Monuments and Ephemera: The <em>Biblioteca Ayacucho</em>

Authors

  • Jessica Gordon-Burroughs Columbia University

Keywords:

Latin American Cultural Studies, Biblioteca Ayacucho

Abstract

The Biblioteca Ayacucho, spearheaded by the Uruguayan intellectual Ángel Rama, among other prominent Latin American critics, was a book collection of Latin American classics forged in theory by sensibilities traceable to the revolutionary dusk of the 1960s. Yet, instituted by presidential decree in 1974 during the first presidency of Carlos Andrés Pérez (1974-1979), the collection itself came into being in a period marked by vast educational reform colored not by the ebullience associated with the Cuban revolution and other revolutionary struggles, rather by the sobering developmentalist policies of guerrilla pacification and neutralization of an armed left. This essay explores how the Biblioteca Ayacucho, producing objects for an intellectual elite, albeit an expanding university population, in the last decade paradoxically became a condition of possibility for a subsequent —and polemical— democratization and symbolic redistribution.

 

Author Biography

Jessica Gordon-Burroughs, Columbia University

Jessica Gordon-Burroughs is a Doctoral Candidate at Columbia University.

Published

2014-04-29

How to Cite

Gordon-Burroughs, J. (2014). Monuments and Ephemera: The <em>Biblioteca Ayacucho</em>. A Contracorriente: Una Revista De Estudios Latinoamericanos, 11(3), 90–118. Retrieved from https://acontracorriente.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/acontracorriente/article/view/793

Issue

Section

Articles / Artículos