Documentary Fever (ACLA 2025)

Organizer: Rosana Hernández

In the short story “Documentary Novelist,” by Argentinian author Sergio Chejfec, the narrator tries to explain to a hotel worker his determination to have his picture taken with the hotel’s macaws: “I explain to her that I am a novelist, […] and that I need the pictures to document that what I write is true […] I have always despised novels based on real facts. But for a while now, I don’t know if reality as such, in any case the documents about real facts, is the only thing that saves me from a certain feeling of dissolution” (*my translation). Although Chejfec’s story can be read as an ironic look at the institution of literature, or precisely for this reason, it poses a question worth asking: Why this boom in documentary writing and what does it mean?


The technique of documentary writing is not new, and we see it in both poetry and narrative addressing a variety of topics. Muriel Rukeyser used it in the 1930s to expose the death of migrant miners by silicosis in West Virginia; Roque Dalton, in the 1970s, to write a revolutionary history of Guatemala. In the 21st century, Mark Nowak resorts to documentary writing to reflect on the violence of mining in West Virginia and China; Javier Cercas, to revisit the Spanish transition to democracy; Jorge Volpi, to reveal the fictional nature of official narratives in the context of the war on drugs in Mexico. Despite the differences, all these works resort to previous (and someone else’s) texts as their raw material, from archival documents in the strict sense to literary texts, testimonies, news, images and works of art. And, in general, these previous textualities do not merge into a new text that absorbs them but rather maintain a certain degree of autonomy, making evident the documentary technique and fostering a reflection on the document itself.


Building on the abundant reflection on different aspects of documentary writing, this panel approaches this technique as a privileged site to reflect both on the notion of literature and on literary criticism. What does the popularity of documentary writing tell us about literature, its cultural and political role, and its relationships with journalism and history in the 21st century? How does it challenge notions such as genre, plot, narrator, authorship, or the reader’s contract? How does it reshape the traditional relationship between literature and fiction? What historical moments do works of documentary writing reenact? What literary traditions do they revisit? What kind of anxieties about the past, the present and the future does this “document fever” reveal?


This panel welcomes proposals addressing these and related questions, both through case studies and theoretical explorations. We are particularly interested in addressing the similarities and differences of documentary writing in the Global North vs. the Global South, as well as exploring the connections of documentary writing to documentary film and art works and theorizations.