García Canclini as a strange editor

fiction, metafiction and autofiction based on a critique of the publishing market

Abstract

Known worldwide for his re-elaboration of the concept of hybridity for the study of Latin American cultural productions, the work of the Argentine anthropologist Néstor García Canclini, exiled in Mexico due to the last military dictatorship, would not be complete if we forgot to consider the work that he carried out, designing strategies, recovering texts and bringing together authors in notebooks and series—the most important being Gedisa’s Serie Culturas—in his role as editor. This work could have well gone unnoticed had it not been for the fact that, at the beginning of the 21st century, García Canclini would take a turn in his writing, recovering an autofictional style to which he was very close in his formative years in Paris-X, where Paul Ricœur directed his doctoral thesis. Based on two key texts to understand the way in which García Canclini represents himself—“Desencuentros entre un antropólogo latinoamericano, un sociólogo europeo y una especialista en estudios culturales estadounidense” (1999) and “Lectores póstumos” (2018)—this article studies the text “Por qué existe literatura y no más bien nada” (2014) as a manifesto of the poetics of Canclini's editor.