ABSTRACT
The rapid increase in connectivity across Latin America, alongside the equally rapid take-up of new technologies across the region, has brought with it growing and vibrant communities of online cultural practitioners, as well as the rise of new artistic and literary forms. This volume focuses on the transformations or continuations that cultural products and practices such as hypertext fictions, net.art, blogs and online performance art, as well as web-based projects that go beyond generic boundaries, perform with respect to a series of prominent Latin American(ist) discourses. These discourses all preexisted the internet and have long histories in Latin America: Here we focus on how they adapt, transmute, or perpetuate themselves in online practice. Given that we deal, therefore, with new media genres and with Latin American(ist) discourses, the intellectual rationale for the volume is thus located at the crossroads of two, equally important, theoretical strands: theorisations of digital culture, in their majority the product of the anglophone academy; and contemporary debates on Latin American identity and culture.
