Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina by Adam Joseph Shellhorse (review)

Adam Joseph Shellhorse’s Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina constitutes a bold and timely intervention in the field of Latin American literary and cultural studies. In fact, one of the book’s greatest strengths is its insistence on the importance of thinking about the nature and history of the academic field as an important component of intellectual inquiry, which has become increasingly uncommon given the dispersed, specialized, and generally conflict-avoidant nature of the field today. Shellhorse resuscitates, in a post-memory sort of way, some of the central arguments from the 1990s, when the field of Latin American literary and cultural studies was ablaze with contention concerning the nature and limits of aesthetic representation and its relationship to a thinking of the political. His title seems to echo that of one of the more polemical books of that era, John Beverley’s polemical Against Literature (1993), and indeed, Beverley is cited as an important influence. However, Shellhorse’s approach differs starkly from Beverley’s, and veers more toward the post-structurally informed work of Beverley’s sometimes rivals, Alberto Moreiras, Brett Levinson, Gareth Williams, and Jon Beasley-Murray, who are also cited as critical references for the project. Shellhorse takes as his starting point a concern shared by all of those just named, although it comes in the form of a quotation by Beverley: their work seeks “a way of thinking about literature that is extraliterary, or . . . ‘against literature’” (qtd. in Shellhorse 5). “Literature” here is understood variously as “an exalted form of individual expression and ‘high’ culture,” as a universalizing affirmation of regional identity, and as a regime of representation complicit with hegemonic structures of power (4).

Rather than exiting or opposing literature as Beverley did, Shellhorse defines anti-literature from within the literary itself, rethinking writing as an unprogrammatic and multimedial assemblage of forces capable of disrupting hegemonic forms of discourse. His approach is informed by various strains of philosophy, primarily Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theories of minor literature and immanence, affect, and corporeality, but also includes Jacques Rancie`re’s notion of a dissensual disruption of established distributions of sensibility, Jacques Derrida’s notion of textuality, and Alain Badiou’s understanding of the poetic event. Shellhorse’s exploration of anti-literary forces within literature leads him to consider the nature of modernism, the avant-garde, and the neo-Baroque in Latin America, and his approach to (anti)literature instills new life into this subject. He argues that the predominant mode of the avant-garde, which sought to break with the past only in order to found a new sense of identity that is both regionally specific and universally recognizable, is fundamentally “literary” in the traditional sense, even as it challenges established norms of literature. What he calls anti-literature, which could also be called anti-avant-garde or avant-garde, involves a radicalization of poetic language that resists any such hierarchy, identitarian discourse, or foundational aesthetic autonomy, affirming instead the potential for writing to reconfigure non-dominating relations with the fundamentally heterogeneous and dynamic elements of reality. Shellhorse stresses the political dimension of such an alternate mode of writing, which eschews political representation per se for an active attention to the limits, excesses, and exclusions of representation, including what he calls the feminine and the subaltern.

The case studies of anti-literature are taken from the center and margins of the twentieth-century literary canon, constituting what could be called the prehistory of post-literature. They wind between the conventions of modernism, on the one hand, and the demands of political commitment, on the other, reflecting elements of both but determining relations to politics and aesthetics that are...