Rethinking Neocolonial Esthetics: Literature, Politics, and Intellectual Community in Cuba's Revista de Avance

Abstract

Writers from Jorge Luis Borges to Alejo Carpentier have celebrated the role of literary journalism in Latin American cultural life. The periodical press mediates between author and public, between the heavy sea of tradition and the rising tide of the new, between the institutions that sustain convention and the spontaneous, vibrant eruptions that give life to the avant-garde. Literary journalism thus traces the struggles of writers against the canon while revealing their engagement in the political and aesthetic events of the day. But as one might expect, literary journalism also unravels the neat boundaries of the finished work or the book in the ongoing dialogue with contemporary publications and multifaceted speculations on culture. In this way, the pastiche of materials found in the modern review exposes the vivid heterogeneity of the intellectual field.