Early Career Fellow in Research Area 1: "Competing Communities"

June –  August 2023

Making Books/Making Community: Latin American Independent Publishing Projects under the Charm of the Avant-Garde. Conflicts, Legacies, Transtemporalities

This project explores alternative publishing and micropublishing projects in contemporary Latin America, focusing on the way in which they recover certain aspects of the historical avant-garde(s) –their collective imagination, libraries, procedures, practices and modalities of intervention. In its body of work, the legacy of the avant-garde must be rethought in relation to the subject of community, since publishing projects are characterised by a way of intervening in the construction of affective communities around books and reading. This work will consider publishing houses with industrial production, such as Caja Negra, Mansalva (Argentina) and Tumbona Ediciones (Mexico), as well as the artistic publishing projects Oficina Perambulante, Ediciones Urgentes (Argentina), Esto No Es Un Libro (Mexico) and La Liebre Dorada (Argentina–France), which are characterised by handcrafted, collective–cooperative production processes, strong interventions in the context of social conflict situations and a disruption of the very concept of the book.

Verónica Stedile Luna (1989, Necochea) is an independent editor and researcher from Argentina. She received a PhD in Literature at the National University of La Plata (2019) and was awarded a CONICET postdoctoral fellowship in 2020. She is currently a lecturer in Methodology in Literary Research at the same university. Her research focuses on the intersection between the avant-garde, literary theory and publishing practices. As publishing house director in EME Ediciones (www.emeeditorial.com.ar), she is specifically responsible for the collection "Madriguera. Essays on art and literature". She has conducted periods of research in France (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), funded by UNLP in 2018; Brazil (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina), with an AUGM scholarship in 2019; and Germany (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin), with a bursary from the DAAD in 2022. 

She is co-author and coordinator of the book Estado de feria permanente. La experiencia de las editoriales independientes en Argentina, 2001-2020 (Club Hem, 2019) with Daniel Badenes, and Dossier Recorridos de Barthes (Boletín CETYCLI 2023) with Guillermina Torres. She is currently preparing the collective book Vocabulario situado de teoría. Literatura, enseñanza, investigación, together with Verónica Delgado, Analía Gerbaudo and Federico Cortés.