Texts: Cartonera Literature in Action

This chapter invites our readers on a journey through cartonera texts and thus makes a new contribution to the academic scholarship on cartonera publishers, whose contents remain largely untouched by scholars attending more closely to everything outside the text: cartonera’s unusual forms of production, consumption, and distribution. We give this chapter special status as the first of the four cartonera forms to begin to redress this balance, highlighting the literary, cultural, and social value of cartonera catalogues as a vast body of texts that are principally literary but also stretch out into other territories of expression, from artists’ books to political essays. Our understanding of cartonera is as a publishing movement rather than a literary movement, group, or genre, yet most cartonera books contain literature in its broadest and most inclusive sense, in contrast to and defiance of definitions of literature such as written works of superior or lasting artistic merit. We therefore begin by contextualizing cartonera writings and writers in relation to their literary predecessors, with a discussion of the relation between cartonera and an earlier form of high-profile, politically engaged literature that also stretched the boundaries of what is normally considered literature: the distinctly Latin American form of writing known as testimonio. In contrast to testimonio, we read cartonera texts as part of a more collective, horizontal, and hands-on process of writing, producing, and publishing books, and we explain how our methodology allowed us to engage and read them through these processes. Given the impossibility of doing justice to cartonera literature as a continental and transcontinental body of thousands of unique and diverse works, the chapter proceeds through four close-up readings, with a section dedicated to each of our project partners and a focus on the texts they have generated since we began working with them in 2017. What comes to light through these readings is the diversity of cartonera forms and worlds but also an important commonality: a shared desire to articulate an alternative, pluriversal politics of poetic, literary, and creative practice to resist and reconfigure deeply entrenched colonial forms of meaning-making, knowledge production, and research.