Towards a Transnational History of Latin American Women's Writing

MONICA SZURMUK

Buenos Aires

Workshop; Literatura de mujeres en contextos transnacionales; 2013

IIEGE, UBA

A few months ago, Ileana Rodríguez and I were invited to submit a proposal for a ?History of Latin American Women?s Literature? for the Cambridge Histories Collection (https://universitypublishingonline.org/cambridge/histories/). This collection, a trademark of Cambridge?s publishing agenda, includes chronological volumes (Histories of Antiquity, of the Middle Ages), regional ones (Histories of Egypt, Africa, Latin America), as well as literary, economic and linguistic histories. I had never used this collection before leaving Argentina, but spent many hours perusing the different volumes while doing my Ph.D. in the United States, and later on as a faculty member in that country. Libraries in the US reserve a special privileged space for this collection which is now also available online. It is meant to serve as a guide for scholars and advanced students alike; volumes where top scholars in the field map the road for younger generations or for those who want to venture their research into otherwise unexplored territories. Cambridge is a mark of editorial excellence but also of colonial authority, it is order imposed from the center of the Empire. One of the defining characteristics of the collection is its shelf duration that Cambridge has always put at fifty years. I doubt that any written product can count on lasting fifty years right now, but the job of deciding what goes, and what doesn?t is daunting anyway. The question before us was: ?How do we organize and create a ?History of Latin American Women´s Literature?? But also, is this history necessary? As feminist scholars, moreover, we were hesitant about the legitimizing and immobilizing nature of a history: had we become gate-keepers, were we in charge of deciding who had access and who was left out? How can you organize a field that has prided itself on its mobility, countercanonical nature and outsidedness? The answer is in the proposal I share with you below. You will notice that it is indeed an intervention in the field, changing the nature of what we understand by ?literature,? by ?women,? and by ?history;? challenging the concept of area studies in general and Latin America in particular. It is followed by a table of contents where you can have a sense of the diversity in the approaches of our contributors.