Precarious Publishing in Latin America: Relations, meaning and community in movement

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This project focuses on a contemporary publishing phenomenon that lies at the intersection between cultural trend and social movement, artistic intervention and community environmental project. Known in Latin America as editoriales cartoneras (or catadoras in Brazil), the phenomenon is often translated as 'cardboard publishing', because one feature that unites the diverse publishing projects is the material from which they make their books: recycled cardboard. Yet the term 'cartonera' encompasses far more than the English word 'cardboard'. It is also a reference to the cartonero figure - the cardboard collector or waste picker, a product of economic crisis and unemployment - that was so central in the formation of the first cartonera publishing organisation Eloisa Cartonera in Buenos Aires (2003). It was from cartoneros that Eloisa's founding artists and writers gained inspiration and purchased cardboard, and it was with them that they set up a productive publishing workshop that has since published around 200 titles. Editoriales cartoneras might thus also be translated as 'waste-picking publishers'. Some of them, like Eloisa and Dulcineia (São Paulo), continue to work directly with waste-pickers. Many others, though, have recycled the idea, and adapted it to different local contexts, communities and social needs: some work with groups of school children from deprived areas, others with indigenous communities, to name just two examples. What underpins these divergent, fragmented projects, however, is the shared notion of working productively and creatively from a situation of precariousness - material, social, political, economic and/or environmental. In this comparative study of cartoneras from Brazil and Mexico, we explore 'precarious publishing' in its two closely inter-related guises: an artistic trend and a social movement. In methodological terms, this requires a transnational, interdisciplinary approach that analyses the projects simultaneously as a collection of artistic texts and objects (through literary analysis) and a set of production methods, everyday interactions, organizational logics and social networks oriented toward social transformation (through ethnographic fieldwork). This project makes a number of contributions to research across different humanities and social science disciplines. From sociological and anthropological perspectives, it explores the ways in which theories of social movements can be productively broadened out to include - or dialogue with - phenomena that, like cartoneras, are not only artistic in character, but also fragmentary, fragile and precarious in nature. From a literary angle, it fills a significant gap in research: though these publishers have attracted attention from scholars and journalists since 2003, their focus has largely been on the unusual ways in which they publish (organizational structures and processes), leaving the literary form and content of the books untouched. Our project explores how the content and form of the books (as literary, philosophical or political texts and as art objects) play a key part in creating new relations, communities and meaning. Finally, our innovative use of interdisciplinary methods makes this a ground-breaking study for scholars approaching similarly complex movements that are emerging worldwide in response to increasingly precarious economic, social and environmental conditions. Beyond academia, our project is designed to create productive international collaborations between academics, publishers, cultural promoters and library archivists, which will lead to a number of shared outputs: a series of blog posts co-written by publishers, academics and librarians; a participative exhibition in London, in which participants will contribute to a new cartonera book; and a collection of cartonera texts accessible to UK-based readers and researchers at Senate House Library, Cambridge University Library and the British Library.