Ksenija Bilbija

Accounting for Violence: Marketing Memory in Latin America

Accounting for Violence offers bold new perspectives on the politics of memory in Latin America. Scholars from across the humanities and social sciences provide in-depth analyses of the political economy of memory in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay, countries that emerged from authoritarian rule in the 1980s and 1990s. The contributors take up issues of authenticity and commodification, as well as the “never again” imperative implicit in memory goods and memorial sites. They describe how bookstores, cinemas, theaters, the music industry, and television shows (and their commercial sponsors) trade in testimonial and fictional accounts of the authoritarian past; how tourist itineraries have come to include trauma sites and memorial museums; and how memory studies has emerged as a distinct academic field profiting from its own journals, conferences, book series, and courses. The memory market, described in terms of goods, sites, producers, marketers, consumers, and patrons, presents a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, commodifying memory potentially cheapens it. On the other hand, too little public exposure may limit awareness of past human-rights atrocities; such awareness may help to prevent their recurring. Contributors. Rebecca J. Atencio, Ksenija Bilbija, Jo-Marie Burt, Laurie Beth Clark, Cath Collins, Susana Draper, Nancy Gates-Madsen, Susana Kaiser, Cynthia E. Milton, Alice A. Nelson, Carmen Oquendo Villar, Leigh A. Payne, Jose Ramon Ruisanchez Serra, Maria Eugenia Ulfe

Fiction's Mysterious Ways: Eloísa Cartonera

The story of Eloísa Cartonera, the first cartonera publisher, has many possible beginnings. The one I like to call foundational—errant and erratic as it may be—has one anonymous and three known protagonists: the artists Washington Cucurto, Javier Barilaro, and Hernán Bravo Varela had just eaten their milanesa sandwiches and were strolling through the streets of Buenos Aires, chatting about the hardships of publishing poetry. The year was 2003 and the country was immersed in a profound economic crisis. The peso was then worth four times less than during the Menem tenure (1989–99) when the convertibility plan, shored up with foreign credits as well as money from the privatization of public industries, failed to bring lasting stability to corruption-ridden Argentina, so the individual collection of cardboard was an effective means of survival for hundreds of thousands of citizens. Since 2001, as many small businesses went bankrupt, thousands of workers had lost their source of income and were taken out of the mainstream system of production. Thus, the combination of nearly one-fifth of the citizens of Buenos Aires below the poverty line, with an explosive increase in the price of paper, gave birth to a new occupation: the cartoneros. Entire families with numerous children, some 100,000 of them, took over the streets of the Argentine capital every night and scavenged through the garbage in search of recyclables, mainly newspapers, magazines, and cardboard. It was a job that could only be done at night after the remaining members of the middle class took out their garbage. One can only imagine that the conversation of the three protagonists was prompted by the events associated with the XXIX Book Fair that was taking place in Buenos Aires at the time. As the price of paper skyrocketed—by 300% in just a few months in 2002—many of the businesses whose livelihood depended on paper either collapsed or had to alter their Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 88, Vol. 47, No. 1, 2014, 13–20

Humoring Resistance: Laughter and the Excessive Body in Latin American Women's Fiction (review)

The Inordinate Eye. New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction illuminates the understanding of contemporary fiction and its underlying connection to visual and verbal transcultural modes of perception and expression. In this context, Lois Parkinson Zamora’s “cultural legibility” proves essential to alternative and accurate accounts of Latin American modernity. She sets an important precedent for scholars whose interest is the study of literature that reflects hybrid modes of imagining. She demonstrates the latter through the sign of the New World Baroque and its syncretic forms and defying perspectives, which she brilliantly traces in contemporary Latin American fiction.