The Book in Movement: Radical Politics and the Recrafting of Books in Latin America
Magalí Rabasa
Cultural Studies
UC Davis
Rabasa’s dissertation is an ethnography of the print book, and examines its production and circulation in current social movements in Latin America. Over the past two decades, Latin American intellectuals have conceptualized the region as a “continent in movement” with waves of popular mobilization from Patagonia to Tijuana expressing repudiation of both neoliberal policies and the post-neoliberal capitalist models of current “progressive” governments. In recent years, there has been an explosion of alternative presses (publishing houses) working alongside the autonomous movements, which Rabasa asserts are defined more by their practices(cooperativism, self-organization, horizontalism) than by any specific categories or identities (class, race, etc.). It is in this context that new political concepts are emerging as grassroots political actors theorize their own experiences, creating a new body of political theory. The alternative presses, whose production and circulation practices the dissertation follows, are on the frontlines of this process. Grounded in more than two years of participatory research with presses, writers, booksellers, and movements in the capital cities of Mexico, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina, Rabasa’s dissertation explores how the print book is made of—and is continually making—political, social, and economic relations. She argues that a different print book is emerging, which she calls the “organic book” drawing on Gramsci’s notion of the “organic intellectual.” Produced by the very actors and practices theorized in its pages, this object— the “book in movement”—is organic to the politics it describes. The organic book emerges from early twentieth century anarchist traditions, but today it appears as an “old” medium being made anew. A multi-sited ethnography, Rabasa’s dissertation takes methodological inspiration from cultural studies, anthropology, book studies, and political economy, exploring how books participate in multidimensional networks that zigzag across the continent.