In our ongoing search for new topics for Review, the moment seemed ripe to assess technology’s impact on creative expression as the theme for this issue. We live in an age where our collective society is experiencing unprecedented, often violent, change. It’s also a time when an interdisciplinary approach to the world around us is paramount, where boundaries are breaking down, new paradigms are emerging, and we’re seeing the intersection of culture and technology in new and previously unimagined combinations. It’s now possible, for example, to produce a model of a three-dimensional car from a photocopy machine, in a manner of speaking, thanks to 3D printing.
Review 90, which focuses on “Latin America and the Technological Imaginary in the Digital Age,” guest-edited by cultural critics Mark Dery and Naief Yehya, has been developed within this context. In their respective selections of academic essays and creative texts, Dery and Yehya and their contributors address the aforementioned dissolving of boundaries and reconfigured interrelationships between discourses. In so doing, they consider new possibilities for creative production, where what we know as culture—writing, art, music, design—intersects with science, technology, engineering, and even politics and public policy. Perhaps most emblematic to this issue of Review is the notion of the border as both reality and metaphor—at once a reminder of our past and present, and an ongoing inquiry into our collective future.
The contents of this issue, by a plethora of cutting-edge writers and scholars, address not only the topic of the border but innovations in pop music, contemporary bio-art, burgeoning forms of digital writing, gender boundaries and representations, science fiction, and the often fine line between human and artificial life—all in relation to cyberculture as manifested in both the United States and Latin America (in countries such as Chile, Colombia, and Mexico). The issue also includes respective texts on a socially integrated design plan developed in Chile during the Allende administration, and on the Venezuelan musician Arca. Our Features section showcases pieces marking Adolfo Bioy Casares’s centenary and Nicanor Parra’s 100th birthday and a conversation between Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez and American novelist Jess Row. Book reviews cover new titles in translation by Leopoldo Marechal, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Valeria Luiselli, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Andrés Neuman, Mylene Fernández-Pintado, and others.
My heartfelt thanks to Naief Yehya and Mark Dery, our guest editors for Review 90, and to all our contributors, including all the fine translators who participated in this issue, among them, Charlotte Whittle, who translated many of the biographical notes. I thank our various other editors—Jason Weiss, Gabriela Rangel, and Sebastián Zubieta—and my staff: José Negroni, Meriann Peña, and Flavia Cornejo. Developing and producing this issue has been a valuable learning experience as well as a leap of faith into “a great beyond” of new possibilities in an ever-changing world.
—Daniel Shapiro