A pesar de surgir de un contexto de crisis y precariedad, las editoriales cartoneras nunca se han definido ni limitado a esa premisa, sino que han manifestado una estética profundamente ligada a lo social, que va mucho más allá de la edición tradicional. Precisamente esto nos revela el elaborado libro colectivo Taking Form, Making Worlds. Cartonera Publishers in Latin America de Lucy Bell, Alex Ungprateeb Flynn y Patrick O’Hare. A partir de un extensivo trabajo de campo y colaboración con Dulcinéia Catadora y Catapoesía en Brasil y La Rueda Cartonera y La Cartonera en México, Lucy Bell, Alex Ungprateeb Flynn y Patrick O’Hare presentan un proyecto de investigación sobre las editoriales cartoneras latinoamericanas. Analizan su historia y su práctica al mismo tiempo que reflexionan, dialogan y aprenden con y de las cartoneras/catadoras.

Despite emerging from a context of crisis and precariousness, cardboard publishers have never been defined nor limited to that premise, but rather manifested an aesthetic deeply linked to the social, which goes far beyond traditional publishing. Precisely this is revealed in the elaborate collective book Taking Form, Making Worlds. Cartonera Publishers in Latin America by Lucy Bell, Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, and Patrick O’Hare. Based on extensive fieldwork and collaboration with Dulcinéia Catadora and Catapoesía in Brazil and La Rueda Cartonera and La Cartonera in Mexico, Lucy Bell, Alex Ungprateeb Flynn and Patrick O’Hare present a research project on Latin American cardboard publishers. They analyze their history and their practice while reflecting, discussing and learning with and from the cartoneras/catadoras.

Globalization in the past decades has been considered a new phase of integrated global economy, with increased cultural interactions and loss of nation-state sovereignty. In recent years, critics and citizens have raised concern towards a neoliberal system that sustains inequality and growing uncertainty. Following the financial crisis’ beginning in 2007, Spanish and Latin American citizens began voicing their opinions and shifting the attention inwards.

This dissertation explores how Hispanic novels, published from 2008 to 2018, have moved from a postnational and cosmopolitan scenario towards a conversation about precarious conditions, disappearances, the subaltern and the consequences of globalization. Using the method of narratology and the critical approach of New Historicism, the dissertation analyses the aesthetics and characteristics of selected novels from Spain, Chile, Peru and Mexico, as well as their dialogue with sociocultural and political discourses. It focuses on writers sharing an interest in visuality and in disrupting conventional novelistic forms. It argues that while some writers play with the novelistic forms in order to break national restrains, others use it to demonstrate the crisis suffered by their characters and to recover the corporeality in their works.

Chapter 1 presents an interdisciplinary discussion of theoretical key concepts and a brief review of the literary industry and its gatekeepers. Chapter 2 describes the emergence of postnational novels in Latin America in 1996 with the anthology McOndo and the Crack manifest and establishes its connections to the Spanish anthology Mutantes in 2007. Based on previous studies and through the analyses of 80M84RD3R0 (2008) by César Gutiérrez, El genuino sabor (2014) by Mercedes Cebrián and Los huérfanos (2014) by Jorge Carrión, seven characteristics in the postnational literature are proposed: fragmented structure, discontinuous time, deterritorialized space, polyphonic narrators, hybrid characters, digital visuality and technopoetics.

Chapter 3 introduces what I have termed precarious writings, which highlight the material traits of recent Hispanic novels and are characterized by fragmented structures, anachronisms, peripheral spaces, first-person narrators, marginalized characters, analogue visuality and an attentiveness to materiality. Through the analysis of La filial (2012) by Matías Celedón, Nancy (2015) by Bruno Lloret and Conjunto vacío (2015) by Verónica Gerber Bicecci, it is argued that the novels present aesthetics of the ineffable, proposing ways of understanding diverse conditions of precarity experienced by their characters.

Finally, the dissertation reaches its concluding chapter, where the similarities and differences between the two tendencies are presented. Taking different sociocultural, economic and political aspects into consideration, mapping these different spatio-temporal voices provides new knowledge of Transatlantic connections between Latin American and Spanish writers, and gives insight into the directions and responses of contemporary Hispanic Narratives in times of globalization. The “return of the face” describes the reappearance of the voice of the other in its vulnerability and subalternity, previously hidden in postnational and global novels. It discusses whether the notion of precarity, as a bottom-up approach, may contribute to a new perspective of understanding current local and global tensions and dynamics.

In 2012, the Chilean writer Matías Celedón published La filial, a book-object conditioned by the precariousness and economic circumstances of his time, but also by the analogue materiality of the stamp he used to write it. At a time when the paper book seemed doomed to obsolescence, Celedón responds with anguish at the possible disappearance of archived memory and with a reflexive nostalgia (Boym, 2001) for obsolete technologies and found objects. This interview with the writer explores his narrative, analogue aesthetics, the importance of memory and the role of independent publishers in the commitment to experimentation.

En 2012, el escritor chileno Matías Celedón publica la obra La filial, un libro-objeto condicionado por la precariedad y las circunstancias económicas de su tiempo, pero también la materialidad analógica del sello que emplea para escribirla. En un momento en que el libro en papel parecía estar condenado a la obsolescencia, Celedón responde con angustia ante la posible desaparición de la memoria archivada y con una nostalgia reflexiva (Boym, 2001) hacia las tecnologías obsoletas y los objetos encontrados. La presente entrevista con el escritor indaga en su narrativa, en la estética analógica, la importancia de la memoria y el papel de las editoriales independientes para la apuesta por la experimentación.

Este capítulo elabora un estudio de la novela Los muertos de Jorge Carrión y la sitúa como ejemplo de una narrativa postnacional que, siguiendo a Jürgen Habermas, problematiza la forma en que la historia y la memoria se ligan a la idea de la construcción de una nación. Mientras que la novela propone la aspiración a una identidad postnacional y rompe con el mito de un Estado en el que habita una población nacional homogénea, también revela la dificultad de su realización. El capítulo plantea una lectura de la novela en su correlación con la acelerada digitalización del mundo, las crisis democráticas actuales y el regreso a los nacionalismos populistas de corte tradicional. Se propone, a su vez, el término tecnopoética para caracterizar la interacción entre el medio visual y el lenguaje poético que domina la obra. El análisis revela que a la par que la novela trabaja la textura literaria y plantea una literatura capaz de trasladar sensibilidad a la pantalla, critica la creencia ingenua en la red y en las nuevas tecnologías que reproducen estructuras de poder. La obra de Carrión muestra una clara consciencia de su propia participación en un contexto que no se puede separar de las inquietudes sociopolíticas actuales.