Our America? Past and Future of the New Latin American Fiction

1996, the McOndo anthology is born in the United States
1996, the Crack group is born in Mexico
In the last two decades, the so-called “new” Latin American fiction
has achieved prominence, joining the debate about “World
Literature.” Literary groups such as the “Crack” or the
“McOndianos” have intervened in this alignment by rejecting
historically recognized —though much misinterpreted— literary
modes such as Magical Realism. Twenty years after the Crack and
McOndo, there is a need to assess Latin American fiction in the 21st
century. Taking after José Martí’s famous essay, Our America? Past
and Future of the New Latin American Fiction is the first United Statesbased gathering of both Latin American studies scholars as well as
writers who were part of these literary groups. The goal of this
conference is to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas about
transatlantic connections, cultural migrations, new forms of
communication, global literatures, and non-fixed identities as they
pertain to new aesthetic trends.
Our America? Past and Future of the New Latin American Fiction
PROGRAM OF ACTIVITIES - OCTOBER 20th
GRACE ALLEN ROON, USF LIBRARY, 4TH FLOOR
10:30-11:00 am
REGISTRATION AND OPENING REMARKS
Dr. Ralph Wilcox, Provost and Executive Vice-President, USF
Dr. Stephan Schindler, Chair, Department of World Languages, USF
Dr. Sonia Wohlmuth, Spanish Head, Dept. of World Languages
Dr. Pablo Brescia and Dr. Oswaldo Estrada, organizers
11:00-12:30 pm
SESSION I: ANTHOLOGIES, MANIFESTOS AND CANON: THE
WRITERS’ VIEW
Session Chair: Jonatán Martín Gómez, Washington U-St. Louis
• “El crack está en no creérselo: pre y post manifestos”
Pedro Angel Palou, Tufts U
• “Escritor y antólogo: Los casos McOndo y Se habla español” José
Edmundo Paz Soldán, Cornell U
12:30-2:00 pm
LUNCH
2:00-3:30 pm
SESSION II: LATIN AMERICAN FICTION FLASHBACK AND
FLASHFORWARD
Session Chair: Madeline Cámara, U of South Florida
• “A veinte años de McOndo y el Crack: un balance en doce puntos y
un epílogo”
Eduardo Becerra, U Autónoma de Madrid
• “Después del testimonio: archivos del futuro en las ficciones
centroamericanas del siglo XXI”
Alexandra Ortiz-Wallner, Humboldt U, Berlín
• “¿Estamos Unidos o Estamos Sumidos? Lo hispano en las
transmigrafías desde/hacia USA”
Pablo Brescia, U of South Florida
3:30-4:00 pm
COFFEE BREAK
4:00-4:45 pm
TOUR OF THE LATIN AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION
COLLECTION, Melanie Griffin
8:00-10:00 pm
DINNER
Our America? Past and Future of the New Latin American Fiction
PROGRAM OF ACTIVITIES - OCTOBER 21st
GRACE ALLEN ROON, USF LIBRARY, 4TH FLOOR
9:00-10:30 am
SESSION III: McRACK: 20 YEARS
Session Chair: Carlos Cano, U of South Florida
• “El Crack vs la crítica: encuentros, mediaciones, contrastes”
Tomás Regalado-López, James Madison U
• “Narrativas Post-McOndo: la ficción colombiana hoy” Catalina
Quesada Gómez, U of Miami
• “Cracking borders: de McOndo a USA”
Oswaldo Estrada, U of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
10:30-11:00 am
COFFEE BREAK
11:00-12:30 pm
SESSION IV: LANGUAGES, NEW AND OLD: THE WRITERS’
VIEW
Session Chair: Thomas Nulley-Valdés, Australian National U
• “Las fisuras en un enmohecido realismo mágico”
Naief Yeyha, Mexico-New York
• “Escrituras abigarradas: con/a través del español en EE.UU”
Cristina Rivera Garza, U of Houston
12:30-2:00 pm
LUNCH
2:00-3:30 pm
SESSION V: OUR (LITERARY) AMERICA: THE 21st CENT.
Session Chair: David Arbesú, U of South Florida
• “Si navegar es tan preciso: novelas itinerantes”
Ezequiel De Rosso, U de Buenos Aires
• “¿Pos McOndo? La ficción hispanocaribeña en el siglo XXI”
Rita De Maeseneer, U of Antwerp, Belgium
• “Exclusión y selfie: literaturas ‘pequeñas’ y ‘menores’ pos
McOndo”
Wilfrido Corral, Independent scholar
3:30-4:00 pm
COFFEE BREAK AND CLOSING REMARKS
5:00-7:00 pm
RECEPTION (USF Graphicstudio)
READINGS BY PEDRO ANGEL PALOU, CRISTINA RIVERA
GARZA AND NAIEF YEHYA.
PARTICIPANTS
Pedro Ángel Palou is a prolific novelist and essayist and professor of
Latin American Studies at Tufts U. Part of the Crack group, he has
authored thirty-three books, including the novel Como quien se desangra,
and a historical trilogy about Zapata, Morelos and Cuauhtémoc. His
latest books are El fracaso del mestizo, Cinema, Identity and Literature in
20th Century Mexico and No me dejen morir así, a novel about Pancho
Villa´s revolution. He is also an anchorman on public television, a chef,
a soccer referee, and a journalist.
Paper: The presentation will offer a writer’s view about the birth of the “Crack” movement and its
initial reception in Mexico and later in Europe. It will also consider the editorial market’s role since
then for Mexican literature and focus on the second “manifesto” of the Crack group (2016). The
presentation will offer personal reflections on literary history and the place of the Crack in the Latin
American literature canon.
José Edmundo Paz-Soldán is a prolific fiction writer and professor
of Latin American literature at Cornell U. He came to the U.S. thanks
to a soccer scholarship offered by the U of Alabama in Hunstville. He
participated in the McOndo anthology. He has published ten novels,
among them Río Fugitivo, Los vivos y los muertos, Norte, and Iris and five
books of short stories, among them Amores imperfectos, Billie Ruth and
Las visiones. He coedited the anthology Se habla español: Voces latinas en
U.S.A. (2000).
Paper: The anthology McOndo made twenty years ago thanks to a prologue that was read as a
manifesto of a new generation. The anthology Se habla español. Voces Latinas en USA (2000) was a
different kind of intervention. Having participated in McOndo and coedited Se habla español, the
presentation will offer a personal view of what these two participations entailed —one as a writer;
the other as an anthologist— and will review the prologue of both books twenty years later.
Eduardo Becerra is professor of Latin American literature at the U
Autónoma de Madrid. His publications include Rubén Darío y su obra (2000)
and Pensar el lenguaje; escribir la escritura (experiencias de la narrativa
hispanoamericana contemporánea) (1995). He has also edited, among others,
El ocaso de Europa (2015), Cuentos y otras narraciones de Alejo Carpentier
(2014), Ciudades posibles. Arte y ficción en la constitución del espacio urbano
(2010); El arquero inmóvil. Nuevas poéticas sobre cuento (2006), and the
anthology Líneas aéreas (1999).
Paper: The presentation will assess Latin American fiction since the McOndo anthology and the Crack
manifesto by surveying the literary production of the authors involved in both camps since 1996 and
identifying their main narrative approaches, in addition to studying the critical reception of their
work. In doing this, it seeks to determine if these literary groups honored the “tradition of rupture”
that has been pervasive in Latin American fiction.
Alexandra Ortiz Wallner has taught at several European universities
and is currently visiting professor at Humboldt-U Berlin. Her research
interests include memory and violence in post-war Central America,
gender issues and South-South relations in Latin American literatures.
She is the author of El arte de ficcionar: la novela contemporánea en
Centroamérica (2012) and co-editor of Sur/South: Politics and Poetics of
Thinking Latin America/India (2016) and Poéticas y políticas de género: ensayos
sobre imaginarios, literaturas y medios en Centroamérica (2013).
Paper: After the 1990s, new forms of narrating emerged in Central American literary production,
displacing the loci of enunciation, transcending local spaces into more hemispheric and global
scenarios. The presentation will focus on the figure of the archive, which emerges in Horacio
Castellanos Moya, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Francisco Goldman and Claudia Hernández as a space for
negotiating identities, citizenship and memory. These authors offer dis-formations of the archive of
the past in favor of what the presentation calls “archives of the future”.
Pablo Brescia is professor of Latin American literature at the U of
South Florida, where he teaches 20th and 21st century Latin American
literature, culture and film. He is the author of Borges. Cinco
especulaciones (2015) and Modelos y prácticas en el cuento hispanoamericano:
Arreola, Borges, Cortázar (2011), and editor of Cortázar sampleado. 32
lecturas iberoamericanas (2014), La estética de lo mínimo: ensayos sobre
microrrelatos mexicanos (2013), and El ojo en el caleidoscopio: las colecciones
de textos integrados en la literatura latinoamericana (2006).
Paper: Within the context of “global”, “world” literature, the presentation will focus, first, on the
presence of the United States as a cultural imaginary in the prologues and fiction of anthologies such
as McOndo and Se habla español. Secondly, it will address possible ways of thinking about the history
and, more specifically, about the last twenty years of Hispanic literary production in the United
States through the concept of transmigrafías.
Tomás Regalado-López is associate professor at James Madison U,
where he teaches Latin American literature and civilization. His research
interests include contemporary Latin American literature, Mexican
literature, and literary movements such as the Crack, McOndo, and the
Boom. He is the author La novedad de lo antiguo: la novela de Jorge Volpi
(1992-1999) y la tradición de la ruptura (2009), and co-author of Crack.
Instrucciones de uso (Mondadori, 2004), with the Crack writers.
Paper: The presentation will review approaches to the Crack in media and academic journals
focusing on three specific moments in the history of the group: first, the reading of the “Crack
Manifesto”, in 1996; second, the international acclaim received by Jorge Volpi´s In Search of Klingsor
after 1999; third, the publication of the “Crack Postmanifesto,1996-2016” and the resulting debate in
Mexican media. The presentation will also touch upon critical approaches to McOndo, an anthology
that faced similar challenges in both Latin America and Spain.
Catalina Quesada-Gómez has taught at several universities in the
United States, Europe, and Latin America. Her research interests
include 20th and 21st-century Latin American literature and culture.
She is the author of Literatura y globalización: la narrativa
hispanoamericana en el siglo XXI (2014) and La metanovela
hispanoamericana en el último tercio del siglo XX (2009) and editor of
Cultura y globalización en Hispanoamérica (2014), a special issue of
Pasavento. Revista de Estudios Hispánicos.
Paper: Many readers took the McOndo anthology as a statement about what would be, henceforth,
the paths of new Latin American narrative The presentation will discuss the legacy of this publication
in the most recent Colombian narrative, focusing on Juan Cárdenas. In his novels, Cárdenas
undermines some of the assumptions of 21st century Latin American writers, demonstrating that the
possibilities for rebellion for contemporary writers go far beyond thematic or spatial choices.
Oswaldo Estrada is associate professor of Latin American literature at
the U of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. His research focuses on gender
transgression, historical memory, and dissident identities in
contemporary Mexico and Peru. He is the author of Ser mujer y estar
presente. Disidencias de género en la literatura mexicana contemporánea (2014)
and La imaginación novelesca. Bernal Díaz entre géneros y época (2009), and
editor of Senderos de violencia. Latinoamérica y sus narrativas armadas (2015)
and Cristina Rivera Garza. Ningún crítico cuenta esto… (2010).
Paper: The presentation will study the processes of cultural hybridity, border-crossings, immigration
and language contact in writers associated with the Crack and McOndo literary groups such as Paz
Soldán, Volpi and Bayly. It will also examine and compare those same thematic coordinates in
writers who do not “officially” belong to these groups, such as Rivera Garza and Brescia.
Naief Yeyha is an engineer, journalist, fiction writer, and cultural critic
who has lived in New York since 1992. He was included in the McOndo
anthology. He writes for La Jornada, La Razón, Literal, Letras Libres, Zócalo,
and Luvina. He has published three novels (La vida en Marte, Camino a casa,
Obras sanitarias), two short stories collections (Historias de mujeres malas;
Rebanadas) and five book long essays. His work analyzes the impact of
technology, mass media, propaganda and pornography in society.
Paper: 1986 seemed like a good year for Mexico. Globalization and posmodernity were in the air.
The presentation will document how Yeyha and Guillermo Fadanelli created Moho magazine and
wrote a war manifesto against “the literature to which we were condemned” motivated by the urgent
need to extinguish the melancholy of magical realism and make literature, once again, respond to
reality.
Cristina Rivera Garza is a prolific fiction writer, poet and
distinguished professor of Hispanic Studies and creative writing at the
U of Houston. She has published several novels and short story
collections, among them Nadie me verá llorar, La muerte me da and
Ningún reloj cuenta esto. She is also the author of seven books of poetry.
Her most recent book of essays is Los muertos indóciles. Necroescrituras y
desapropiación (2014). She keeps a blog-archive
(www.cristinariveragarza.blogspot.com), and a twitter account
(@criveragarza).
Paper: The presentation will take as its starting point Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s idea of ch´ejes
“tongues” (stained, inserted, disjointed) and will analyze through this lens writers who write in
Spanish in the United States, attending to the processes of translation and dissemination. The
presentation will consider both the Boom-Bolaño-Luiselli axis and also writers who publish in small,
independent presses.
Ezequiel De Rosso is professor of Latin American literature at the U de
Buenos Aires. He has published, in collaboration, Entre la experiencia y la
narración. Ficciones latinoamericanas de fin de siglo (1970-2000) (2014) and as
sole author Nuevos secretos. Transformaciones del relato policial en América
Latina (1990-2000) (2012). His critical anthologies include La máquina de
pensar en Mario (2013), Retóricas del crimen (2011) and Relatos de Montevideo
(2005).
Paper: The presentation studies a trend in Latin American literature during the last twenty years: a
roaming as a main narrative theme and objective in a set of fragmentary stories. Novels such as
Lecciones para una liebre muerta, by Mario Bellatín, or Cada despedida, by Mariana Dimópulos, solve in
an original way a tension that lurks in Latin American literature since McOndo and the Crack: the
possibility of articulating a Latin American identity in a global context.
Rita De Maeseneer is professor of Spanish American literature and
culture at the U of Antwerp where she specializes in Spanish Caribbean
literature and its diaspora. Her research topics include
gastrocriticism, transnationalism and popular culture. Some of her recent
monographs are Devorando a lo cubano (2012), Seis ensayos sobre narrativa
dominicana contemporánea (2011), and the co-edited volume El canon en el
Caribe Hispano y el Cono Sur (2014).
Paper: The presentation acknowledges that Hispanic Caribbean literature has occupied a peripheral
and contentious position in relation to Latin American literature. Through an analysis of works by
Eduardo Lalo, Ena Lucía Portela, and Rita Indiana Hernández, it will illustrate how 21st century
Hispanic Caribbean literature presents a global, subjective and intermedial turn that characterizes
contemporary Latin American literature as a whole, but at the same time writers are still coping with
their particular (trans)national literary context.
Wilfrido (Will) H. Corral taught at the U of Mass-Amherst,
Stanford U and others. He is author or co-author of fourteen books,
among them Condición crítica (2015), Bolaño traducido: nueva literatura
mundial (2011), Cartografía occidental de la novela hispanoamericana
(2010), El error del acierto: contra ciertos dogmas latinoamericanistas
(2006) and coedited the volumes The Contemporary Spanish American
Novel: Bolaño and After (2013) and Theory's Empire (2005).
Paper: The presentation will posit that movements like McOndo and Crack start from a loosely
defined “poetics of inclusion” and tend to finish in canonical exclusion. Both groups’ progression to
an aesthetic of the “selfie” has served to distance some of their initial members from the original
cohort, especially those from smaller countries purportedly with “minor” literatures. I will focus on
some earlier foundational (i.e., César Aira) and “minor” Andean authors to explain the present
tension in Latin American narrative.
Thomas Nulley-Valdés is a PhD student at the Australian National
U in Canberra. His research focuses on the literary and ideological
interventions of short story anthologies in contemporary Spanish
American fiction; the respective literary fields in which the
anthologies arise and the trajectories of the authors involved. He has
conducted over twenty-five interviews with authors and editors about
this topic.
Jonatán Martín Gómez is a PhD student at Washington U St. Louis.
His research focuses on authors such as Alberto Fuguet, Edmundo Paz
Soldán and Jorge Carrión and themes such as transatlantic, transcultural
and transmedial relations in the McOndo and Afterpop literary groups.
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Dr. Pablo Brescia
Dr. Oswaldo Estrada
Thomas Nulley-Valdés
Jonatán Martín Gómez
Joseph Constantine
Mallory Edwards
Mariam Manzur
Pedro Méndez
Sergio Rojo
Diana Valdés
Rocío Vélez-Pesante
Rachel West
Matthew Wilkinson
PRESENTED BY
C
U
Mex
Graphicstudio
UC-Mexicanistas
(Intercampus
Research Program)
Department of World Languages
USF Office of Research and Innovation