ARTELETRA

Arteletra: The Sixties in Latin America and the Politics of Going Unnoticed. Cover image feature a Sator Sqaure that has been modified to include the work Arteletra.

The Sixties in Latin America and the Politics of Going Unnoticed

Purdue University Press, 2021

Honorable Mention
Best Book in the Humanities
LASA Southern Cone Studies Section

ArteletrA analyzes the Sixties in Latin America in order to revisit the core claim of literary and cultural studies to political relevancy in the contemporary world: the task of making visible the invisible. Though visibility can secure rights for the disenfranchised, it also risks subjecting them to the biopolitical and capitalist arrangements of space. What is at stake in this book is a series of aesthetic and ethical tools for engaging in politics—defined here as the potential to disagree—without first passing through visibility. These tools cohere around a practice Bartles calls “the politics of going unnoticed,” which he derives from an archive of three noteworthy, though under-appreciated, authors who wrote during the Sixties: Calvert Casey (1924–69), Juan Filloy (1894–2000), and Armonía Somers (1914–94). For the first time ever, Casey, Filloy, and Somers are put in dialogue with one another to further demonstrate the unique contributions of Latin American writers to contemporary debates about the crossroads of literatures and politics.

Ebook editions are now available for free as part of Purdue UP’s Open Access Publishing

Reviews

  • ARTELETRA offers a unique, innovative framework for reading an era in Latin American cultural history that seemed foreclosed to further literary or political readings. [...] Bartles not only helps us revisit this decade by attending to works and writers other than the ones we commonly associate with the period, but he also opens up a much-needed space today for alternative forms of utopian thinking.

    —Mariela Méndez, University of Richmond

  • "Es un libro no sólo de gran originalidad, sino un análisis crítico sobre cómo se pensó la experiencia política más allá de la típica dicotomía entre izquierda y derecha, a nivel continental."

    —Best Book in Humanities Prize Jury

  • "El libro demuestra que la política de pasar desapercibido y la ética de ser percibido no son ideales a los que aspirar, sino prácticas generalizadas que la literatura retrata en su más imperceptible cotidianidad. Al ponerlas en el foco de atención, como concluye Bartles, podemos ver en los fracasos del pasado el futuro de la utopía."

    —Conversaciones del Cono Sur 7.1

  • "Pasar desapercibido provee una serie de herramientas para abrir caminos sin hegemonía y hacia nuevas formas de narrar y vivir en comunidad, donde la convivencia se pueda repensar desde nuevos escenarios."

    —MARLAS 6.1

Essays

“Navigating Uncertainty: The Ambiguous Utopias of Le Guin, Gorodischer, and Jemisin.” Utopian Studies 33.1 (2022): 107–126. Pennsylvania State University Press.

“Byung-Chul Han’s Negativity; or, Restoring Beauty and Rage in Excessively Positive Times.” CR: The New Centennial Review 21.3 (2021): 55-80. Michigan State University Press.

“Héctor Manjarrez’s Uncertainty; or, Politics without Dogma.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 53.3 (2019): 923–946. Washington University in St. Louis, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.

“Calvert Casey’s Wasted Narratives.” Revista Hispánica Moderna 70.1 (2017): 19–35. Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania Press.

“La alegoría errante de la torre-cueva de Juan Filloy.” Revista Iberoamericana 82.254 (Jan-Mar 2016): 213–228. University of Pittsburgh, Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana.

“Gauchos at the Origins: Lugones, Borges, Filloy.” Variaciones Borges 40 (2015): 133-152. University of Pittsburgh, Borges Center.

“A Queer Chicana/o Ethics of Representation: Rasquache Camp in the Novels of Rechy and Luna Lemus.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 39.1 (Spring 2014): 105–132. University of California, Los Angeles, Chicano Studies Research Center.

Book Chapters

“Deserted Islands for the Nation: Empty Land- and Seascapes in Three Argentine Films of the Malvinas/Falkland Islands.” In The Film Archipelago: Islands in Latin American Cinema, edited by Antonio Gómez and Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián. New York: Bloomsbury, 2022. 31–54.

“La ética de exponerse en De miedo en miedo de Armonía Somers.” In La escritura de Armonía Somers: Pulsión y riesgo. Colección de Escritores del Cono Sur. Ed. María Cristina Dalmagro. Sevilla: Editorial Universidad de Sevilla, 2019. 63–76.

“Farmworkers’ Theater,” “Flor y canto,” “Rebozo,” and “Vegigantes.” Celebrating Latino Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Cultural Traditions. Ed. Maria Herrera- Sobek. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO/Greenwood P, 2012. 489, 496, 975–976, 1119–1120.