My research addresses the still unresolved question of what “writing” is. Although the proliferation of writerly technologies and textual practices has resulted in a renewed scholarly interest in the subject, a comprehensive definition of what “writing” entails remains unformulated within the purview of Writing Studies—an emerging field involving disciplines as divergent as Media Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Aesthetics, Literary Studies, Linguistics, and Anthropology. In this context, I argue that early Latin American novelists embedded innovative theories of writing in their fiction, debunking the myth of the author as a “spontaneously inspired genius” and reconceiving the act of penning as a mediated, embodied, effortful, and situated activity. My first book project examines novels from the 1840s through the 1920s that depict acts of penning and develop theories of writing from Cuba, Venezuela, and Brazil. My follow-up research explores how South American science fiction and Queer art imagine writing technologies of the future, as well as the relationship between said technologies, artistic practices, and globalized societies.

My first book project, Against Productivity: Unproductive Writing in Early Latin American Fiction, examines Latin American novels from the 1840s through the 1920s in which characters use writing as a means to refuse productivity. These characters write in lieu of work (sometimes, to explicitly avoid working) and in defiance of social mandates that discourage them to pen on the basis of their race, ethnicity, class, and/or gender. Nuancing grand narratives that identified “writing” as a mere colonial imposition (Mignolo), a tool for political domination (Rama), and a vehicle for social indoctrination (Sommer), I show that early canonical Latin American novels—including Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab (Cuba, 1841), José de Alencar’s O Guarani (Brazil, 1857), Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’s Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas (Brazil, 1881), and Teresa de la Parra’s Ifigenia (Venezuela, 1924)—depicted disenfranchised subjects (clerks, homemakers, enslaved peoples, former Indigenous leaders) writing in minor genres (notes, letters, scribbles, diaries) to take a stance against racism, ethnocentrism, paternalism, and misogyny, as well as to escape the oppressive experiences of domestic, pauperized, and forced labor. Given the paucity of archival evidence documenting penning habits in the national consolidation era, novels serve as privileged sources to interrogate how nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Latin Americans conceived of the writing process and experienced its liberating power.

By considering the freeing function that writing adopts in early national novels, my research shifts the conversation away from the binaries that have dominated the fields of literary, cultural, and historiographical studies of Latin American societies, including writing/orality, original/derivative, local/colonial, and foundational/afoundational. I move away from binaries by demonstrating that in nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Latin America, acts of writing were not mere colonial impositions of the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, but also practices that might have historically worked alongside oral traditions to turn colonial legacies and their successor neocolonialist orders against themselves. Following early novelists, writing may have served to oppose experiences of bodily oppression and temporal homogeneity and to creatively resist the expectation of socioeconomic reproduction.

In examining conceptions of writing in so-called “foundational fictions”—including Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab (Cuba, 1841), José de Alencar’s The Guarani (Brazil, 1857), Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’s The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (Brazil, 1881), and Teresa de la Parra’s Iphigenia (Venezuela, 1924)—I also contest the scholarly assumption that early Latin American novels are valuable only to the extent that they “allegorize” state projects in the national consolidation era. As I demonstrate by closely studying novelistic depictions of writing processes, early authors depicted innovative textual practices and developed sophisticated theories of what “writing” is. In particular, they conceived of penning as an embodied, convoluted, and effortful activity; against the myth of the author as a “spontaneously inspired genius,” Latin American novelists portrayed writing as an arduous process deeply affected by the environment, bodily sensations, and the materiality of writerly technologies. The complexity with which acts of writing are depicted in early novels demonstrates the latter’s theoretical and literary worth: not only do these novels provide theories of writing that remain relevant in the present, but they also dismantle the idea that “high” Latin American literature begins with the mid-twentieth-century Boom that put Nobel prize winner Gabriel García Márquez, as well as prestige authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, in the international spotlight.

My book’s arc thus follows chronological, critical, and conceptual criteria. The arc is chronological, in that it begins with pre-independence and pre-slavery-abolition processes in the nineteenth century (Sab, 1841; O Guarani, 1857; Memórias póstumas, 1881) and culminates in the emerging capitalist nation-states of the early twentieth century (Ifigenia, 1924). It also serves as a critical history of the economically productive regimes or activities that each novel represents and opposes through unproductive writing (enslavement, vassalism, state bureaucracy, domestic labor), and of the social scripts that these regimes impose on the protagonists (racism, ethnophobia, paternalism, misogyny). Finally, the book’s arc is conceptual insofar as it builds an increasingly expansive definition of “writing” upon each novel’s characterization of the penning process (as anthropodecentric, collaborative, multimodal, and performative).

While my first project focuses on theories of writing in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, my follow-up research, tentatively titled (Un)written Futurities: Imaginary Writing Technologies in Contemporary South American Arts, explores how twenty-first-century science fiction and Queer art imagine writing technologies of the future. In light of the proliferation of South American science fiction, speculative fiction, and Queer graphic art, I examine books as well as artworks to explore questions such as: How do South Americans envision the future of writing practices and technologies? Which future writing technologies are featured in fiction and art, and what role do they fulfill in the alternative societies in which they are embedded? Do South American works provide ground-breaking definitions of “writing,” such that they advance new possible relationships between humanity and technology at a global scale?

Preliminary outputs of this latter research are my article for Revista Luthor on the history and present of South American science fiction, three book chapters on imaginary technologies in Latin American science fiction and Queer art, and my M.Phil. thesis on contemporary LGBTQ+ Argentine fiction (University of Glasgow). In my pieces, I argue that South American subjects are invested in depicting scenarios where media technologies and practices ostensibly differ from our own, thus providing new theories of what “writing” entails or might entail in times to come. I also propose that, by integrating different cosmologies into their fictional worlds, authors and artists advance rapports between the body, media technologies, and societies that are unthinkable from the Global North. Finally, I suggest that, by incorporating different cultures, languages, and histories into the reflection of what “writing” is, South American subjects contest stark separations between textuality, aurality, orality, and visuality.