Transnational Book Histories in Latin America

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel proposes a challenge to common simplifications of the social life of books. In a center-periphery perspective, the Latin American book market is often viewed as a passive site at the margins of the European, where the latter determines what foreign literature is translated locally and what Latin American texts manage to cross borders. Conversely, the publishing history of local literature is often granted unwarranted autonomy. This dichotomy is nuanced by looking at the inflow of print culture through other circuits like hemispheric exchanges, immigrant groups, or cultural diplomacy. Also, through publishing and critical strategies by which local agents often reformulate foreign traditions, or, more generally, the conceptual frames they elaborate to act upon a particular book trade balance. This panel casts light on transnational networks that cut through mainstream itineraries of the foreign book in Latin America and thus redefine hegemonic cartographies of the circulation of ideas, aesthetics, and literary artifacts.

Sub Track

• Literature and Culture: Interdisciplinary Approaches

Session Organizers

• Rosario Hubert, Trinity College

• Guido Herzovich, CONICET / Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA)

Chair

• Fernando J Degiovanni, The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY)

Individual Presentations

• Asimetrías y dependencias en la producción y circulación de ciencias sociales y humanas en América Latina: análisis y comparación de los campos académicos argentino y mexicano en el presente - Alejandro Dujovne, Centro de Investigaciones Sociales (CIS), IDES, CONICET

• La UNESCO en Argentina: conexiones locales para la importación y exportación de literatura mundial (1948-1978) - Alejandrina Falcón, UBA/CONICET

• Blueprints of Book Massification in Argentina: from national/foreign to commercial/true literature - Guido Herzovich, CONICET / Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA)

• Tang poetry in Spanish: Maoism, translation and the publishing boom - Rosario Hubert, Trinity College

• Transnational book histories and the debate about world literature: Caribbean literatures as an example - Gesine Mueller