What is Viral Literature: Latin America?

Our understanding of the Covid-19 pandemic is incomplete if we forget how it was narrated when it was happening, when the fear of the virus was not a memory but a live reality.

Viral Literature: Latin America is a research project archiving, studying and bringing together real-time literary responses to the Covid-19 crisis in Latin America. The focus is on fiction and nonfiction texts in Spanish* authored by Latin American writers that circulated through social media or other digital platforms from February 2020 to March 2022. The project is led by Dr Luis Medina Cordova at the University of Birmingham (UK) and funded by the British Academy from 2023-2025.

During the period in focus, when Latin American writers were experiencing the pandemic alongside their audiences, they produced an online body of writing deeply engaged with the fears and anxieties caused by the virus around the world. 

This website collects and displays stories from Twitter, testimonies from Facebook, fiction recorded on smartphones, and other viral literary creations on a specially designed map. These literary texts are highly diverse, yet they all have in common that they spread online when the Covid-19 lockdowns shut down traditional channels of literary circulation.

Viral Literature: Latin America documents and enables public access to a body of writing derived from—and in dialogue with—the isolation, self-distancing, xenophobia, violence, illness, and death that Latin America experienced during Covid-19. But it also foregrounds hope, resilience and community in the region during an unprecedented crisis. The project aims to shed light on the Latin American narration of the Covid-19 pandemic to facilitate new understandings of a global catastrophe.

 

*While we recognise Latin America’s vast linguistic diversity, the project is currently focused on collecting literary responses in Spanish for methodological reasons. We aim to include other languages in the future