Intermedial Turn, Expanded Arts, and Politics in Latin America: A Turn with Other Turns (Digital, Archival, Decolonial)

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the intermedial turn in relation to the digital, archival and decolonial turns in order to evaluate developments in Latin American digital literature. The argument is based on the following premises: Firstly, the most productive intermedial perspective for understanding contemporary art and culture is one that focuses on notions such as syncretic or synthetic media. These notions emphasise the search for a conceptual fusion between media and languages, rather than transpositions and other kinds of transmedial relations. The latter include the recurrence of a topic or narrative in different media, as seen in branded content within cultural industries. Secondly, the prevalence of intermedial art practices today stresses a post-autonomous cultural scene that, in both artistic practice and theory, reacts against the notion of specific autonomous languages and isolated disciplinary fields, emphasising a conception of art as a social practice. Thirdly, this can lead to intermedial studies being embraced not for the sake of intermediality itself, i.e. the study of intermediality per se, but because the intermedial turn goes hand in hand with other developments that shape contemporary approaches to art and culture. As discussed in the final part of this essay, a productive intermedial approach to the study of Latin American digital technopoetics – and digital literature in particular – necessarily coincides with the digital turn, as well as other approaches such as the archival and decolonial turns.