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[ecrea] Call for chapters – Literary Journalism and Latin American Wars

Tue Aug 09 10:40:17 GMT 2016


We would like fellow researchers who are interested in literary journalism pieces regarding wars and revolutions in Latin America to contribute to our book.

Best,

Mateus Yuri Passos
Postdoctoral fellow – Faculdade Cásper Líbero (São Paulo, Brazil)


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Title: Literary Journalism and Latin American Wars: Revolutions, Retributions, Resignations Edited by: Mateus Yuri Passos, Aleksandra Wiktorowska and Margarita Navarro Pérez
Publisher: Éditions PUN – Université de Lorraine
Publication date: Fall 2018

Due date for abstracts of proposed articles: 15 October 2016 Due date for final articles: 1 March 2017

Send all inquiries/abstracts/articles to John S. Bak ((john.bak /at/ univ-lorraine.fr) <mailto:(john.bak /at/ univ-lorraine.fr)>)

Argument:

For as long as there have been wars, there has been war reporting. The only thing humankind seems to value more than the taking of life is the recording of that death in ink. From Mesolithic to Neolithic cave drawings at Bhimbetka (India) and Jabel Acacus (Libya) to the Attic histories and epics of Herodotus, Thucydides and Homer; from Elizabethan tragedies to cult television series like Generation Kill: no media, ancient or modern, has escaped the theme of man’s inhumanity to man, nor has the public’s thirst for blood abated with time. For better or for worse, war reporting has remained a rich cultural heritage that touches not only those individual cultures or states that have borne the scars of war on its people or its landscapes, but also the collective memory of what it means to be human – or inhuman. To neglect war reporting is in part to forget the war that produced it and to fail to educate our children about how our failures have repeatedly existed coevally with our triumphs.

The arts, in particular literature, have played a significant role in recording wars for posterity. Literature affords audiences an emotive response to human tragedy that is often denuded in histories or sensationalized in the press. Literature lets readers travel where historians and journalists rarely venture: into the human psyche responsible for violence. Histories recount the battles, tally the dead, bestow the laurels and pass sentence on the enemy. The press, which only fully made the distinction between fact and rhetoric within the last century (in most democracies), frequently foments the chauvinism necessary for a state to empty its coffers on transgressing international borders rather than on addressing domestic affairs. As the press matured over time, journalistic reporting, which once occupied the no man’s land along the literature–history continuum, shifted paradigms and followed its own naturalistic instincts down a factographic path that aligned it closer to a historical rather than to a literary discourse. The general perception among democratic states by the 1920s was that journalism ought to be either “objective,” as it would become in the American tradition, or “polemical,” as it has often remained in the European one. In terms of war reporting, if history would satisfy itself with the telling of the how of war, and journalism the when and the who, literature would preoccupy itself with the why.

Whether recorded on papyrus or parchment, in pamphlets or broadsheets, via epics or novels, in photographs or film documentaries, the violence of war remains one of the most horrific experiences to which the human community has been exposed. Yet, modern historical and journalistic discourses have tended to objectify war to a safe, sublimated distance, even reducing it to a cultural logic that promise renewal through destruction. In effect, we have made of war a euphemism, which, as the poet Joseph Brodsky observed, “is, generally, the inertia of terror” we do not wish to acknowledge firsthand but which we agree is a necessary antidote to cultural exhaustion. Literature, on the other hand, provides subjective responses to war that appeal to our emotive needs, but it ultimately cheats us, providing satisfying or disturbing narrative ends to a war, while often ignoring, falsifying or even romanticizing its documented history. Since literature has traditionally instructed humanity through the ages about war more than history has, its effect has been to mythologize war in our collective conscience – often to the detriment of a given war’s truth. Consequently, to understand the motives and the players behind any war in any nation and at any given time, we have had either to choose between dry factography (when such facts were available and uncensored) and demagogic fiction, or to read both.

As an alternative to war literature and traditional war journalism, and to the historical legacies that have emerged from or given rise to both, literary journalism in its several written and visual avatars has sought different ways to perceive and represent the aesthetics of the war experience. Like its sister disciplines – journalism and literature – literary and multimedial journalism has repeatedly defended the necessities and exposed the horrors of war; has accurately chronicled the events and passionately dramatized its players; has rallied the troops and sympathized with the enemy. But, unlike its siblings, literary journalism does all of this at the same time. Its verité aesthetics offer incontestable facts with a critical distance worthy of history; its documentary heuristics capture multiple eye-witness accounts that give journalistic bylines their timely importance; and its transmedial story-telling provides visual images worthy of our greatest war novelists, playwrights, poets and photographers. While not being the definitive source of war reporting, literary journalism does offer a more complete experience to a historical event by complementing the strengths of each of the other sources of war documentation and correcting their weaknesses or limitations. Literary journalism is, to be sure, more subjective than history, inviting the reader to participate in an event rather than passively observe it from the margins of time; it is longer and more detailed than short, dry journalistic pieces found in our broadsheets that are bound by formulaic structures, house styles, and word counts; and it is more fact-bound and thus less deterministic than war literature.

This book – the third in the ReportAGES series published with the Université de Lorraine – examines various forms of Latin American literary journalism that helped shift the paradigm of documentary representation in war reporting. When Gabriel García Márquez died in April 2014, the world of letters lost one its most talented novelists and influential journalists of the 20th century. Like Márquez, many Latin American authors resorted to literary journalism to capture their countries’ civil wars, revolutions or pogroms. Jorge Ibargüengoitia wrote about the Mexican Revolution of 1910 in Los Relámpagos de Agosto (1964) and later about the Mexican War of Independence in Los pasos de López (1981). In Operación Masacre, Rodolfo Jorge Walsh described the events following the Revolución Libertadora in Argentina in 1955. Biografía de un cimarrón by the Cuban author Miguel Barnet tells of the story of a Cuban ex-slave of African descent that fought during the Cuban War of Independence (1895–98). The book, published seven years after the Cuban Revolution ended in 1966, is considered a watershed in the development of Latin American literary journalism.

Latin American literary journalism is thus rarely separated from Latin American politics throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Dictatorships – the most notorious being perhaps Chile’s Pinochet – civil wars and colonial wars all inspired the work of literary journalists who wrote knowing that reprisals would inevitably follow the publication of their work. The poet Heberto Padilla was imprisoned in 1971, and Rodolfo Walsh was assassinated by an Argentinean militia in 1977. Faced with such realities, Latin American authors had to be deceptive to get their stories published and read. Potential questions on the history of the genre in Latin America that could be addressed include:

   *  Is Latin American literary journalism essentially a militant
     journalism?
   *  How did Latin American literary journalists avoid censorship?
   *  What differences can be noticed between works written during
     dictatorships or in
   * colonial times and those produced later?
   *  Latin American authors were forced to invent specific genres
     (crónica, crônica,
   * testimonio) that used literary techniques which allowed them to
     criticize authoritarian governments without putting their lives in
     danger. How subjective could the authors be when writing their
     stories? What impact did their stories have on the nation and its
     people?
   *  How much distance did literary journalists – Latin American or
     otherwise – put between themselves and the object of their writing?
   *  Does an authorial voice during times of repression or a
     preponderant political agenda within a text limit its universality
     and keep it from even being considered a classic?


Latin American literary journalism was unavoidably influenced by an imported/exported European reportage tradition, as well as by America’s “New Journalism” of the 1960s and 70s. While Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and Joan Didion were exploring the consequences counterculture had on an imploding America (with Didion later turning to Latin America in Salvador), Latin American authors were still largely trying to find a voice to express the struggles experienced by their peoples. Even though literary journalism on all three continents had traditions that predate the 1960s, it is safe to say that the genre came of age at this time, and Latin America’s interactions with Europe and the United States played an important role in the making of its own brand of literary journalism, by whatever name it was called – periodismo narrativo, jornalismo literário or periodismo literario. The journalistic influences from Europe and the United States raise an incalculable number of questions regarding the essence of Latin American literary journalism to which this conference hopes to provide answers. Potential questions on the transformation of the genre in Latin America could include:

   *  What effect did foreign literary journalists have on the local
     form when they began writing about Latin America? Did Latin literary
     journalists adopt more of an American or a European sensibility when
     writing about their countries’ social and political issues.
   *  When Germans came to Brazil in the 19th century, some of them
     decided to write in German. Did it change the nature of literary
     journalism in this country and, if so, how?
   *  What effect did moving to the United States have on writers who
     were born in Latin
   * America, such as Alma Guillermoprieto, who writes for the American
     and the British
   * press and covered the El Mozote massacre?
   *  When Cuba began rejecting Euro-American culture in the
     post-revolution 60s, did its
   * authors shun the influence they had received abroad or did they
     simply sublimate it?


The diversity of viewpoints will allow us to understand how literary journalism has found its place in Latin America and contributed to the building of a sense of nationalism, between democracy and authoritarianism, between unity and fragmentation.

The book also reproduces extracts from each of the various primary sources under study with the goal of extending the canon of literary journalism. The extract (500 words or so) can be presented in its original language, but an English translation must be provided (along with all permissions to republish the extract). Accompanying these extracts are brief contextual glosses that situate that text within its national literary and journalistic traditions, as well as an article of detailed analysis (around 7,000 words) that interpolates the aesthetics of war reporting in the text that the extract comes from. The book thus hopes not only to provide present and future readers with examples of literary war journalism that have been widely neglected over the past century but also to capture what is particular or unique about the extracts in their day and to consider how they speak to us today.

Proposed articles (as well as their abstracts) can be written in English, Spanish or Portuguese and sent to John S. Bak ((john.bak /at/ univ-lorraine.fr) <mailto:(john.bak /at/ univ-lorraine.fr)>).
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