Cultura letrada y proyectos nacionales: Periódicos y literatura en Bolivia (siglo XIX) by Fernando Unzueta (review)

Taking on a question that is, at first glance, carefully circumscribed—print culture and the public sphere in nineteenth-century Bolivia—Fernando Unzueta follows a trend of boundary crossing apparent in recent multinational studies of nineteenth-century print culture by Lee Skinner and Víctor Goldgel, two authors he cites in his introduction. Where these two studies trace a carefully defined intellectual and aesthetic concept through a number of distinct localities, Unzueta analyzes newspaper culture, broadly conceived, within the strict temporal and geographic boundaries delineated in his title. While staying within the borders of the Bolivian republic literally (and including at least one important work by an Argentinian author first published in Bolivia), he develops an unusually comprehensive notion of the literary that goes beyond traditional genres such as the novel to include newspaper prose and meta-literary prologues.

In the recent study Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015), Caroline Levine points out the necessarily symbiotic relationship between categories and category crossing by noting that approaches defined by boundary crossing transcend some categories while reifying others, so that the multinational literary study might depend upon strict notions of time and genre, or a multi-genre approach might be strictly circumscribed by theme or location. In this sense, Unzueta’s focus on a specific time and place allows him to develop an expansive notion of the literary more in sync with the word’s actual meaning to nineteenth-century readers than the narrower definition popularized by twentieth-century critical approaches.

What Unzueta finds most limiting about the traditional notion of the canon is the way it takes discrete printed texts—almost always books, almost always novels—and separates them from the structures that produced them. He notes that not only was literary discourse in nineteenth-century Bolivia first produced in newsprint, but so were most literary works in general. For example, in chapter four, “La prensa y la formación de una literatura nacional”, Unzueta focuses on the anthologies, newspaper essays, and book prologues where canon formation was discussed more or less in real time. While he acknowledges the nationalistic role of the nineteenth-century novel as a device for popularizing history—“el mecanismo principal para la invención de los héroes nacionales reconocidos como figuras míticas” (119)—he also points out that we cannot accurately and completely consider the nineteenth-century novel without taking into account the printed space in which so many of them appeared by installments: the newspaper itself must be considered in any analysis of the “romance nacional” (110).

The analysis of overlapping webs of print distribution in relation to the development of a broader public consciousness of politics and history inevitably leads to Jürgen Habermas’s formulation of the public sphere. In his introduction, Unzueta notes the contextual differences between Habermas’s analysis of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century print culture in Great Britain and the world of nineteenth-century Bolivia. The idea of the public sphere was to some degree aspirational in its original context, and Unzueta notes in Bolivia a further degree of removal as the public sphere comes to signify a shared belief that such spaces should exist and a shared conception of their absence. Unzueta shows how José Manuel Gutierrez’s 1887 remark on the need for a space where disinterested reason can prevail is a hope for the future rather than a description of the present. As Unzueta puts it, the “ideales del modelo narrativo de la esfera pública y no su realidad” serve as inspiration for the builders of Bolivian print culture (163).

One of the obvious difficulties for considering the dream or reality of a public sphere in nineteenth-century Bolivia is the question of who was invited or allowed to participate. As in most of post-independence Spanish America, elite gate-keepers wielded hierarchies of race and gender as formidable if not absolute barriers. Unzueta’s third chapter, “G...