Book Review: Burning Down the House: Latin American Comics in the 21st Century.

 

reviewed by Maite Urcaregui

Laura Cristina Fernández, Amadeo Gándolfo, and Pablo Turnes, eds. 2023. Burning Down the House: Latin American Comics in the 21^st 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 21^st 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 20^th and early 21^st 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 21^st 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 21^st 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 21^st 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 21^st 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.