On Writing: Learning from Other Places

Here I go again out towards left field.

I doubt Federico Perelmuter thought his review essay THIS REVIEW SHOULD NOT EXIST could be applied to writing about Indiana. 

"“Latin America” is one such keyword and, nowadays, a gringo fabrication. Even if I could rescue something decidedly autochthonous and pure that unified the region, I wouldn’t know how to tell it apart from the Yankee, imperial mythology. Latin American authors engaging elements of the continent’s shared canon and interconnected histories face a double bind that demands, in a sense, that they establish a relationship with “Latin America” as a formulation emanating from above—from centers of literary power, nowadays New York and formerly Paris—to be translated, to sell, to make money from their literature. Latin America registers in those literary centers as an aggregation of tropes established mostly by the aesthetics of token authors inducted into the “global” literary canon—Neruda, García Márquez, and Bolaño key among them. Borges, for these readers and critics, might as well have been French.

Isn't it New York that dismisses Indiana (as well as the rest of the Midwest) as "fly-over country"? Isn't it towards New York we must pitch our literature?

Consider 's prescription for "Latin American" literature:

"An array of geographical, historical categories—Latin America, Argentina, Providence—are at stake when writing stories like these. In many ways, such categories are determined by those centers of power toward which literature is often, by necessity, oriented, and they constrain what can be said about such places. We cannot disregard them completely. Yet we should not deploy those categories as they arrive. Instead, we must critically assess them, turn them over in our hands and scramble them. See what happens when we push back against such assumptions: Do they cave inwards or burst into pieces? Are they what we thought they were? If literature just confirms what we know, what’s the point?

I italicized the last sentence. It made me think. I hope it has the same effect on you.

sch

1/29/22