Taking Form, Making Worlds: Cartonera Publishers in Latin America by Lucy Bell, Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, and Patrick O’Hare (review)

Reviewed by: Taking Form, Making Worlds: Cartonera Publishers in Latin America by Lucy Bell, Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, and Patrick O'Hare Andrew Reynolds Keywords Cartonera, Book History, Book Editing, Latin America, Anthropology, Testimonial, Collectivity, Transnational, Literary Studies, Indigeneity, Marginalization, Social Movements, Material Culture, Andrew Reynolds, Lucy Bell, Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, Patrick O'Hare bell, lucy, alex ungprateeb flynn, and patrick o'hare. Taking Form, Making Worlds: Cartonera Publishers in Latin America. U of Texas P, 2022, 303 pp. Taking Form, Making Worlds: Cartonera Publishers in Latin America is an exemplary book in so many ways. In academia, there is a tendency to aspire to increased interdisciplinarity, collaboration, experiential learning, and elevating marginalized voices. Lucy Bell, Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, and Patrick O'Hare perform all of these in profound and inspiring ways throughout their unprecedented book. Taking Form, Making Worlds is an ethnographic study of the Cartonera publishing movements across Latin America as editors and bookmakers created handmade editions from discarded materials, principally cardboard. This is a book of literary criticism, a study in transnational print culture by marginalized populations, and a witness of academic meta-analysis and criticism. Through an introduction and six far-reaching End Page 385 chapters, the authors tell the story of Cartonera publishers through a praxis of experiencing the living archive of the book format. The book itself is a striking textual artifact with a stunning and colorful cover of a stack of Cartonera editions. Black and white photographs throughout the text complement an extensive colored image insert that illustrates the process, context, and sample pages of Cartonera texts. This book takes us across contemporary local production processes of Cartonera editions in Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico and it stresses the essential nature of Cartonera publishing as a collective and activist-based practice. The book also describes how Cartonera content is shaped by the complex social contexts of the cardboard materiality of the text and the collective editing and production of the books. Here the Cartonera form lives alongside local issues of political activism, issues of class and indigeneity, and the democratization of artistic production. At first glance, it would make sense for the Cartonera editions themselves to be at the center of the book's analysis, but the authors make a deliberate choice to make Cartonera editors the protagonists of the book. Their voices speak loudly through all six chapters as they enunciate the contexts of Cartonera physical form and materiality, the history of the Cartonera form, and the local contexts and political struggles of the process of bookmaking. The authors construct their narrative through constant dialogue via both formal interviews and participation in everyday conversations while visiting Cartonera sites and participating in bookmaking themselves. All six chapters depict in-person local experiences as central framing markers of the book. This analytical framework corresponds to the Cartonera goal of "desacralizeing art and literature" (29) and the authors, in foregrounding and recording knowledges and modes of practice emanating from the editors themselves, confront typical academic readings of art and literature. This is not to say that the analytical strength of the book ever loses intellectual force or depth, but the authors work to incorporate models of decoloniality, social participation, open-ended and pluralistic practices, and marginalized materialities and economies as theoretical pivot points in constructing the sweeping narrative of the Cartonera edition. As each of the chapters questions traditional scholarly theories and modalities, chapter one, which provides an overview of the history of the Cartonera book and publisher, sets out to represent a "set of fluid chronologies" (45) in order to tell the story of the material form. The prominence of the Buenos Aires Ediciones Eloisa in the early 2000s begins the pluralistic history. The End Page 386 chapter then discusses in detail the emergence of Cartonera publishing across the hemisphere from Cuba to Bolivia, Chile, Brazil, and Mexico. These histories, all plural and fluid, share commonalities based on resistance, collaboration, and "socioaesthetic form" (59). Chapter one also begins an important aspect of the book's narrative arc: the Cartonera's "complex, dynamic, and contested entanglement with the university" (62). This metacritique of the academic gaze points to a cognizant effort of the book to position...