Argentina´s Narratives and the Exploration of the Emptiness
In recent Latin American narratives (literature and films), spaces play a central role as key devices of exploration. Some of them are empty spaces. But what does “empty” mean? They, primarily, are spaces not colonized by previous meanings. Art and literature find there a great occasion to explore new meanings, topics, aesthetic reformulations. The wastelands, for instance, used to be seen as deserts, wilderness, badlands: unproductive spaces. On the contrary, wastelands have a powerful and secret life. Art and literature could colonize them to create complex territories. There is a rich literary tradition in Latin America focused on wastelands. In the Southern Cone, Domingo F. Sarmiento´s Facundo (1845) is a powerful description of the empty spaces. Previously, the European travelers who crossed the continent in search of economic profit, during the 1820s, have described the same territory as a wasteland. What Sarmiento called “the desert” was, however, the Indians´ territory, the reign of the nomads; despite Sarmiento´s description, an intensive life occurred there for centuries, empty of meaning for the modern creole elite. Some contemporary narratives return today, to those “wastelands”. Either as unproductive land or land of the barbarians, the tradition as wasteland remained active in the twenty-first century Argentine fictions, although completely transformed. The memory of the radical emptiness that founded the nation helped to deploy an imaginary of exploration and fictionalization in literature and films. In this project, I focus on three film directors (the Argentinean Mariano Llinás and Lucrecia Martel, and the Paraguayan Paz Encina). In their films, they explore multi-layered spaces, spaces where history is the occasion to interrogate new meanings and possibilities of the present. The main purpose of this project is to study the exploration of the emptiness in contemporary narratives.
Graciela Montaldo
Vita
Montaldo is a Professor at the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Columbia University, where she was Chair and Director of Graduate Studies. She specializes in Latin American Cultures from the nineteenth Century to the present. She is the author of Museum of Consumption (2021), Rubén Darío. Viajes de un cosmopolita extremo (2013), Zonas Ciegas. Populismos y experimentos culturales en Argentina (2010), among other books. She is co-editor of The Argentina Reader: History, Culture and Politics (2002). Her research interest focuses on the crossroads of literature, media, arts, films, and politics. In her current research, a Lexicon of Counterculture, she explores the uses of “the clandestine/underground” as a political tool in modern Argentina. She delves into cultural and aesthetic practices that fictionalize or interpellate the non-official circuits of culture.
Research Areas
Latin American Cultural Studies
Culture and Politics
Gender and Feminism in Latin America
Transnational Cultures
Argentinean Culture
Publications (Selection)
Selected Books
2021: Museum of Consumption. Archives of Mass Culture in Argentina. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press. https://www.cambriapress.com/pub.cfm?bid=788
2013: Rubén Darío: Viajes de un cosmopolita extremo. Selection, Edition, and Introduction of Rubén Darío´s Travel Writings. Buenos Aires, Fondo de Cultura Económica.
2002: The Argentina Reader (co-editor with Gabriela Nouzeilles). Durham and London, Duke University Press.
Selected Chapters and Articles
Forthcoming: “Borges: A Critical Detour.” Included in The Cambridge History of Argentinean Literature.
Forthcoming: “Latin American Literature and Criticism in the Global Market.” In Latin American in Transition. Vol V (1980-2017). Edited by Monica Szurmuk and Debra Castillo. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Forthcoming: co-authored with Sarah Goldberg. “Masas, cultura, consumo. La feminización de la cultura en la hora de los derechos.” In Una historia feminista de la literatura argentina, Edited by Tania Diz, Andrea Ostrov, and Florencia Angilletta.
2019: “Rayuela: una enciclopedia para rebeldes.” Introduction to Rayuela, by Julio Cortázar. Critical Edition. Madrid: RAE/Alfaguara.
2019: “Art and Latin America.” Editor of the special issue, “Art and Latin America,” Revista Hispánica Moderna. Volume 72, n. 2. December.
2018: “The Struggle for Words.” Introduction to Nelly Richard, Eruptions of Memories. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, Critical South Book Series.
2017: “Transnational Intellectuals: Between Celebrity and Diplomacy.” In Journal of World Literature. Vol. 2, Issue 1.
