networks, and they examine the ties between America, Africa, and Asia. By doing so, they prove the global constitution of early modern Spanish and Portuguese American literatures, their historical and cultural contexts, and their long-lasting legacies.

Seeking to understand the economic relations between author and publisher, this study analyzes the place of Roberto Bolaño in the Latin American literary canon through the texts of Jorge Herralde. After showing how the work of the 1998 Premio Herralde winner has been commodified, Lèal offers a critical reading of the writer figure, as represented in three key moments of Bolaño’s short story production.

The volume asks how the literatures of the Americas and the Caribbean present multiple or internally differentiated spaces and how these are distinguished or traversed by different temporalities. The historical and (post)colonial experiences of these areas turns them into especially fertile ground for the exploration of the connections between landscape/geography and historical/temporal palimpsests as well as the specificities of literary form.

The contributions are dedicated to individual, yet conceptually interconnected studies of staggered, multiple, non-simultaneous temporalities in modern and contemporary literature. The volume adopts a comparative perspective throughout and intends to foster the dialogue between the study of Latin/American and Caribbean literatures—in Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English. Therefore, the individual essays are not grouped according to geographical or linguistic areas, but follow a trajectory from spatiotemporal constellations of the 19^th century to ruined/catastrophic landscapes and the geopoetic inscriptions of time in regions. The essays should appeal to all readers interested in World Literature, Hemispheric Studies as well as temporal approaches to space and geography.

Phenomena such as the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, or the surge of political populism show that the current phase of accelerated globalization is over. New concepts are needed in order to respond to this exhaustion of the global project: the volume scrutinizes these responses in the aesthetic realm and under a "post-global" banner, while incorporating alternative, non-Western epistemologies and literatures of the post-colonial Global South.

This book analyzes, conceptualizes and historicizes the amateur translator figure as political and cultural agent in US-Latin American relations, from the end of the 19^th century to the mid-20^th century. Centered on the work of two US-American translators, Alice Stone Blackwell and Isaac Goldberg, it is the first study to offer a modern history of the amateur translator as subject of resistance and cultural mediator between the two regions.

This volume is the first to use numerical indicators to examine the impact made by the Spanish Premio Biblioteca Breve as an instrument of canonization and evaluation, taking into account changes to book market structures since 1958. By analyzing archival materials, databases, and information about literary agencies, the author is able to draw conclusions about reception, circulation, and the accompanying book market dynamics.

A transcontinental and transdisciplinary debate is currently taking place about the concept of world literature in which female writers have so far played a marginal role in spite of their centrality as the authors of literary texts. There has been a dearth of research into the question of what makes female writers from the Latin America of the early twenty-first century world authors, which this book aims to answer.

It has only been in the 21st century that the literary oeuvre of the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) has received international recognition, after being repeatedly forgotten in the past. This volume traces its belated transformation into world literature using specific materials from the history of Lispector’s translation and reception, providing a new perspective on the problems of canonization in the field of world literature.

The existence of World Literature depends on specific processes, institutions, and actors involved in the global circulation of literary works. The contributions of this volume aim to pay attention to these multiple material dimensions of Latin American 20^th and 21^st century literatures. From perspectives informed by materialism, sociology, book studies, and digital humanities, the articles of this volume analyze the role of publishing houses, politics of translation, mediators and gatekeepers, allowing insights into the processes that enable books to cross borders and to be transformed into globally circulating commodities. The book focusses both on material (re)sources of literary archives, key actors in literary and cultural markets, prizes and book fairs, as well as on recent dimension of the digital age. Statements of some of the leading representatives of the global publishing world complement these analyses of the operations of selection and aggregation of value to literary texts.

This volume is the first sistematic study of French editorial mediation in the internationalization process of Latin-American literatures. It opens a new field of investigation – Latin-American literary works translated into French – and develops methodological tools to extend this type of study to other literatures from the Global South.

The debate surrounding world literature has been brought into renewed focus in light of questions pertaining to global networks in a polycentric world. Beyond theoretical debates, however, there has been a marked lack of materialistic approaches that seek to shed light on processes underlying the formation of world literature. Using Latin American literature as an example, this volume shows how the global circulation of literature takes place.

From the perspective of Latin American Studies, this volume offers a critical contribution to the current debate on world literature. It is structured around three conceptual blocks: "gatekeepers", as the dispositives and actors mediating the international circulation of literature; "translation", as an unavoidable but always problematic mechanism; and "local literatures", as modes of writing that remain intrinsically tied to their contexts.

From today’s vantage point it can be denied that the confidence in the abilities of globalism, mobility, and cosmopolitanism to illuminate cultural signification processes of our time has been severely shaken. In the face of this crisis, a key concept of this globalizing optimism as World Literature has been for the past twenty years necessarily is in the need of a comprehensive revision.

World Literature, Cosmopolitanism, Globality: Beyond, Against, Post, Otherwise offers a wide range of contributions approaching the blind spots of the globally oriented Humanities for phenomena that in one way or another have gone beyond the discourses, aesthetics, and political positions of liberal cosmopolitanism and neoliberal globalization. Departing basically (but not exclusively) from different examples of Latin American literatures and cultures in globalized contexts, this volume provides innovative insights into critical readings of World Literature and its related conceptualizations.

A timely book that embraces highly innovative perspectives, it will be a mustread for all scholars involved in the field of the global dimensions of literature.

What is World Literature? To answer this question, this book asks another one: How is it produced, that is, what are the material conditions, processes, and actors, which enable Latin-American Literature to circulate internationally and become (Latin-American) World Literature? Exploring the tension between literature for and of the world, the volume also intend to give visibility—and value as World Literature— to local forms of expression.

Landscape, as it appears and is described throughout the works of Bernardo Carvalho and Robert Walser, provides an excellent—yet virtually unexplored—pathway to the authors’ literary projects.

The landscape functions here as a synthetic and unifying figure that triggers, at first, through the analysis of its description per se, the main and most evident elements of the authors’ works. However, when sustained as a methodological figure beyond the scope of its own description, the landscape soon reveals a darker, far more fascinating and far less explored side of the authors’ oeuvres: a vengeful, seemingly defeatist resentment against the status quo, which gives way to the more latent and biting elements of the authors’ prose, such as irony, the unheimlich, an anti-heroic agenda, the apocalyptic aesthetics of a disaster-prone fictional world, as well as an understanding of history and literature through the figures of failure and marginality.

By drawing from diverse critical traditions from Latin-America and Europe, this comparative text seeks to unravel, in all of its complexity and scope, the fictional stage upon which Walser’s and Carvalho’s characters narrate, with their dying breath, a world that is slowly undoing itself.

How can we talk about World Literature if we do not actually examine the world as a whole? Research on World Literature commonly focuses on the dynamics of a western center and a southern periphery, ignoring the fact that numerous literary relationships exist beyond these established constellations of thinking and reading within the Global South.

Re-Mapping World Literature suggests a different approach that aims to investigate new navigational tools that extend beyond the known poles and meridians of current literary maps. Using the example of Latin American literatures, this study provides innovative insights into the literary modeling of shared historical experiences, epistemological crosscurrents, and book market processes within the Global South which thus far have received scant attention. The contributions to this volume, from renowned scholars in the fields of World and Latin American literatures, assess travelling aesthetics and genres, processes of translation and circulation of literary works, as well as the complex epistemological entanglements and shared worldviews between Latin America, Africa and Asia.

A timely book that embraces highly innovative perspectives, it will be a must-read for all scholars involved in the field of the global dimensions of literature.

This study delves into the Cuban project Diáspora(s) and the magazine of the same name, which circulated in Havana from 1997 to 2002 by way of samizdat techniques. Taking a mixed-methods approach, it views Diáspora(s) as a network, drawing out the synergies between the social formation of the intellectual network, the magazine medium, and the transnational aesthetics developed by the project.