Today, we have the pleasure of interviewing Mónica Szurmuk, an Argentine academic and specialist in literature by and about women travelers. Currently, she’s a professor at the National University of San Martín, where she co-directs the Master’s Degree in Latin American Literatures. She is also the director of the “Latin American Literature in Transition” series for Cambridge University Press.
This is an excerpt from a conversation on the Hablemos, escritoras podcast, hosted by Adriana Pacheco.
Adriana Pacheco: Thank you very much, Mónica, for coming on Hablemos, escritoras.
Mónica Szurmuk: Thank you very much for the invitation.
A.P.: Tell us: How did you get your start in literature, what were your beginnings?
M.S.: If you’re asking about the origin of it all, I would probably say it was at school. I had the measles when I was seven or eight years old, and it was then that I felt like a reader for the first time. I dedicated that week of being bedridden to reading. My mom, dad, and grandparents brought me books, and that was the first time I read an entire book. I was always a reader. Literature, the subject known as “Castellano” here, was always one of my favorite subjects. When I finished high school, which was during the dictatorship, it was very difficult to pursue studying literature at university. And so, instead of getting a degree in literature, I joined a teachers’ institute, which is a teacher training institute, and studied literature there. And thus, I started training as a literature educator.
A.P.: Then you studied in California, so you also come with this influence from American academia.
M.S.: Exactly, I studied at the University of California in San Diego, which at that time had—well, it still does—a program for literature. Not literature by country, but literature at large, which was what attracted me to that program a lot. The program didn’t focus on any specific country’s body of work, which allowed for a more widely comparative exploration of the craft based on theoretical questions. So, I got my master’s degrees there, first in Comparative Literature, then in Latin American Literature. I got my doctorate in what was then called “Spanish,” but which was really Latin American literature. And I always existed at the intersection of different languages, and that’s why being part of that department was so pivotal for me. Many of the professors I studied with came over from other areas, and I maybe wouldn’t have had the opportunity to work with people like that if I had pursued a doctorate that focused strictly on Spanish. My doctoral advisor was Susan Kirkpatrick, who was fundamental in my understanding of the intersection of gender, class, and race; I also knew Jaime Concha and Carlos Blanco, and I met Ileana Rodríguez. During those years, a group of female professors from the different campuses of the University of California—who were already working as a collective, and had begun to meet and work together to analyze women’s literature and gender—created a way for graduate students to have a similar collective experience. These teachers were Francine Masiello, Mary Louise Pratt, Martha Morello Frosch, and several others. They had started meeting after a LASA conference, when they noticed that women had no significant presence there, that all the important panels were organized around male-centric issues, that women had little voice. And so, they were the ones who led the way and started holding a series of conferences across the different campuses of the University of California, where graduate students had the opportunity to present papers, to get to know each other, to start collaborating with each other and also to collaborate with them, an extraordinary group of feminist critics. In that sense, I was very lucky to have that experience at that time and also to be in San Diego, very close to the border, where we had the influence of Mexican teachers.
A.P.: With Ileana Rodríguez, a professor who is as exquisite, exact, and profound as you, you edited the volume Latin American Women’s Leadership with Cambridge University Press, where you feature Francine Masiello, Debra Castillo, Ana Peluffo, Maricruz Castro Ricalde. Tell us a little about this book. How did it come about? What line of research did you and Ileana pursue? It’s tricky to put together a volume like that, isn’t it? Also, whom do you invite and whom do you have to leave out? Because if you didn’t leave some people out, it would be an endless volume.
M.S.: It was one of those wonderful things that just happened. I was leaving a LASA panel that I had organized with a series of critics in the field of Latin American studies. Among them were Jean Franco, Mary Pratt, and Marisol Vera, director of the publishing house Cuarto Propio. Ileana invited me to work with her on this history of women’s literature in Latin America. The book bears a historical imprint. We wanted to organize it chronologically, and it was very clear that the field of the nineteenth century was a little abandoned at one point, and that changed thanks to the enormous boom around the production of women in the Latin American nineteenth century, that is, both the literary production and the production of the female critics who began to read this literary production in the North American academy. Well, I think in the national academies they read the nineteenth century, but not a lot of women writers from that time were being read. It took these women critics in Latin America, in different countries, in the United States, for these women to be read. And when we arrived, there was already an important nineteenth-century corpus, there was already a very important decolonial corpus and accounts of what had happened before colonial times. We said, “We can’t start in 1492, we have to start earlier.” Then the book was transformed into an extraordinary space. What happened to us is that we thought, when we started preparing the book, that there was much more than we thought, but even so we were very surprised by everything we found.
A.P.: Great, well, what an adventure, and I imagine Cambridge University Press must have been happy with that volume, and now we can enjoy it. Let’s discuss your first book, entitled Mujeres en viaje. Here, you focus more on the local, on those women who in some way are making history through travel. And, obviously, the Southern Cone has wonderful women authors who were travelers. Mexico has some too. Tell us about that book.
M.S.: I wrote my thesis on women travelers, and what interested me was to think about how Argentina, the Argentine landscape between 1850 and 1930, had been written from the perspective of women, Argentine women who had traveled and had written about other geographical places. But of course, like any woman traveler, the Argentine woman traveler draws comparisons with her place of origin, like the European and North American women who had written about Argentina. In other words, ultimately, my thesis, which later became the book that was published as Women and Argentina: Early Travel Narratives, was a book about how women can build an authorial place from which to write. And, at the same time, it’s about how the gazes of these women see things that men don’t. But, in some cases, they’re very trapped by racial or class determinants of their time. So, what interested me in that book was to be able to think about the landscape, place and the place of enunciation, the place of writing and what we were talking about when we talked about women travelers. What intrigues me is how these women had these writerly experiences when they had no political rights, because at the heart of it all is the fact that these women did not vote, they did not have power over their own children. In many cases, they could already be owners, own property, but in many cases, depending on their national origin, they couldn’t. That’s to say, what are the interstices, what are the places from which alternative identities can be constructed? So, think about these readings. I really like, for example, the readings that Sylvia Molloy did, which try to make their way into the texts and do a very close reading that allows you to see where there’s a small break that reveals the potentiality of the text, reveals the difference, and reveals how we can intervene as critics. There is something that I call “the hospitable archive.” I believe that literature allows us to reconstruct moments of the past, but also, it’s as if it were taking the temperature of a particular moment, where women could say certain things and not others, but this is archived and literature works in a hospitable way, as an archive of that which could not be said, that which could not be articulated but was already there.
A.P.: I find it fascinating, and those are precisely the conversations you can have when you’re joining forces and making comparative analyses. Mónica, you have another book on which you collaborated, Latin American Literature in Transition.
M.S.: Well, I had the opportunity to create a series for Cambridge University Press, which is a series called Latin American Literature in Transition. What it proposes is a global rereading of Latin American literatures, thinking about the category of transition. In other words, how can we think? How can we look again at the ways in which all Latin American literature was written using this category? I liked the challenge of designing a series of five volumes where, from the present, we look back at what happened in Latin American literature. I believe that, due to the characteristics of Latin America, the construction of what we could call literary texts and critical texts has always been parallel. So, what if we review it? It’s like looking at everything with new eyes. The first thing I thought about was how to organize it, and I did so chronologically. There are five volumes organized chronologically. The first begins before 1492 and ends at the time of the revolutions, around 1810; that one was edited by Rocío Quispe Agnoli and Amber Brian. The second was edited by Ana Peluffo together with Ronald Briggs, and deals a lot with the moment of the construction of national states, but also with the construction of all the institutions of national states, from linguistic institutions to institutions such as slavery. That one goes up to 1860. The third volume goes up to 1930 and was edited by Fernando Giovanni and Javier Uriarte. The fourth volume runs from 1930 to 1980, edited by Amanda Holmes and Par Kumaraswami. And the last volume was edited by Debra Castillo and I—it begins in 1980 and goes until 2018, and is like the decantation of everything that happened in the other volumes. And in that volume, we were interested in thinking about what is happening in current literary criticism. So, we have a chapter on criticism, which was written by Graciela Montaldo, and we have chapters that deal with new genres, such as comics and rap. There’s a chapter by Maricruz Castro Ricalde that deals with Mexican cinema in Hollywood. We have chapters about women writers who create new genres as writers but also as critics, as in the case of Liliana Colanzi and Cristina Rivera Garza. We have a chapter on border literature in Portuñol, for example, the literature of the triple border between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. We dedicate a lot of space to thinking about the native languages of Black women as well.
A.P.: You examine the evolution of gender and sexuality studies in Latin American literature from a critical perspective. What do you think about what has been happening in recent years? How do you feel these gender and sexuality studies have changed in relation to Latin American literature?
M.S.: I think these are fundamental areas. And it also seems to me that, particularly with studies on sexualities and dissidence, the feedback is continuous. In other words, it seems to me—unlike in other areas, for example—some critics who were my students a few years ago have been transformed. And it also seems to me that there’s a continuous feedback loop between the street and the university. So, this gives us a way of thinking about literature that’s different, and I’m not saying it hasn’t always happened, but in Latin American literature, for a variety of issues, the echo from the outside has always been fundamental and has been very strong. As is the case in the Southern Cone with the number of writers who disappeared, who were victims of torture, and this has also happened, of course, in Central America and in Colombia, in Brazil. It seems to me that, in the case of sexual dissidence, there’s something that gets developed in the street and then returns to the university. In other words, the feedback is continuous, it’s more immediate. And I would say the same thing happens with the movements of indigenous peoples, with brown women in Argentina, but it seems to me there’s something there that has been thought about in academia and suddenly explodes into the street and has an immediate echo in academia, in cinema, in journalism, in theater.
A.P.: How wonderful. Well, to close, I’ll congratulate you on the new book, A History of Argentine Literature, that you co-edited with Alejandra Laera. Thank you very much for accepting this invitation.
M.S.: Thank you very much.
Translated by Will Howard
You can listen and read the complete interview in Spanish
on the Hablemos, escritoras website.
