Presentation of the dossier
Gilberto Loaiza Cano
Dossier coordinator
Universidad del Valle
In the specialized journals of disciplines related to the human and
social sciences there has been a tendency to use a method, one that has often
been fruitful, that of the monographic issue. This has been useful for many
important reasons, not only to stay afloat, in the Colombian case, in the face
of the vagaries of measurement of our inscrutable Colciencias.
It has mainly served to call for affinities, and to recognize specific research
communities on particular topics. Journals have then become meeting points,
links that are more or less unbreakable between those who, though from various
and diverse disciplines, converge in research problems. This issue, number 13
of the journal Historia y memoria is
another example of that fortunate effort to unite, under the same topic,
research experiences from different latitudes. This time, the call was for
papers regarding Books, readings and
readers in Colombia and Latin America.
I consider the result put together in this journal to be very
consistent. A collaboration from some foreign researcher would have been
desirable; perhaps, someone from Chile, Mexico or Argentina, where we know
there are very good research traditions regarding the history of the book and
reading, accompanied by the contributions, probably more solid, of what is now
called “the new intellectual history.” Despite this obvious absence, the sample
is really significant, and it informs about how much work has been done in
Colombia, and how diverse that work is. In addition, this depicts a field full
of possibilities.
Some recent events in Colombia have helped for this monographic issue
and other publications to show a nucleus, more and more consolidated every
time, of investigations regarding such topics. In fact, Professor Alfonso
Rubio, responsible for the first article of this dossier, has led a permanent
seminar on written culture and organized several meetings of reflection and,
very recently, he was the editor of a collective book that gathers together
several researchers[1]. At the beginning of 2016, by the initiative of Paula Andrea Marín, another
collaborator of this dossier, there was an international event in the Instituto
Caro y Cuervo where the topics of the history of editing, the book, and
reading were dealt with. Therefore, there are now several antecedents that
allow us to think about new well-defined works that revolve around a
disciplinary universe that is coming out of its ostracism. Will Colombia soon
have a history of the book, or a history of public opinion, or a history of
printed culture? I do not know when, but it is clear that
there is a more solid panorama of monographic studies of quality that may lead
to greater temporal reaches.
The first
article warns us that a history of the book and reading should not alienate a
history of writing and, in that example, writing is linked to a more complex
process, as is the history of the modern rational state. The following, for
which the undersigned is responsible, refers to an attempt at a comparative
assessment of the transition to a modern advertising regime based on the
freedom of the press. After that, there comes a work by Robinson López Arévalo, a contribution to
the history of the national library of Colombia; the book on the main library
of the state constitutes a research exercise, so as not to call it a challenge
on multiple fronts. Following the history of the formation and consolidation of
the national library of a country means to reconstruct moments of the
construction of traditions, of trends according to government priorities or
projects of dissemination of the book within cultural policies. The mere examination
of how one of the collections was formed leads us to a process of representation;
certain books have occupied a place in the collective memory as well as in the
criteria of conservation of some officials. The order and place could be
modified according to likes, whims, the criteria of some officials over others
and, perhaps, that explains a lot about how certain categories of books are
understood by different generations of officials and readers.
There is a
group of essays focused on different moments of the history of reading. Diana
Paola Guzmán makes an audacious interpretative bet: she believes that the
teaching of reading has been systematically linked, at least in the Republican period,
to a hygienist intention. I believe this article has a really solid documental
corpus and a strong transversal view, which allows the author to see the
so-called “discursive regularity” in which citolegias occupied a place of
affirmation of the will to have control over the bodies of individuals.
Meanwhile, Cristina Gil Medina and Paula Andrea Marín, concentrate on a set of
publications that, at their respective times, were landmarks of printed
production. One studies the importance that the formation of the female reader
had in certain female publications from the second half of the 19th
century. To give some background, it is essential to add that the woman was a
very defined object of interest for conservative advertisers and that, when so
desired, conservative writers were clever in the creation of advertising
strategies to create a female reading audience or, probably better said, a
reading market. Biblioteca de señoritas, along
with El Mosaico
and La Caridad,
were part of the sustained efforts to create a library, ideal for
Catholicism, at a time of associative and advertising disputes with radical
liberalism. And it contributed to paving the way for the expectation of canonic
works of the triumphant Catholicism in the midst of the ascent of the political
project of the Regeneration. Marín Colorado helps us to understand how the
image in journalistic publications was an assertive announcement of the changes
in sensitivity that were part of the modern transition in the Colombia of the
first decades of the 20th century; above all, that which seems to
indicate the ascent of a new commercial phase which foresaw the conquest of a,
not necessarily, literate market. The
researcher is right in perceiving a displacement of the preponderant writing
genres, which accompanied the shocking visual message. We are faced with the
new habits of reading consumption and regarding the formation of writing
personnel who would have their niche in the columns of magazines and newspapers
that started to abandon the tone of political essays, which had been the
preponderant way of writing.
The last two
essays – in an order of articles that privileged chronology and type of
analysis- are about journalistic publications that reveal the state of those
groups of individuals involved in the advertising activity. There has been,
since the most remote times of journalism, a close relation between a newspaper
publication and associative life. Many newspapers are evidence of the existence
of a more or less disciplined group of individuals who see in the newspaper or
magazine a means to disseminate their aspirations. La Estrella is the result of the recovery of several newspapers
from Tolima of the 19th century, which are now part of the rich
documental estate of our national library. It is a recuperation exercise for
the historical analysis of some publications that give an account of the
existence of active regional political personnel. María
Teresa Álvarez carried out a similar assessment, but
she focuses on a group of individuals of greater impact in public life, which
is seen in a magazine that was out for several decades. The link of her study
to intellectual history, the prosopography of a group of writers and to the
cultural sociability of a region of the country is apparent. The existence of Ilustración nariñense, between
1924 and 1955, refers to a peculiar rhythm of life and, without doubt, offers
an invaluable documental support as an intellectual world that seems to be
confined to a corner of the Colombian territory, though it maintained a
cultural magazine throughout the transformations, some horrendous ones, of our
public life.
Now, what do
those who are responsible for these monographic issues expect? We expect that
these issues become school references; publications of academic use for other
specialists to have at hand and young researchers in search of a view of the
picture as a whole regarding one area of interest or the other. I trust that
this issue sponsored by HISTORIA Y
MEMORIA will be of constant use among colleagues and students. Thanks to professor Olga Yanet Acuña and to the team of
the journal for having achieved that this collective effort has had such a
fortunate culmination.
[1]
Alfonso Rubio (ed.), Minúscula y plural.
Cultura escrita en Colombia, Medellín, La Carreta Histórica, 2016.