How Do the New Materialisms Read Form?

• In Event: Aesthetic Form and the Limits of “Nuestra América”

Abstract

This paper considers what new materialist approaches mean to Latin American studies, and particularly what it might mean for Latin Americanist literary criticism and political theory. In recent years, debates about ways of reading (distant reading, surface reading, postautonomy) and about the status of critique and theory more generally (post-critique, affective criticism, ooo) emerged as a response to what was perceived as the exhaustion of dominant paradigms (Marxism, psychoanalysis). Drawing on writers like Rodrigo Hasbún and César Aira, and critics like Hector Hoyos, Dierdra Reber, Bruno Latour, Roberto Schwarz, and Antonio Candido, I demonstrate that the emergence and history of new materialist approaches does not simply present yet another way of reading and understanding literature, cultural, or social processes throughout Latin America. Rather I argue that such approaches raise questions about the nature of materialism anew that are fundamental to understanding the contemporary itself throughout the region and beyond. To propose such an understanding is no doubt to insist on a kind of link between thought and history that came to define the old materialisms. And indeed, the fundamental difference between materialisms old and new is that while the former sees literary form as that link, or mediation, the latter does not. But as this paper shows, this commitment to immediacy not only raises the question of whether the new materialisms can read for literary and artistic form, but also offers an image of the social that may yet have profound consequences for the possibility of imagining historical change.

Author

• Emilio Sauri, University of Massachusetts Boston