1996, the McOndo anthology is born in the United States 1996, the Crack group is born in Mexico

In the last two decades, the so-called “new” Latin American fiction

has achieved prominence, joining the debate about “World Literature.” Literary groups such as the “Crack” or the

“McOndianos” have intervened in this alignment by rejecting historically recognized —though much misinterpreted— literary modes such as Magical Realism. Twenty years after the Crack and McOndo, there is a need to assess Latin American fiction in the 21st century. Taking after José Martí’s famous essay, Our America? Past

and Future of the New Latin American Fiction is the first United States-based gathering of both Latin American studies scholars as well as writers who were part of these literary groups. The goal of this conference is to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas about

transatlantic connections, cultural migrations, new forms of communication, global literatures, and non-fixed identities as they

pertain to new aesthetic trends.

Our America? Past and Future of the New Latin American Fiction PROGRAM OF ACTIVITIES - OCTOBER 20th

GRACE ALLEN ROON, USF LIBRARY, 4TH FLOOR

10:30-11:00 am REGISTRATION AND OPENING REMARKS Dr. Ralph Wilcox, Provost and Executive Vice-President, USF Dr. Stephan Schindler, Chair, Department of World Languages, USF Dr. Sonia Wohlmuth, Spanish Head, Dept. of World Languages Dr. Pablo Brescia and Dr. Oswaldo Estrada, organizers

11:00-12:30 pm SESSION I: ANTHOLOGIES, MANIFESTOS AND CANON: THE WRITERS’ VIEW

Session Chair: Jonatán Martín Gómez, Washington U-St. Louis

• “El crack está en no creérselo: pre y post manifestos” Pedro Angel Palou, Tufts U

• “Escritor y antólogo: Los casos McOndo y Se habla español” José Edmundo Paz Soldán, Cornell U

12:30-2:00 pm LUNCH

2:00-3:30 pm

SESSION II: LATIN AMERICAN FICTION FLASHBACK AND FLASHFORWARD

Session Chair: Madeline Cámara, U of South Florida

• “A veinte años de McOndo y el Crack: un balance en doce puntos y un epílogo” Eduardo Becerra, U Autónoma de Madrid

• “Después del testimonio: archivos del futuro en las ficciones centroamericanas del siglo XXI” Alexandra Ortiz-Wallner, Humboldt U, Berlín

• “¿Estamos Unidos o Estamos Sumidos? Lo hispano en las transmigrafías desde/hacia USA” Pablo Brescia, U of South Florida

3:30-4:00 pm

COFFEE BREAK

4:00-4:45 pm TOUR OF THE LATIN AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION COLLECTION, Melanie Griffin

8:00-10:00 pm DINNER

Our America? Past and Future of the New Latin American Fiction PROGRAM OF ACTIVITIES - OCTOBER 21st

GRACE ALLEN ROON, USF LIBRARY, 4TH FLOOR

9:00-10:30 am SESSION III: McRACK: 20 YEARS Session Chair: Carlos Cano, U of South Florida

• “El Crack vs la crítica: encuentros, mediaciones, contrastes” Tomás Regalado-López, James Madison U

• “Narrativas Post-McOndo: la ficción colombiana hoy” Catalina Quesada Gómez, U of Miami

• “Cracking borders: de McOndo a USA” Oswaldo Estrada, U of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

10:30-11:00 am COFFEE BREAK

11:00-12:30 pm SESSION IV: LANGUAGES, NEW AND OLD: THE WRITERS’ VIEW

Session Chair: Thomas Nulley-Valdés, Australian National U

• “Las fisuras en un enmohecido realismo mágico” Naief Yeyha, Mexico-New York

• “Escrituras abigarradas: con/a través del español en EE.UU” Cristina Rivera Garza, U of Houston

12:30-2:00 pm LUNCH

2:00-3:30 pm SESSION V: OUR (LITERARY) AMERICA: THE 21st CENT.

Session Chair: David Arbesú, U of South Florida

• “Si navegar es tan preciso: novelas itinerantes” Ezequiel De Rosso, U de Buenos Aires

• “¿Pos McOndo? La ficción hispanocaribeña en el siglo XXI” Rita De Maeseneer, U of Antwerp, Belgium

• “Exclusión y selfie: literaturas ‘pequeñas’ y ‘menores’ pos McOndo” Wilfrido Corral, Independent scholar

3:30-4:00 pm

COFFEE BREAK AND CLOSING REMARKS

5:00-7:00 pm

RECEPTION (USF Graphicstudio) READINGS BY PEDRO ANGEL PALOU, CRISTINA RIVERA GARZA AND NAIEF YEHYA.

PARTICIPANTS

Pedro Ángel Palou is a prolific novelist and essayist and professor of Latin American Studies at Tufts U. Part of the Crack group, he has authored thirty-three books, including the novel Como quien se desangra, and a historical trilogy about Zapata, Morelos and Cuauhtémoc. His latest books are El fracaso del mestizo, Cinema, Identity and Literature in 20th Century Mexico and No me dejen morir así, a novel about Pancho Villa´s revolution. He is also an anchorman on public television, a chef, a soccer referee, and a journalist.

Paper: The presentation will offer a writer’s view about the birth of the “Crack” movement and its initial reception in Mexico and later in Europe. It will also consider the editorial market’s role since then for Mexican literature and focus on the second “manifesto” of the Crack group (2016). The presentation will offer personal reflections on literary history and the place of the Crack in the Latin American literature canon.

José Edmundo Paz-Soldán is a prolific fiction writer and professor of Latin American literature at Cornell U. He came to the U.S. thanks to a soccer scholarship offered by the U of Alabama in Hunstville. He participated in the McOndo anthology. He has published ten novels, among them Río Fugitivo, Los vivos y los muertos, Norte, and Iris and five books of short stories, among them Amores imperfectos, Billie Ruth and Las visiones. He coedited the anthology Se habla español: Voces latinas en U.S.A. (2000).

Paper: The anthology McOndo made twenty years ago thanks to a prologue that was read as a manifesto of a new generation. The anthology Se habla español. Voces Latinas en USA (2000) was a different kind of intervention. Having participated in McOndo and coedited Se habla español, the presentation will offer a personal view of what these two participations entailed —one as a writer; the other as an anthologist— and will review the prologue of both books twenty years later.

Eduardo Becerra is professor of Latin American literature at the U Autónoma de Madrid. His publications include Rubén Darío y su obra (2000) and Pensar el lenguaje; escribir la escritura (experiencias de la narrativa hispanoamericana contemporánea) (1995). He has also edited, among others, El ocaso de Europa (2015), Cuentos y otras narraciones de Alejo Carpentier (2014), Ciudades posibles. Arte y ficción en la constitución del espacio urbano (2010); El arquero inmóvil. Nuevas poéticas sobre cuento (2006), and the anthology Líneas aéreas (1999).

Paper: The presentation will assess Latin American fiction since the McOndo anthology and the Crack manifesto by surveying the literary production of the authors involved in both camps since 1996 and identifying their main narrative approaches, in addition to studying the critical reception of their work. In doing this, it seeks to determine if these literary groups honored the “tradition of rupture” that has been pervasive in Latin American fiction.

Alexandra Ortiz Wallner has taught at several European universities and is currently visiting professor at Humboldt-U Berlin. Her research interests include memory and violence in post-war Central America, gender issues and South-South relations in Latin American literatures. She is the author of El arte de ficcionar: la novela contemporánea en Centroamérica (2012) and co-editor of Sur/South: Politics and Poetics of Thinking Latin America/India (2016) and Poéticas y políticas de género: ensayos sobre imaginarios, literaturas y medios en Centroamérica (2013).

Paper: After the 1990s, new forms of narrating emerged in Central American literary production, displacing the loci of enunciation, transcending local spaces into more hemispheric and global scenarios. The presentation will focus on the figure of the archive, which emerges in Horacio Castellanos Moya, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Francisco Goldman and Claudia Hernández as a space for negotiating identities, citizenship and memory. These authors offer dis-formations of the archive of the past in favor of what the presentation calls “archives of the future”.

Pablo Brescia is professor of Latin American literature at the U of South Florida, where he teaches 20th and 21st century Latin American literature, culture and film. He is the author of Borges. Cinco especulaciones (2015) and Modelos y prácticas en el cuento hispanoamericano: Arreola, Borges, Cortázar (2011), and editor of Cortázar sampleado. 32 lecturas iberoamericanas (2014), La estética de lo mínimo: ensayos sobre microrrelatos mexicanos (2013), and El ojo en el caleidoscopio: las colecciones de textos integrados en la literatura latinoamericana (2006).

Paper: Within the context of “global”, “world” literature, the presentation will focus, first, on the presence of the United States as a cultural imaginary in the prologues and fiction of anthologies such as McOndo and Se habla español. Secondly, it will address possible ways of thinking about the history and, more specifically, about the last twenty years of Hispanic literary production in the United States through the concept of transmigrafías.

Tomás Regalado-López is associate professor at James Madison U, where he teaches Latin American literature and civilization. His research interests include contemporary Latin American literature, Mexican literature, and literary movements such as the Crack, McOndo, and the Boom. He is the author La novedad de lo antiguo: la novela de Jorge Volpi (1992-1999) y la tradición de la ruptura (2009), and co-author of Crack. Instrucciones de uso (Mondadori, 2004), with the Crack writers.

Paper: The presentation will review approaches to the Crack in media and academic journals focusing on three specific moments in the history of the group: first, the reading of the “Crack Manifesto”, in 1996; second, the international acclaim received by Jorge Volpi´s In Search of Klingsor after 1999; third, the publication of the “Crack Postmanifesto,1996-2016” and the resulting debate in Mexican media. The presentation will also touch upon critical approaches to McOndo, an anthology that faced similar challenges in both Latin America and Spain.

Catalina Quesada-Gómez has taught at several universities in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Her research interests include 20th and 21st-century Latin American literature and culture. She is the author of Literatura y globalización: la narrativa hispanoamericana en el siglo XXI (2014) and La metanovela hispanoamericana en el último tercio del siglo XX (2009) and editor of Cultura y globalización en Hispanoamérica (2014), a special issue of Pasavento. Revista de Estudios Hispánicos.

Paper: Many readers took the McOndo anthology as a statement about what would be, henceforth, the paths of new Latin American narrative The presentation will discuss the legacy of this publication in the most recent Colombian narrative, focusing on Juan Cárdenas. In his novels, Cárdenas undermines some of the assumptions of 21st century Latin American writers, demonstrating that the possibilities for rebellion for contemporary writers go far beyond thematic or spatial choices.

Oswaldo Estrada is associate professor of Latin American literature at the U of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. His research focuses on gender transgression, historical memory, and dissident identities in contemporary Mexico and Peru. He is the author of Ser mujer y estar presente. Disidencias de género en la literatura mexicana contemporánea (2014) and La imaginación novelesca. Bernal Díaz entre géneros y época (2009), and editor of Senderos de violencia. Latinoamérica y sus narrativas armadas (2015) and Cristina Rivera Garza. Ningún crítico cuenta esto… (2010).

Paper: The presentation will study the processes of cultural hybridity, border-crossings, immigration and language contact in writers associated with the Crack and McOndo literary groups such as Paz Soldán, Volpi and Bayly. It will also examine and compare those same thematic coordinates in writers who do not “officially” belong to these groups, such as Rivera Garza and Brescia.

Naief Yeyha is an engineer, journalist, fiction writer, and cultural critic who has lived in New York since 1992. He was included in the McOndo anthology. He writes for La Jornada, La Razón, Literal, Letras Libres, Zócalo, and Luvina. He has published three novels (La vida en Marte, Camino a casa, Obras sanitarias), two short stories collections (Historias de mujeres malas; Rebanadas) and five book long essays. His work analyzes the impact of technology, mass media, propaganda and pornography in society.

Paper: 1986 seemed like a good year for Mexico. Globalization and posmodernity were in the air. The presentation will document how Yeyha and Guillermo Fadanelli created Moho magazine and wrote a war manifesto against “the literature to which we were condemned” motivated by the urgent need to extinguish the melancholy of magical realism and make literature, once again, respond to reality.

Cristina Rivera Garza is a prolific fiction writer, poet and distinguished professor of Hispanic Studies and creative writing at the U of Houston. She has published several novels and short story collections, among them Nadie me verá llorar, La muerte me da and Ningún reloj cuenta esto. She is also the author of seven books of poetry. Her most recent book of essays is Los muertos indóciles. Necroescrituras y desapropiación (2014). She keeps a blog-archive (www.cristinariveragarza.blogspot.com), and a twitter account (@criveragarza).

Paper: The presentation will take as its starting point Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s idea of ch´ejes “tongues” (stained, inserted, disjointed) and will analyze through this lens writers who write in Spanish in the United States, attending to the processes of translation and dissemination. The presentation will consider both the Boom-Bolaño-Luiselli axis and also writers who publish in small, independent presses.

Ezequiel De Rosso is professor of Latin American literature at the U de Buenos Aires. He has published, in collaboration, Entre la experiencia y la narración. Ficciones latinoamericanas de fin de siglo (1970-2000) (2014) and as sole author Nuevos secretos. Transformaciones del relato policial en América Latina (1990-2000) (2012). His critical anthologies include La máquina de pensar en Mario (2013), Retóricas del crimen (2011) and Relatos de Montevideo (2005).

Paper: The presentation studies a trend in Latin American literature during the last twenty years: a roaming as a main narrative theme and objective in a set of fragmentary stories. Novels such as Lecciones para una liebre muerta, by Mario Bellatín, or Cada despedida, by Mariana Dimópulos, solve in an original way a tension that lurks in Latin American literature since McOndo and the Crack: the possibility of articulating a Latin American identity in a global context.

Rita De Maeseneer is professor of Spanish American literature and culture at the U of Antwerp where she specializes in Spanish Caribbean literature and its diaspora. Her research topics include gastrocriticism, transnationalism and popular culture. Some of her recent monographs are Devorando a lo cubano (2012), Seis ensayos sobre narrativa dominicana contemporánea (2011), and the co-edited volume El canon en el Caribe Hispano y el Cono Sur (2014).

Paper: The presentation acknowledges that Hispanic Caribbean literature has occupied a peripheral and contentious position in relation to Latin American literature. Through an analysis of works by Eduardo Lalo, Ena Lucía Portela, and Rita Indiana Hernández, it will illustrate how 21st century Hispanic Caribbean literature presents a global, subjective and intermedial turn that characterizes contemporary Latin American literature as a whole, but at the same time writers are still coping with their particular (trans)national literary context.

Wilfrido (Will) H. Corral taught at the U of Mass-Amherst, Stanford U and others. He is author or co-author of fourteen books, among them Condición crítica (2015), Bolaño traducido: nueva literatura mundial (2011), Cartografía occidental de la novela hispanoamericana (2010), El error del acierto: contra ciertos dogmas latinoamericanistas (2006) and coedited the volumes The Contemporary Spanish American Novel: Bolaño and After (2013) and Theory's Empire (2005).

Paper: The presentation will posit that movements like McOndo and Crack start from a loosely defined “poetics of inclusion” and tend to finish in canonical exclusion. Both groups’ progression to an aesthetic of the “selfie” has served to distance some of their initial members from the original cohort, especially those from smaller countries purportedly with “minor” literatures. I will focus on some earlier foundational (i.e., César Aira) and “minor” Andean authors to explain the present tension in Latin American narrative.

Thomas Nulley-Valdés is a PhD student at the Australian National U in Canberra. His research focuses on the literary and ideological interventions of short story anthologies in contemporary Spanish American fiction; the respective literary fields in which the anthologies arise and the trajectories of the authors involved. He has conducted over twenty-five interviews with authors and editors about this topic.

Jonatán Martín Gómez is a PhD student at Washington U St. Louis. His research focuses on authors such as Alberto Fuguet, Edmundo Paz Soldán and Jorge Carrión and themes such as transatlantic, transcultural and transmedial relations in the McOndo and Afterpop literary groups.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Dr. Pablo Brescia

Dr. Oswaldo Estrada

Thomas Nulley-Valdés

Jonatán Martín Gómez

Joseph Constantine

Mallory Edwards

Mariam Manzur

Pedro Méndez

Sergio Rojo

Diana Valdés

Rocío Vélez-Pesante

Rachel West

Matthew Wilkinson

PRESENTED BY

Department of World Languages

USF Office of Research and Innovation

CUMex

Graphicstudio

UC-Mexicanistas (Intercampus

Research Program)