Dear Colleagues,

During the early decades of the 20th century, the work of such authors as Eugeni d’Ors, Alfonso Reyes, and Alejo Carpentier initiated a critical trend that reclaimed the logic and aesthetics of the historical baroque as a way to approach a broad range of artistic expressions in Latin America. This theoretical framework, summarized in the general idea of the “Neo-baroque”, explored the logic of instability, ambiguity, and transformation that characterized baroque aesthetics as appropriated in 20th century Latin America. Through this perspective, a broad range of movements have been studied, from Modernism to the experimental avant-garde, from the formal fantasies of Magical Realism to the explosion of the signifier in the so-called poets of the Neo-baroque school.

As we embark on the third decade of the 21st century, we recognize the tectonic stresses and paradigm shifts that are shaping the literary and artistic production coming out of Latin America. This globalized, virtualized, de-territorialized, torn-apart, and reconfigurable century is setting the stage for renewed challenges that require new conceptualizations. It is time to expand our understanding of what and where Latin America is and, therefore, problematize the ways in which we approach the art produced in the midst of this fluid, paradoxical, and always-changing geo-symbolic coordinate.

For this Special Issue of Humanities, we want to offer an opportunity to engage with the critical consciousness gained by these 21st century instabilities and to experiment with innovative methodological and hermeneutic approaches. In brief, we propose to re-energize the impetus of a skewed, anamorphic Neo-baroque perspective in order to explore new ways of thinking from, through, and about current literary and visual production in a “Latin America” we now conceive as a territory in accelerated flux, conditioned by new contradictory historical, cultural, and political forces.

Prof. Pablo Baler
Guest Editor

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• neo-baroque
• baroque aesthetics
• literary and artistic production
• Latin America