Episode 02: Latin American Textualities

Ryan's guests for this episode are Heather J. Allen, Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Mississippi, and Andrew R. Reynolds, Professor of Spanish at West Texas A&M University. Allen and Reynolds are co-editors of the collection Latin American Textualities: History, Materiality, and Digital Media, published in December 2018 by the University of Arizona Press. The collection provides a venue for scholars working in the emerging field of "textual studies," with essays on cultural artifacts ranging from grammar manuals and newspaper articles to (as the editors put it) "items we might consider newcomers or even interlopers in the textual world," including phonographs, "costume books," postcards, publishing catalogs, and virtual databases. In the collection and in the interview, Allen and Reynolds make the case for what a Latin American perspective can bring to this (still Anglo-centric) field; discuss how textual studies can open up new ways of thinking about colonization, modernization, and globalization; and describe the pedagogical possibilities and challenges created by the digitization of archival texts.

Links: For a glimpse of colonial writer Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s "Libro de professiones" — whose "archival conditions (including its digital manifestations)" are discussed in the book — visit the UT Libraries’Tex Libris Blog.  To explore three different electronic visualizations of Jorge Luis Borges's "The Library of Babel” — described in Zac Zimmer's "Do Borges's Librarians Have Bodies?" — see here, here, and here. To view images from Alberto Serrano's Zé Ninguém , a 2015 graphic novel composed of photos of street art appearing on the "walls, doorways, and underpasses in the city of Rio de Janeiro" (analyzed by Edward King in "Between Street and Book,"), visit Serrano's website.