reviewed by Maite Urcaregui
Laura Cristina Fernández, Amadeo Gándolfo, and Pablo
Turnes, eds. 2023. Burning Down the House: Latin American Comics in the 21st
Century. New York: Routledge, 2023. https://www.routledge.com/Burning-Down-the-House-Latin-American-Comics-in-the-21st-Century/CristinaFernandez-Gandolfo-Turnes/p/book/9781032148311
Laura
Cristina Fernández, Amadeo Gándolfo, and Pablo Turnes’ Burning Down the
House: Latin American Comics in the 21st Century (2023) is
a welcome and worthy addition to the study of the “complex and multiple
universe” of contemporary Latin American comics (Fernández et al., 2023: 1).
The expansive collection includes thirteen chapters by fourteen contributors that
discuss comics from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, México, Perú,
Uruguay, and Spain. The editors recognize the difficulty, or what they call the
“particular conundrum,” of writing about Latin America, which comprises many different
national and cultural contexts (Fernández et al., 2023: 2). As they say, “while
most Latin American countries have experienced similar political and economic
processes, these have been filtered by the particular characteristics, history,
social qualities and economic realities of each country” (Fernández et al.,
2023: 2). The editors’ introduction thus begins by reviewing the similar and particular
political and economic realities of Latin America in the late 20th
and early 21st century: the failures of neoliberal governments in
the 1990s and early 2000s; the rise of the “pink tide” of populist Leftist
governments between 2002 and 2015; and the contemporary turn to centrist,
right-wing, and alt-right governments. These political pendulum swings have
coincided with various economic crise--from austerity measures to overspending
to the neocolonial influence of the Global North--which have in turn exacerbated
social inequalities and unrest.
“How
does this political and economic process impact our topic: comics?” the editors
ask (Fernández et al., 2023: 5). Well, in response, Latin American comics have
proliferated, a growth that “often clashes with the economic reality of Latin
American graphic production, made within an increasingly precarious context” (Fernández
et al., 2023: 5). Fernández, Gándolfo, and Turnes further describe this growth,
saying:
Twenty-first-century Latin American comics
are deeply plural in its inspirations, subjects, drawing styles,
political/social concerns and formats. At the same time, its evolution in this
century has been marked by the emergence of three phenomena, often articulated
with each other: the Internet as a means of publication and publicity; the
graphic novel as a privileged format and organizer of the narrative; and,
finally, the inclusion of the comic in state-supported cultural and educational
projects (Fernández et al., 2023: 5).
With
these three phenomena front of mind, the collection offers vital insights about
the development of Latin American comics that speak to the evolution of comics
in the 21st century more broadly. Comics have long been intertwined
with the construction of national identity, for better or worse, and the rise
of the graphic novel in the latter half of the 20th century and the Internet at
the turn of the 21st century has drastically changed comics at the
levels of form, content, production, and circulation. It is this attention to
how comics respond to political and economic changes that makes Burning Down
the House essential reading for all comics scholars
Burning
Down the House is split into two sections that focus on
“two main axes: politics, protests and memories on the one hand and gender and
sexual dissidences on the other” (Fernández et al., 2023: 1). Part One:
Politics, protest and memory “concerns itself with the different ways in which
comics and graphic novels have dealt with the Latin American past, with the
remembrance of lost struggles toward social justice and with newer processes of
social protest which are reshaping the political landscape of our continent”
(Fernández et al., 2023: 11). Contributor Hugo Hinojosa Lobos perhaps best sums
this up when he describes “the clash between a discourse from history and
another articulated from memory,” in his chapter on social protest comics in
response to Chile’s 2019 “social outburst” (Hinojosa Lobos, 2023: 120). Chilean
comics artists, Hinojosa Lobos argues, created a visual archive of the social
outburst that acted as “a historical document and a testimony of a collective
memory,” one that challenged official national narratives (Hinojosa Lobos,
2023: 129). Comics as a form of collective memory is a through-line that
connects the chapters in Part One, especially Laura Nallely Hernández Nieto’s
chapter on how comics remember the 1971 and 2012 student movements in México and
Elena Masarah Revuelta and Gerardo Vilches Fuentes’ comparative analysis of the
politics of memory in Chilean and Spanish comics that depict dictatorship. Another
important contribution of Part One is its attention to histories of
enslavement, anti-Blackness, and Black liberation in Latin America--histories
that often get White-washed or erased under the colonial framework of mestizaje.
Both Marilda Lopes Pinheiro Queluz’s chapter “Between comics and memories,
other stories of Brazil” and Ivan Lima Gomes’ chapter “Black visualities in
Brazilian comics: a historical overview” take up Afro-Brazilian comic artist Marcelo
D’Salete’s Angola Janga (2017), a graphic novel about the establishment
of the “Quilombo dos Palamares,” one of the largest Maroon settlements of
formerly enslaved peoples in seventeenth-century Brazil. Lima Gomes’ chapter offers
an especially powerful analysis of how Afro-Brazilian comics artists draw on
“the potency of Black visual culture in comics” to resist historical erasure
and to picture the complexities of Black life and liberation on the page (Lima
Gomes, 2023; 115).
Part
Two: Genre and sexual dissidence “deals with the way comics and graphic novels
in Latin America have incorporated the demands for more diversity, for female
and sexually diverse authors and for a representation in which they are
present” (Fernández et al., 2023: 13). Jorge Sánchez’s chapter on Argentinian
artist Nacha Vollenweider’s Notas al pie (2017) and Chilean
artist Vicho Plaza’s Las sinventuras de Jaime Pardo (2013) problematizes
the disembodied, authoritative narrator that has dominated documentary comics
and comics criticism. As Sánchez argues, the discontinuous temporalities of
migration and memory represented in these comics fundamentally “affect the
presented bodies, turning them into precarious witnesses” (Sánchez, 2023: 151).
Sánchez’s chapter significantly contributes to and complicates understandings
of graphic embodiment and visual witnessing, two areas of scholarship that have
surged since Hillary Chute’s influential work in Graphic Women (2010)
and Disaster Drawn (2016). Janek Scholz examines the possibilities and
failures of comic artivismo in the face of “the vulnerability of the trans
community, above all for trans women of color and for elderly trans people”
(Sánchez, 2023: 215), in a chapter that builds on Darieck Scott and Ramzi
Fawaz’s formulation of comics as “as queer orientation devices” (Scott and
Fawaz, 2018: 203). Jasmin Wrobel’s chapter, which traces a genealogy of “comics
made by women and developed in the Peruvian fanzine circuit,” is one of my
favorites in this section and will leave you with a rich reading list. Marcella
Murillo’s chapter crucially critiques the misrepresentation of Chola (mixed
race Indigenous women) mothers, daughters, and heroines in Bolivian theatre and
comics. As Murillo argues, male and non-Indigenous creators often create fictional
Chola characters are that conform to the nationalist project of mestizaje and
contribute to marginalization of real Chola populations. Overall, the
collection’s attention to multiple forms of difference and dissidence—gendered,
sexual, and ethnoracial—resists the mythology of mestizaje and privileges perspectives
that have often been marginalized within Latinidad.
Laura
Cristina Fernández, Amadeo Gándolfo, and Pablo Turnes’ Burning Down the
House: Latin American Comics in the 21st Century is an ambitious
collection, not only in its geographic and cultural scope but also in its central
claims and contributions. The chapters speak to the shared histories of (neo)colonialism,
imperialism, colorism, racism, neoliberalism, and political repression and resistance
that shape Latin America while discussing the countries, cultures, and comics
at hand with incredible detail, nuance, and specificity. Speaking to some of
these connections in their introduction, the editors, citing Waldo Ansaldi and
Verónica Giordano, understand Latin America “as a totality” that “is really
composed of many diversities” (Ansaldi & Giordano, 2012: 25; Fernández et
al., 2023: 3). In many ways, that is just what they have created in their collection,
a body of scholarship through which we might begin to approach the totality of
Latin American comics and unravel the many diversities therein.
References
Ansaldi, Waldo,
and Verónica Giordano. 2012. América Latina: La construcción del orden Vol.
1. Buenos Aires: Ariel.
Fernández, Laura
Cristina; Amadeo Gándolfo, Amadeo; and Pablo Turnes, eds. 2023. Burning Down
the House: Latin American Comics in the 21st Century. New York: Routledge.
Scott, Darieck,
and Ramzi Fawaz. 2018. “Queer about Comics.” American Literature. 90
(2): 197-219.
Maite
Urcaregui (she/they) is an Assistant Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at San José State University. Her research and teaching
explore Latinx and multiethnic American literatures and comics through
feminist, queer, and critical race theories and histories. She is co-editor, with
Fernanda Díaz-Basteris, of Latinx Comics Studies: Critical and Creative
Crossings, forthcoming from Rutgers University Press.
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