Professional Documents
Culture Documents
97
Shortened Title
Introduction
The articles in this dossier originate in an international colloquium entitled What is the Contemporary? that took place at
Stanford University on May 2122, 2012.1 We had the good fortune of
having several distinguished speakers, some of them contributors here,
approach this question in broad terms and with a special interest in
Latin America. Our simple, yet compelling point of departure was the
observation that the contemporary, as a critical category and an object
of study, is often taken for granted or entirely omitted from academic
discussion. Courses are taught and books are edited with the modifier contemporary as an organizing principleas in Contemporary
Poetry from the Americas or Contemporary Brazilian Cinemabut
these coinages beg the question of what exactly the contemporary is.
Even at the most basic, etymological level, the idea of sharing the
times leads to asking when would that shared epoch begin, who shares
it and how, and so forth. Declaring by fiat that contemporary Latin
American literature, for instance, begins in key historical turning points
like 1898, 1945, 1989, or 2001 is easily suspect of arbitrariness. Similarly, equating contemporary with modern, although grammatically correct, eludes an investigation about the aesthetic values associated with
each of these evocative terms. Once we started to examine the matter
more closely, and to ponder on the specific ramifications of the problem
for Latin America, we found ourselves with a veritable field of inquiry.
It is high time to study the contemporary. Much scholarship assumes it is the purview of journalistic criticism, and waits for consensus
to arise before considering it a viable subject of analysis. Higher learning
favors the study of the past over the present, which adds institutional
blindness to the inherent difficulty of considering a changing object, as
the idiom goes, in real time. This is all the more pervasive in the case of
Latin American culture, which does not circulate in mainstream metropolitan humanistic discourse, and is thus relegated to an always-already
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there is a Greenwich meridian for scholarship, and not just for fiction,
then this state-of-the art compilation seeks to claim it as its own. At the
same time, our goal is to open new roads for future research.
One possible route would be to extend an invitation to other
spaces that construct the contemporary, such as literary festivals. Some
are nonscholarly in nature, such as the various instantiations of Hay
Festival in Bogot and Cartagena, while others involve local scholars
alongside novelists, such as the Forum de Literatura Brasileira Contempornea at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. There is an
untapped potential of combining the efforts of art practitioners and
theorists, in the spirit of the workshop that Lionel Ruffel describes.
Such collaborations could give heft and critical import to Latin American locales within a world-system of literature, beyond merely promotional efforts to stimulate the rapid consumption of fictiona cycle
that leads to unassimilated overproduction and disperse cultural capital.
We must demand literature that plunges deeply into the present, and
provide the critical tools and the resounding chambers to make it matter. The transnational model advocated here may serve as an example.
We sought to build on the asymmetric collaboration of Hispanophone
and Lusophone elements, but always in the presence of a planetary
discursive community. We were reminded that in his 1897 LAction
restreinte, Stphane Mallarm suggested that one should not proclaim
ones own contemporaneity, for the present escapes apprehension: Mal
inform celui qui se crierait son propre contemporain (372). Be this
as it may, our finding is that writers, thinkers and artists do proclaim
their own contemporaneity, accepting to live in and to give form to its
untimelinessperhaps, a way to throw the dice again and again.
When it comes to the contemporary, as this Dilogo Crtico
of Revista de Estudios Hispnicos makes clear, questions matter as much
as, if not more than, answers. We hope to lend a fresh pair of eyes to
the study of present-day culture, elicit a reconsideration of our roles as
scholars, and ultimately encourage readers of this dossier to seize the
present moment and explore its perilous territory.
Stanford University
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NOTES
The event was organized by Cultural Synchronization and Disjuncture and Tangible Thoughts on Luso-Brazilian Literature, both Research Unit Working Groups
from the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at Stanford University.
Additional support came from a Faculty Conference Grant from the Center for Latin
American Studies. Other co-sponsors were the Department of Iberian and Latin
American Cultures, the Department of French and Italian, the Europe Center, Modern Thought and Literature, and the Humanities Center. Universit Paris 8 also made
the event possible. Adam Morris, Caroline Egan, and Patricia Valderrama assisted in
the preparation of the Dilogo crtico manuscript. Our acknowledgement goes to all.
See, for instance, Snchez Prado, Ignacio M., ed. Amrica Latina en la Literatura
Mundial. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, Universidad de Pittsburgh, 2006. Print.
WORKS CITED
Agamben, Giorgio. What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays. Stanford: Stanford UP,
2009: 4044. Print.
Beverley, John. Latinamericanism After 9/11. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Print.
Casanova, Pascale. Literature as a World. New Left Review 31 (2005): 7190. Print.
. The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004. Print.
Mallarm, Stphane. Ouvres Compltes. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. Print.