The Book in Movement

The Book in Movement is a deeply researched ethnography of autonomous publishing in contemporary Latin America. Magalí Rabasa traces networks of action in Mexico City, Oaxaca, La Paz, Buenos Aires, and Santiago, in which books emerge as precipitates of human social practice. The result of rigorous observation and analysis, this study helps us understand books within a flux of movement of many sorts—labor, thought, solidarity, and imagination—and offers a sophisticated model for studies of textual materiality.

This is an excellent, important, and methodologically innovative book. In its materiality-centered perspective—illuminating the networks established among objects, machines, and people—books are seen not simply as purveyors of symbolic content (the ideas explored in them) but in fact as actors endowed with the capacity to produce change and connections in the real world as material objects.

Rabasa contributes an essential thread to the dynamic conversation in Latin American studies on the evolution of the book. Her eclectic interdisciplinary approach—from archives and material culture to on-the-ground fieldwork to sociopolitical analysis—reveals the role of the book as a point of encounter for collective agency. These transnational book projects challenge the region’s reigning neoliberal consumerist culture to celebrate their hands-on, interactive, and mobile nature.