Latin American Literature In Transition, Volume 5

MÓNICA SZURMUK; DEBRA A. CASTILLO

Cambridge University Press

Lugar: Cambridge; Año: 2022 p. 500

0-1234-5678-9

How do we address the idea of the literary now, at the end of the second decade in the 21st century? Many traditional categories need to be exploded, in that they obscure or overlook significant contemporary forms of cultural production. In this volume we look at literature and culture in general in this hinge period poised between a too-simplistic version of the past, and an as-yet unimagined future. We believe that urgent work is needed to make a transition to more adequate ways of thinking and working in our contemporary context. The resurgence of nationalist movements and reinforced bordering throughout the globe testify to the urgent need for a harder look at the shape and impact of such socio-historical and political processes. In this volume we underline the ways culture work has always been situated at the intersection of identities and geographies that fundamentally complicate national or traditional area studies understandings of cultural production. Hence, the topics we have identified as central to this volume of Transitions point to fresh, intersectional understandings of cultural practice, while keeping in mind the ongoing stakes in a struggle over material and intangible cultural and political borders that are being reinforced in formidable ways all around us. Even more crucially, the thinkers who participate in this project are themselves at the cutting edge of this mode of questioning. Thus, scholars in this volume may be asking us to think about how authors and literary texts refuse to limit themselves within national boundaries, whether defined by presumed citizenship, cultural references, or language; how new genres and new forms of scholarship are reshaping what we can think and write; how climate change informs our understanding of landscape and identity; how the very field of cultural and literary studies itself is being reimagined as new cultural objects (snapchat stories, digital archives, youtube videos, weird fiction, a corporate model of organizing learning) energize our thinking.