Group Teaches Active Use of Literature

Responding to the economic crisis and ensuing political corruption that hit Argentina in 2001, the poor, unemployed citizens of Buenos Aires took to the streets to sell cardboard. Two years after the chaos, an informal publishing house called “Eloisa Cartonera” opened to buy cardboard from cardboard-pickers called “cartoneros,” and to create “libros cartoneros,” books made with cardboard covers. This movement was born out of economic necessity and creativity, showing that literature can help build community.

Inspired by the cartonera model, the Paper Picker Press has run educational workshops encouraging people to engage with literature and take ownership over it since 2007. At 2 p.m. on Friday in CGIS, the Press will run a book-making workshop exposing attendees to the revolutionary idea that hatched this successful social and economic project.

The terms that the Press uses to describe its project confront the standard top-down model of literary education. They call the creative interpretation of literature “intervention,” and teachers “facilitators.” “If this is a revolution,” says Doris Sommer, a Professor of Romance Languages and Literature and African and African American Studies, “it’s in the spirit of [Marxist thinker Antonio] Gramsci—of reformism through cultural practices, because it gets people to read and write at a high level, in which creativity and critical thinking are recognized.”

The Press encourages active engagement with high-level texts through its activities. “The program can change the culture of school,” Sommer says. “When you develop critical thinking and understand it through the arts, you’re in fact changing the world simply by trying to understand it.” True to the project’s Latin American roots, the students write “literature de cordel,” understanding an existing work by writing their own version of it, and hanging it on a clothesline.

The Press is part of the Cultural Agents Initiative, a project which advocates for active humanities, and of which Sommer is the Faculty Director. “What we’re saying here is that the humanities are a field that can create and promote effective interventions, because it trains and promotes judgments and an exercise of possibilities. Most humanists would be averse to thinking of the humanities as a field for preparing you for other things—that the humanities should be fixed on purposelessness, on disinterested art. The whole mission of Cultural Agents... is about reviving, linking up again the mission of civic development of the humanities. The humanities used to be the obvious place for citizenship preparation,” Sommer says.

The Press believes that the concepts and skills one can develop by actively using the humanities are necessary for civic engagement, mirroring part of the mission of the Harvard Task Force on the Arts. “Giving people outside of Harvard an understanding that the arts are vehicles of exploration is a way of underlying the importance of arts in the development of the curriculum. All of the issues that the Arts Task Force are communicating come alive in an immediate and practical way with the Paper Picker Press. Arts become a way of interpreting, exploring, rehearsing ethics.” Sommer says.

Marcela Maheca, the Executive Director of the Cultural Agents Initiative, says that the Press uses the arts to take risks. “If you put a mission to the arts, it’s going against the tenets of the field,” she says. “That’s the risk they are taking.”

“It’s a new way to think about teaching,” says Tyler A. Brandon ’12, who has adapted the methods of the Press to the PBHA group South Afterschool Boston, whose curriculum she coordinates. Brandon was inspired to do so by the Press’s “new creative solution to get kids reading by drawing and visual arts, drama, photography, music, and dance.”

The Press’ emphasis on lateral, reciprocal action and risk-taking helps make them revolutionary. Maheca says the group is aware how difficult it is to do this. “My personal experience is how the community here perceives Harvard—how they are not interested at all,” she says. “By being able to go down lower, and speak with them... in the same language, and bring something sophisticated into their own words, it’s also a risk. Organizations don’t like to feel that they don’t understand what you’re saying. What we’re doing is crossing the bridge.”

In doing so, the Press demonstrates that “our partners outside of the university are quite as sophisticated as our partners inside,” Sommer says. “To show people that they’re already sophisticated or can be, just by making art, is part of the bridge that we’re making with the community. It’s not top-down. It’s really reciprocal.”

—Staff writer Alina Voronov can be reached at avoronov@fas.harvard.edu.