Global and International Studies Building 2176
Anke Birkenmaier is a scholar of modern Caribbean and Latin American literature and culture. She studes literature in relation to other discourses such as anthropology, looking at the ways in which ideas about culture and race have evolved over time. Her interest in media and sound studies has also led her to explore the ways in which the novel has entered in competition with other communication media, especially in the digital age.
Her book on Alejo Carpentier, Alejo Carpentier y la cultura del surrealismo en América Latina (2006) presented an analysis of the little known early years of Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, when he engaged with “dissident” surrealists in Paris in the 1930s (Robert Desnos, the Collège de Sociologie, Antonin Artaud), and worked for the radio and advertising industry. Her second monograph, The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature between the Wars (2016) tells the story of the interconnected scientific and literary networks that established Latin American anthropology as a key discipline in the Americas from the 1920s onward. In it, she reconstructs two decades of scientific and literary collaborations in the service of anti-racist theories of Latin American culture. Birkenmaier's recent publications have focused on German cultural philosopher Oswald Spengler’s longstanding interest in Latin America as well his outsized impact on Latin American intellectuals (see my editions, in German and in Spanish, of Spengler’s posthumous drama Moctezuma).
Birkenmaier served as director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Indiana University from 2015-2019. Through her intedisciplinary collaborations cultivated there, came the volume, Caribbean Migrations: The Legacies of Colonialism (2020). Birkenmaier's next project is titled, The Latin American Novel in the Digital Age, in which she will explore further the ways in which Latin American writers of the 20th and 21st centuries have engaged with electronic media of mass communication, such as the telephone, radio, television, and podcasts.