Graciela Montaldo

Graciela Montaldo

As scholar and teacher, I specialize in modern and contemporary Latin American cultures. My research is focused on cultural institutions, cultural production and the intersection between culture and politics. I published Museo del consumo. Archivos de la cultura de masas en la Argentina (2016, Museum of Consumption. Archives of Mass Culture in Argentina, 2021), Rubén Darío. Viajes de un cosmopolita extremo (2013), Zonas ciegas. Populismos y experimentos culturales en Argentina (2010), A propriedade da Cultura (2004), Teoría crítica, teoría cultural (2001), Ficciones culturales y fábulas de identidad en América Latina (1999), La sensibilidad amenazada (1995), and De pronto el campo (1993, 2024). I am also the co-editor of Routledge Companion to Nineteenth-Century Latin America (2024), The Argentina Reader: History, Culture and Politics (2002), Esplendores y miserias del siglo XIX (1996) and Yrigoyen entre Borges y Arlt (1989, 2006). I recently finished the critical edition of Opiniones by Rubén Darío (2024).

Regarding recent collaborative works, I edited with Agnes Lugo-Ortiz the Routledge Companion to Nineteenth-Century Latin America (2024). I am currently working with Gabriela Nouzeilles on a new version of The Argentina Reader. I also collaborated on the Historia feminista de la literatura argentina (forthcoming) and on volume V of Latin American in Transition (2022). For the Cambridge History of Argentinian Literature I wrote a chapter on Jorge L. Borges (forthcoming).

Academic Statement

My research interests are at the crossroads of different fields. Trained in literature and cultural practices (intellectual history, sociology of culture), I moved progressively through media, cultural, and visual studies. My last book, Museo del consumo (2016, 2021), intersects those multiple perspectives exploring the politics of cultural consumption in modern Argentina. I have studied cultural practices such as tango, circus, and fashion to understand how mass culture reconfigures the social space and rearticulates political experiences.

In my current research, I am working on the dynamics of criticism and theory in Latin American cultures. Critical discourse organized a large part of the intellectual experience throughout the 20th century and I am interested in exploring the new practices that they initiated and how they were articulated with political activism. Focusing on the figure of Ángel Rama, I trace the genealogy of his experience and see how his practice spread throughout the subcontinent. I am not trying to make a history of Latin American criticism but rather a reflection on its construction and power in Latin American culture, introducing, in a mostly masculine discourse, the gender perspective. Since theory and criticism were an essential part of the reflection on Avant-garde and Marxist works, my research explores key moments of this tense relationship

On the other hand, I am also writing shorter pieces about culture of “the clandestine/underground” as a political tool in modern Latin America. I am interested in cultural and aesthetic practices that fictionalize or interpellate something not officially allowed, secret, or prohibited.

 

    Recent Publications

     

    Courses

    Document and Imagination in Contemporary Latin American Culture

    Women, Culture, Activism, and Gender in Latin America

    Pueblos en lucha: the Agency of the People in Latin American Cultures

    Consumer Culture in Latin America

    Literature + Theory = Revolution: The uses of Theory in Latin American Cultures

    Hispanic Literature in the Global Experience. Theory, Circulation, and Materiality

    Circulation of Objects: Material Culture in Latin America

    Documents and Evidence in Contemporary Latin American Literature and Arts

    Research and Professional Development Workshop

    Hispanic Cultures