The Infrastructure of Literary Autonomy in the Latin American Present

• In Event: Specters of the Vanguard

Abstract

The collapse of the national popular formation of state-orientated literary production in Latin America has been well documented—Carlos J. Alonso has recently termed this “the novel without literature.” The dominant narrative of this shift reads the present moment as a decline of state-sponsorship and the entry of the “market” and has coalesced into a debate around two positions: the new market-friendly novel either retains some spark of the prior critical moment of vanguardist literary autonomy which allows it to negotiate the post-national in politically interesting ways or it does not and the spark is extinguished. In this talk, I argue that we must break from this approach to the literary and the vanguardist tradition in the present because it leads to an unfruitful deadlock between nostalgia for the Keynesian state and a nihilistic acceptation of the present. I argue we should approach the literary autonomy of the avant-garde through the concept of infrastructure instead of through an opposition between state and market. Infrastructure, as defined by Graham and Marvin in Splintering Urbanism (2001), is what makes possible the circulation of goods, knowledge, meaning, people, and power. Using this definition I argue that the most interesting recent literary experiences in Latin America (cartonera, the independent press movement, feminism comunitario) are tied to attempts to change the infrastructure that produces an autonomous literary sphere, while also calling into question the positive valuation of that very autonomy.

Author

• Brian Whitener, University of Michigan