What would the spirits of Latin America’s most notable figures say about a text on Revolution and Republics?
On Saturday, May 30, Doris Sommer and LASA President Maxwell Cameron invited participants to find out — at Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris. A Pre-Texts session like no other: history, place, and protocol in conversation with the dead and the living.
By Chiara Caiazzo
We walked together toward the cemetery, and at the gate, Doris and Max began by presenting the methodology and its historical roots in the practice of tobacco factory workers in Cuba, who used to hire a professional lector to read books to them while they worked. After this, we “hired” a lectora, who read the text out loud — an excerpt from Rousseau’s Émile(1762). We did not have the text in hand. We listened, and as the words took shape, so did the images in our minds.
What followed was an amoeba-like wandering through Montparnasse — searching for César Vallejo, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes — and asking, text in hand: what would they say about Rousseau today? Pre-Texts asked us to revive these authors, not to speak about them.
The threshold between life and death, Chiara writes, is not set in stone. Words keep living in the tremor of our voices when we read them aloud. Read more!
