Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

‘El libro era una cosa que ocupaba espacio’ (Néstor Perlongher). Recent Works on Poetry, Publishing and Performance in the Southern Cone

2015; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 24; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13569325.2015.1066320

1469-9575

Ben Bollig,

Latin American Literature Analysis

El libro era una cosa que ocupaba espacio" (Néstor Perlongher).Recent Works on Poetry, Publishing and Performance in the Contemporary Southern Cone.On a 2014 trip to Argentina, I visited a number of bookshops.Buenos Aires, in particular, is renowned for its iconic stores: the Ateneo Gran Splendid, in a cavernous converted theatre; the elegant and trendsetting Eterna Cadencia, which also runs an influential publishing arm; or the once seminal, now defunct, Gandhi on Avenida Corrientes, whose name has been revived on a fashionable Palermo shopping street.Those I visited this time tended to be smaller in scale.Eloísa Cartonera, the cardboard-recycling book maker in La Boca, is now an established feature on the tourist circuit.The poetry publisher Bajo la luna opened its own small bookshop in Villa Crespo.Librería Mi Casa, meanwhile, is just that: Nurit Kasztelan, the owner, is a poet who has created, in a back bedroom in her family home in Villa Crespo, a catalogue of contemporary Argentine literature with international distribution, alongside her own imprint, producing attractive paperbacks with postcard inserts and eye-catching covers.Outside of Buenos Aires, travelling around Chubut province in the south, I visited booksellers in Gaiman, a small town founded by the Welsh in the 1870s, and in El Bolsón, on the other side of the province, close to the southern tip of the Andes.These visits were to give talks about a book published by an emerging local publisher, Espacio Hudson, who distributes partly through kioscos or newspaper stands, and partly through bookshops.In both towns, these small, independent ventures, founded in the last few years, provided a space that was at once classroom, library, and cultural centre, while also, of course, selling books.These travels raised for me a series of questions about the status of that very traditional object, the book, and the rather old-fashioned establishment of the bookshop, in the contemporary Southern Cone.Poetry, too, enjoys a certain prominence in this space.Despite undoubted changes in the way people read, not least the rise of e-publishing, this alliance between rather traditional forms of dissemination and otherwise radical or even utopian cultural projects caught the eye.A raft of recent publications from a variety of presses, some academic, some commercial, offers views on a series of such cultural (especially literary) phenomena in Argentina and Brazil, either side of the turn of the twenty-first century.Their authors -from Argentina and elsewhere -write from positions within or close to academia, in Latin America and in the USA, but also with a certain proximity to the authors and groups studied.In some cases, this is a result simply of detailed and