This panel aims to explore the intersection of technology and Latin American literature, expanding scholarly discourse beyond the focus on the Global North (primarily the United States and Europe) to address Latin American contexts. In doing so, it emphasizes discourses and themes inherent to the region, including the contributions of Argentinian, Puerto Rican, and Peruvian literature to the global literary landscape. Building upon foundational studies such as those by Jane Robbinett (1994) and Jerry Hoeg (2000), the presentations featured in this panel are unique in their exploration of how contemporary Latin American fiction represents technology: from the impact on the writing process to its role as a subjective prosthesis. Presentations will also include a digital humanities project that confronts technology and poetry, as well as a data-driven analysis of Amazonian literature. Collectively, these presentations will propose approaches to Latin American literature that challenge traditional readings or open new fields of study. To promote discussion, we have selected four panelists who will be strictly limited to 15-minute papers.
In “Piglia and His Precursors: Tensions between Technology and Writing in Sergio Chejfec and Michel Nieva”, Rodriguez Reyes will begin by examining the movement and changing reception of the contact between technology and writing practices in Latin-American literature. Starting from a lecture on the subject, given in 2013 by Ricardo Piglia, this presentation focuses on Argentinian writers Sergio Chejfec and Michel Nieva. As writers of fiction, their own processes of work were impacted by the interaction between various technologies of writing – from the pencil or pen to various word processors and ChatGPT. Through a comparative examination of their work, this presentation analyzes the modulations across time of the notions of writing, authorship, text and book in the light of the tensions predicated on phenomena such as migration, the late ascent to modernity of Latin American countries and the postcolonial circulation of technological resources.
Similarly, “Filtering and Suspending the Body. Grasping Reality through Filters” by Rosales Fernández explores how the material conditions generated by the insertion and normalization of the use of technologies in Andrea Chapela and Samantha Schweblin’s fictional work sets a new posthuman order. In these works, the possibilities of interaction between humans and technological objects and the apprehension of the surrounding reality are portrayed. Subjectivities are reoriented to a hybrid order: the body is digitized, sensitivities are filtered, emotions are reconfigured in a corporeal experience of extended reality. In this way, the presentation proposes examining fictional representation of technology as subjective prosthesis: from the digitization of human subjectivities to the indifferentiation between human corporeality and technological devices.
In dialogue with the previous presentation, Edgar in “Poetry’s Potential Re-Publics: An Archaeology of Latin American Newspaper Poems” explains a digital humanities project that uses technology (computational methods and machine translation) to collect, tag, translate, and make public-facing poetry that circulated in the mid-20th Century among newspaper publishers and readers in Latin America. Cross-referencing literary translation theory to the unique needs of poetry as a cultural and designed medium, this paper highlights the difficulty of using computational tools to collect and translate poems. While it outlines the research methods, ethics of care, and process of the digital humanities project, the presentation also speaks to the poems themselves, highlighting how editors of El Imparcial (Puerto Rico) and Diario Las Américas (South Florida) used them to fill space, make political statements, honor dignitaries, build community, and “platform” poetry, literary arts, and artists from within the mass medium of their time.
The formal part of the session ends with “Literature as Data and the Myth of the Vast Amazonian Emptiness” delivered by Carrillo-Jara explores the construction of Latin-American national literatures and the distortion of Amazonian cultural production using a humanities data science approach. Starting from the “myth of the vast Amazonian emptiness” (Smith) to explain how the historiography of Peruvian literature has ignored the Amazonian literary production by considering that region as an empty space of writing and culture, this research analyzes different publications (histories, scholarly articles, dissertations, and Wikipedia) using a data-driven approach (data mining and data visualization) to demonstrate the construction of a national literary tradition that oscillates between the capital in the coast and some cities in the mountains (the Andes) overlooking the Amazonian cultural production. Exploring databases and digital repositories, this presentation also identifies two moments of intense literary activity (1890 and 1942) that do not correlate with the literary reception of that production and proposes a redefinition of Peruvian identity as a requirement for the inclusion of the Amazon.