The panel is composed by two leading scholars in the field of Latin American Studies, Marcy Schwartz and Emily Hind, and two early career scholars, Oriele Benavides Salazar and Daniel Carrillo-Jara. They come from diverse subregional fields: Southern Cone, Mexico, Venezuela and the Andes, respectively. Therefore, the panel provides coverage across the continent.

The panel builds on a significant wave of scholarship on the topic of literature and public life, including work by two of the panelists, Schwartz and Hind. They have written on subjects such as the practice of aloud reading, and dialogue with scholars who have touched in recent years on questions such as the emergence of cartonera and other forms of informal publishing, the impact of the digital in literary production (also the topic of Carrillo Jara) and the role of literature in the articulation of social movements related to gender and racial rights (Benavides’s subject). The panel thusly engages a living discussion in the field of Latin American literary studies, which in turn provides new perspectives to the growing interest in the “public humanities” in the US.

The panel is configured by four short presentations that engage specific case studies in 10-12 minutes each, thus allowing for at least a 15 minute discussion. Speakers have agreed to comply with this.

Schwartz opens the panel exploring public reading programs in Latin American cities since 2000, with a particular focus on the program “Santiago in 100 Words”, central to the reconfiguration of the city after the Pinochet dictatorship. The programs defy the solitary, private conception of reading by taking literature to the streets: distributing creative writing to a mass public in unconventional arenas for both sociopolitical and literary value. Following up on her book Public Pages: Reading along the Latin American Streetscape (2018), examples from newer research reveal literary reading as a common, daily, accessible activity that promotes social cohesion.

Salazar proposes a review of certain gaps in the body of Latin American literature written by women during the 1980s. She postulates that such writings drew on the organizational and visibility possibilities of the autonomous feminism of the time. In particular, the paper engages women's literary conferences that took place in that decade, These events functioned as hermeneutic machines that collectively situated the voice of women writers in disputes over the “interpretive power” of their own literary production. With a focus on Margo Glantz, together with her cultural activism around the IV Ibero-American Congress of Women Writers, she studies how women writers developed innovative coordinates for the deployment of the Latin American novel in the public space.

Carrillo-Jara explores the construction of Andean literature (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela) in two different language editions of Wikipedia: English and Spanish. The possibility of retrieving all this information and the multilingual nature of the platform are the principal advantages of Wikipedia when researching the construction of national literatures in the digital world. Comparing both versions he analyzes the way they approach the representation and writing of Andean literature. Because of its accessibility and collaborative nature, Wikipedia allows linguistic communities to propose divergent representations of national literatures. Indeed, the Wikipedias in English and Spanish reveal two communities with their specific point of view that use the platform to propose different narratives.

Hind’s paper discusses the role of the audiobook in children’s literature, departing from the ambiguous position that a major Mexican editor of the genre has on the topic. Hind defends the idea that reading aloud to children gives them time, intimacy, and an affective bond. She also wonders why might intellectuals find it uncomfortable to admit in plain language that reading aloud might not cultivate in the first instance a new reader, but something more like a loving relationship. From this perspective, the paper asks how might literacy homework in Mexico and the US currently geared toward time on task recalibrate its demands if initially the allure for children of reading isn’t the book, but the mediation.