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

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)


****

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)>).
---------------
ECREA-Mailing list
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier and ECREA.
--
To subscribe, post or unsubscribe, please visit
http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://homepages.vub.ac.be/~ncarpent/
--
ECREA - European Communication Research and Education Association
Chauss�de Waterloo 1151, 1180 Uccle, Belgium
Email: (info /at/ ecrea.eu)
URL: http://www.ecrea.eu
---------------