In 2022, Professor Javier Uriarte co-edited, together with Fernando Degiovanni, the book Latin American Literature in Transition, 1870-1930 (Cambridge University Press), which includes 25 chapters, divided into five parts: commodities, networks, uprisings, connectors and cities, covering a wide array of topics, problems and discourses, from rubber, coffee or yerba mate, to diasporas, chinoiseries, indigenismos, war, visual technologies, Iquique, Ciudad Juárez, etc. The full book index can be accessed here. 
As the editors explain, “Latin American Literature in Transition 1870-1930 examines how the circulation of goods, people, and ideas permeated every aspect of the continent’s cultural production at the end of the nineteenth century. It analyzes the ways in which rapidly transforming technological and labour conditions contributed to forging new intellectual networks, exploring innovative forms of knowledge, and reimagining the material and immaterial worlds”. All the chapters or essays provide, thus, “a novel understanding of the period as they discuss the ways in which particular commodities, intellectual networks, popular uprisings, materialities, and non-metropolitan locations redefined cultural production at a time when the place of Latin America in global affairs was significantly transformed”.
Regarding the specificity of the period comprised in the book, between 1870 to 1930, the Introduction by Javier Uriarte and Fernando Degiovanni explain that “cultural critics and historians have long considered the decades between 1870 and 1930 Latin America’s paradigmatic transitional period. The consolidation of oligarchic nation-states after years of civil wars unleashed multiple and unexpected forces in the economic, political, and cultural realms in the last decades of the nineteenth century. And, among many other things, the region witnessed the complex transformation of pastoral and rural societies into modernized and market-oriented states with strong agroexport sectors.”
The conceptual frame of literatures in transition is a Cambridge University Press project that explores the literature of diverse parts of the world, such as “American Literature in Transition”, “Irish literature in Transition”, etc. In the case of “Latin American Literature in Transition”, the series fifth volume, Javier Uriarte argues “that the focus is on processes and changes, on a more dynamic perspective on cultural production and its relations with the political, social, and economic dynamics that take place in the region.”
Prof. Javier Uriarte is also the author of the chapter titled “Travel” that explores various ways in which the practice of travel is conceived of and reflected upon. Working with travelers from 1870 to the end of the 1920s, Uriarte emphasizes the moments when authors reflect on their own practice, its connections with modes of transportation, the notions of modernity, the role of the state and of the “I” in their displacements through different territories.
The co-author of this volume, Fernando Degiovanni, professor at CUNY Graduate Center, was invited to Stony Brook University in 2018 for a series of discussion on methods and theories in our field: Las formas del campo.
Prof. Javier Uriarte specializes in the literatures and cultures of the 19th and early 20th centuries in Latin America, particularly of the Southern Cone and Brazil. He teaches graduate seminars and undergraduate courses on travel literature and environmental humanities.
Prof. Javier Uriarte this August 2023 on the Amazon Delta, across the Marajó Island (Belém, Brazil). See map.
Conference Schedule Friday Nov 4, 2022
Each panel has its own Zoom link.
