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  • Latin American Textualities: History, Materiality, and Digital Media ed. by Heather J. Allen, and Andrew R. Reynolds
  • Shelley Garrigan
Allen, Heather J., and Andrew R. Reynolds, editors. Latin American Textualities: History, Materiality, and Digital Media. U of Arizona P, 2018. 272 pp.

This timely and fresh investigation plots a compelling analogy between the complexities of Latin American regional histories and the mosaic of circumstances under which its various forms of textual cultural representation have taken shape. Building upon D. F. Mackenzie's broad definition of "text" to include a wide array of other representational mediums (including sound recordings, numbers, maps, digital media, and more), the contributors of this study offer a well-crafted update to studies on the foundational role of lettered culture in Latin America that texts from Colombus's Diarios to Rama's La ciudad letrada helped cement. In addition, the bridge to digital media and the ways in which it has transformed the production, consumption, access, and materiality of Latin American regional textualities allows for a creative concluding section that calls for an important turn toward further critical considerations of the impacts of digital culture in Latin American contexts.

Titled "Reading History Through Textuality," Part I builds a case for engaging with the complex regional histories of Latin America in order to set the stage for its unique brand of textual cultural studies. In "Writing Orality," Catalina Andrango-Walker presents two intriguing cases from Peru that demonstrate the ways in which the Quechua and Aymara languages were appropriated and modified according to Latin grammatical structures as published in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century catechism and grammar manuals. As a result, these manuals played pivotal roles in altering not only the structure of the indigenous languages, but also the social identities of the communities. "Witch in the City," by Walther Maradiegue, presents a nuanced analysis of the ways in which the event of a disturbing witch burning that took place in nineteenth-century rural Peru was narrated, framed, and transmitted into a variety of writerly genres in the decades that followed: journalists, authors, and politicians transformed the episode into a metacommentary on place (urban versus rural), authority (the boundaries of scientific and indigenous knowledge), and control. In "The Sudamericana Publishing House: Catalogues as Objects of Study," José Enrique Navarro unpacks the Argentine publishing house's role in the shaping of literary history, drawing compelling inferences from publishing trends and the resulting canonization (or exclusion) of authors by closely examining and comparing the catalogues published in 1950 and 1969.

"Part II: Textual Artifacts and Materialities" moves into the realm of materiality and fleshes out the connections between production processes and objects while building the case for broadening the field of inquiry for textuality and which types of objects may be associated with it. In "Guaman Poma's Library: Costume Books and the Illustrations of an Indigenous Manuscript," George Anthony Thomas argues in favor of the likelihood that Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala consulted Renaissance-era costume books while drafting his famous seventeenth-century Nueva corónica. Delving into details regarding the various social, political, and ethnographic uses to which such costume books were put, Thomas maps out the ways [End Page 288] in which Poma's use of the pictorial image serves a set of specific rhetorical purposes in both forging parallels between pre-and post-conquest Peruvian society and defending Native Americans from trending unfavorable European depictions. The following contribution, "Rioplatense Sound, Text and Transmission in the Early Era of Sonic Reproducibility," offers several insights regarding the far-reaching effects of late nineteenth/early twentieth-century sound-based technologies (phonograph, telephone, and radio) on print culture. Setting the investigation between José Hernández's penning of Martín Fierro in the 1870s and the radio poems of the martinfierristas half a century later, author Sam Carter highlights some of the key underexplored connections between sound technologies and print cultures during this time frame, and uncovers the implications that these links have on factors that influence consumption such as transmission, storage, and ephemerality. With "The Postcard Poetics of Nicanor Parra's Artefactos," Rebecca Kosick's contribution involves an exploration of the Chilean poet's 1972 manifesto, materialized in...

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