Call For Papers Meridional 25: "Textualize the experience. Semantic, pragmatic and ideological aspects of the colonial archive in Latin American fiction and theory”

Meridional. Chilean Journal of Latin American Studies is pleased to invite you to participate in the dossier “Textualize the experience. Semantic, pragmatic and ideological aspects of the colonial archive in Latin American fiction and theory” which corresponds to our 25th number and will be published in October 2025.

Every archive always begins “with the gesture of setting aside, of bringing together (...), denaturalizing things to turn them into pieces that fill gaps in a set established 'a priori'” (de Certeau 2006: 85-86). These “gaps in a set” were, throughout the 19th century until today, the monotheme of Latin American writers in relation to the construction of a myth for each of the national identities (González Echeverría 2006).

But the gesture of American archiving, its true “first domiciliation” (Derrida 1997), began with the same textualization of experience. This is what Bartolomé de las Casas points out when he narrates that Columbus, on his first voyage, threw a small box into the sea with his writings and first-hand documents, with the hope that, if the ship sank, his testimony could survive through writing. . Just as this little box contains supposedly fictitious written material, the same text by Bartolomé de las Casas also contains in its retextualization of the “diary” the desire to reconstitute – and archive through another text – an authentic lost document. The “text” and, above all, the “autograph” or the first-hand document, becomes, in the textual sphere of the colonial era (16th, 17th centuries), a fragile category, whose rescue is a real challenge (stylistic, pragmatic, ideological).

The practices related to this documentary material (the acts of handling, archiving, copying, reading or destroying these 'little boxes' and, with them, their privileged access to a documentary or experimental 'truth'), show in the literatures from the first colonial contact to contemporary fictional or theoretical rewritings, a desire to textually control and resemantize a fragile and moldable archive. This resemantization of practices is also linked to issues of subjectivity or authorship, as well as textual pragmatics (circulation, printing, reception).

The colonial archive revisited (Añón/Colombi 2021), the colonial archive as a permeable text (Ortiz Gambetta 2018; Béreiziat-Lang/Ortiz 2020) and literature in archival status (Ruiz 2018) takes up, in this way, the different perspectives of the discursive tradition of the American colony (Adorno 1992, 1995) as well as the different approaches to archiving (Foucault 2000, Derrida 2000, Didi-Huberman 2021) and its theoretical and interdisciplinary development in local production (Caimari 2017, Goldchuk/Pené 2003; González 2005; Chicote 2021, e.o.).

This dossier calls for works that address the drifts, uses and functions of this colonial archive as a material that generates Latin American (and global) representations, ideas and discourses, still in force. Regarding the core ideas of the present dossier, we propose the following:

• The textualization (the composition, archiving and resemantization) of colonial texts.
• The colonial as vehicles of experience, in different fictional and theoretical productions.
• Discursive and symbolic survival of the colonial archive in contemporary representations and discourses.
• Semantic, pragmatic and ideological aspects of the colonial archive.
• Approach to colonial representations from different disciplines: contemporary Latin American literature, historical semantics, history of publishing, material culture, philology, ethnology and anthropology among others.
• Approach to pragmatic inquiry into literary and historical texts.
• The transmission of experience: from testimony to autofiction.
• The archival turn in the humanities and social sciences: from colonial archons to the digital age.

Bibliography

Adorno, R. (1995). “Textos imborrables: Posiciones simultaneas y sucesivas del sujeto colonial”. Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 21. 41, pp. 33-49.

Adorno, R. (1992). “The discursive encounter of Spain and America: The Authority of Eyewitness Testimony in the Writing of History”. The William and Mary Quarterly 49. 2, pp. 210-228.

Béreiziat-Lang, S./Ortiz Gambetta, E. (2020). “El género épico entre Europa y América: poéticas, ideologías y prácticas culturales”. RILCE 36. I, pp.7-21.

Caimari, L. (2017). La vida en el archivo. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI.

Chicote, G. (2021). “El archivo entre la materialidad de los objetos y la transformación digital en América Latina”. Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 47 (93).

Certeau, M. de (2006). La escritura de la historia. México: Universidad Iberoamericana.

Colombi, B. y Añón, V. (2021). “El Archivo Colonial revisitado. Presentación”. Orbis Tertius 26 (34), e213. https://doi.org/10.24215/18517811e213

Derrida, J. (1997). Mal de archivo. Una impresión freudiana, Madrid: Trotta.

Didi-Huberman, G. (2021). “El archivo arde”. Trad. de J. Ennis. En: Ennis, Juan y Graciela Goldchluk (eds.): Las lenguas del archivo, La Plata, FAHCE-UNLP, Colección Colectivo Crítico, pp. 15-38.

Foucault, M. (2000 [1969]). Arqueología del saber. Aurelio Garzón (trad.), México: Siglo XXI Editores.

Goldchluk, G. y Pené, M. (comps.) (2003). Palabras de archivo. Santa Fe: Ediciones UNL y CRLA Archivos.

González, H. (2005). “El archivo como teoría de la cultura”, Revista La Biblioteca, 1, pp. 52-67.

González Echeverría, R. (2006). Myth and archive. A theory of Latin American narrative Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ortiz Gambetta, E. (2018). “Textos permeables: archivo colonial, prensa y literatura en el Río de la Plata”, Universum 2018 (Chile), 33. 1, p. 211-239.

Ruiz, F. (2018). “Literatura en estado de archivo”, Chuy 5, 23-44.

 

Meridional is incorporated in the following indexes and databases: ERIH-Plus, Latindex Catálogo, DOAJ, Dialnet, Gale-Cengage, Prisma.

The manuscripts’ deadline is on March 30th 2025.

Contact: revistameridional@gmail.com.

Dossier’s coordinators:

Dr. Stephanie Béreiziat-Lang (Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Alemania)

Dr. Eugenia Ortiz Gambetta (IdHICS, UNLP- CONICET)