Presentation

The selection gathered here approaches the writings of Acosta de Samper in an alternative manner, one that not only attends to the great literary and historical value of the celebrated Colombian writer’s production, but also seeks to recover its material dimension through the presentation, for the first time to the reading public, of a selection from her series of albums. In them, the author composes, gathers, cuts, illustrates, and comments on— at times by herself and at others in collaboration— texts and images from her authorship or interests.

The possibility of virtually accessing these book-objects permits multiple reflections about the mode of composition, assembly, and collection of material that the writer carried out before, during, and after the publication of her work in the press. The albums also permit access to the affective spectrum of Soledad Acosta’s writings, especially in the case of those composed jointly with the man who would become her husband, the writer and politician José María Samper. In those texts, details of their engagement, marriage, and mutual sentiments are shared poetically and visually. The characteristic feminine sensibility of her era can likewise be felt in the subjects and aesthetics of the images and texts assembled through the technique of collage in many of these artisanally constructed books. The writer’s albums therefore oblige us to abandon the recurrent image of the nineteenth-century woman writer, pen in hand, solitary, in front of a blank page. The materials presented in this exhibition, much on the contrary, exhibit Soledad Acosta de Samper in a kind of workshop in which intellectual work is combined with manual and affective work. We now imagine a space in which writing and the blank page share prominence with documents, newspapers, and illustrations; in which the pen accompanies paintbrushes, watercolors, and scissors.

Credits

Vanesa Miseres is an associate professor in the department of Romance Languages & Literatures at the University of Notre Dame. She specializes in Latin American literature of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, with an emphasis in South America, and gender, visual, and food studies. She is the author of Women in Transit: Travel, Identity and Writing in South America (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 2017) and is currently preparing a book about Latin American women and wars from the period of independence to World War II. She is also working on other projects related to the feminine use of scrapbooks and co-edits a volume on literature and food for the Food and Foodways series from the University of Arkansas Press.