Sampling and Remixing in Recent Latin American Narrative

This article examines the ways in which the theoretical concepts of remixing and sampling help us understand innovations in contemporary Latin American narrative and film. Using the Cuban film Juan de los muertos by Alejandro Brugués, Norte by the Bolivian novelist Edmundo Paz Soldán, El púgil by the Chilean/Argentine/American Mike Wilson, and short stories by the Chilean writer Álvaro Bisama, I analyze modes of cultural appropriation arguing that they are best understood within the broader artistic context of the remix and the sample. In dialogue with theoretical interventions by Lev Manovich, Eduardo Navas, Henry Jenkins, David Laderman and Laurel Westrup, I chart the ways in which contemporary narrative incorporates and highlights artistic and cultural strategies more commonly understood within the realms of music and digital art even as they repeat and expand the more traditionally literary concepts of collage and intertextuality. I argue specifically that in each text we see how the writers especially use pop culture reference as a narrative building block, incorporating hidden beats and repetitions that are best appreciated as one would a hip hop song constructed of musical samples. I further use this phenomenon to consider the ways in which print narrative uses these strategies to resist relegation to the past as it faces the rise of digital culture.