A Popular Shock to Print Capitalism: the Simón Rodríguez’s project (1828-1843)
Eduardo Febres Muñoz
Kellogg Dissertation Year Fellow
Abstract: In addressing the expansion of printing in Hispanic America after the independence war (1810-1824) vis-à-vis the sociocultural traits of the population in the region, critics have categorically opposed the political hegemony of the literate elite to the cultural practice of the larger subaltern population. This essay examines how, given this contradiction, the dominant model of the public sphere led to a crisis in the relationship between popular discourse and print text, which is expressed in the typographic experimentalism of Simón Rodríguez. In tension with the identitarian essentialism of decolonial critique, Rodríguez considers pragmatically the popular skills for the appropriation and propagation of discourses and the need to incorporate them into the republican project, to overcome the limits of print technology.
Eduardo Febres
Eduardo Febres is a Ph.D. candidate in the Spanish program of the University of Notre Dame. He received his M.A. in Journalism from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Argentina (2011) and his B.A. in Literature from Universidad Central de Venezuela (2006)...
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