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Taking Form, Making Worlds: Cartonera Publishers in Latin America by Lucy Bell et al. (review)

2023; Washington University in St. Louis; Volume: 57; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/rvs.2023.a916257

2164-9308

Academic Publishing and Open Access

Reviewed by: Taking Form, Making Worlds: Cartonera Publishers in Latin America by Lucy Bell et al. Ksenija Bilbija Bell, Lucy, et al. Taking Form, Making Worlds: Cartonera Publishers in Latin America. Austin, U of Texas P, 2022. 303 pp. In this intelligent, emotional, and erudite volume on cartonera alternative publishers in Latin America, authors Lucy Bell (literary theorist), Alex Ungprateeb Flynn (social anthropologist), and Patrick O'Hare (social anthropologist) explore the ways cartonera books create new meanings, relationships and communities. Through an innovative "trans-formal methodology" that implies the research "across social, aesthetic, literary, material, and other forms" (11) that they design, the authors approach four cartonera publishers as research partners: Dulcinéia Catadora (São Paulo, Brazil), Catapoesia (Gouveia, Brazil), La Cartonera (Cuernavaca, Mexico), and La Rueda Cartonera (Guadalajara, Mexico). The book is written with impeccably uniform style, which never reveals that there are three pairs of hands behind it. Throughout, these authors are very careful in avoiding perceptions of power hierarchies, as the mentioned cartonera publishers are located in the Global South, while they themselves all come from the Global North, are part of the academic world, are publishing the results of their inquiry in an academic press, and have been awarded a funding grant for their field research. All professors in the USA and UK, the authors give extensive credit to cartonera publishers, and reiterate their partnership with cartoneras and their practitioners, who are experts in crafting these unique books with cardboard covers. The volume is organized in six chapters, with a comprehensive bibliography and an index. Although the index misses some names and the bibliography misspells others, a bigger problem for someone interested in finding a reference lies in the fact that authors often use only the first name of a cartonera partner in the text, whereas the index is organized by last names. In that sense, for example, finding more references to Sol would be impossible if one did not look under Barreto. The first three chapters examine the brief history of cartonera publishing, an extensive explanation of the methodology they designed, and the literary aspect of the published books; the remaining three chapters brilliantly focus on cartonera modalities: encounter, workshop, and exhibition. Writing about cartoneras is not an easy task: they are multifaceted, polyvalent, plural, heterogeneous, and resistant to definitions, always breaking free from any intent to be tamed through a possible paradigm. They are cultural shapeshifters. The chapter on the content of cartonera books, "Texts: Cartonera Literature in Action" is truly unique. While others have discussed the cartoneras as a social movement or relational artistic practice, the authors offer a thoughtful and nuanced discussion of the literary and cultural value of the texts, laid between painted and stitched cardboard covers. In cooperation with the four cartonera research and publishing partners, the very same authors have also produced an online bilingual volume of texts Cartoneras in Translation which they have translated from Spanish, Portuguese, Nahuatl, and Guaraní, among others. It is a useful companion to this [End Page 339] book under review, but particularly to the third chapter that engages with literary analysis. The goal is to look at the "relation between the cardboard cover and the text, between cartonera forms of production and their literary content" (111).Ultimately, the question the authors pose and answer here is, "what is new about cartonera literature?" Bell, Ungprateeb Flynn and O'Hare are determined to distinguish cartonera literature from testimonio and they see it as decolonial practice which "seek[s] to render marginalized communities visible less through linguistic representation than through material, effective encounters" (114). Through a meticulous and nuanced analysis, the authors show how the literary artistry of cartonera books is achieved through communal practice. This practice elaborates on topics such as the state, racist and classist repression, unequal power hierarchies, and the recovery of local indigenous memory-scapes. The next chapter discusses the modality of cartonera encounters. International events, book launches, and fairs are just some of the encounters that bring cartonera practitioners together, and where new dialogues and relations are formed. Analyzing two of these in particular, in Cuernavaca and in São Paulo, the authors engage in a discussion of two contentious...