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Book presentation with Alex Verdolini in conversation with Emily Apter, Bruno Bosteels and Christopher Wood, moderated by Iván Hofman.

Severo Sarduy was among the most important figures in twentieth-century Latin American fiction and a major representative of the literary tendency to which he gave the name Neobaroque. While most of Sarduy's literary work is available in English, his theoretical writings have largely remained untranslated. This volume—presenting Sarduy's central theoretical contribution, Barroco (1974), alongside other related works—remedies that oversight.

Barroco marks a watershed in postwar thought on the Baroque, both in French post-structuralism and in the Latin American context. Sarduy traces a double history, reading events in the history of science alongside developments in the history of art, architecture, and literature. What emerges is a theory of the Baroque as decentering and displacement, as supplement and excess, a theory capacious enough to account for the old European Baroque as well as its queer, Latin American and global futures.

In addition to Barroco, this volume includes texts spanning Sarduy's career, from 1960s essays published originally in Tel Quel to late works from the 1980s and '90s. It thus offers a complete picture of Sarduy's thinking on the Baroque.

Alex Verdolini is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Yale University and teaches at the Cooper Union. His scholarship and translations have appeared in MLN, Mandorla, and the Harvard Review, among other publications.

Emily Apter is Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature at New York University. Her books include: Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse and the Impolitic (Verso, 2018); Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013); Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (co-edited with Barbara Cassin, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood) (2014); and The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006).

Bruno Bosteels is Acting Dean of Humanities and Professor in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. He is currently preparing three new books, the first a sustained polemical engagement with contemporary post-Heideggerian thought, titled Philosophies of Defeat: The Jargon of Finitude (Verso); the second, a collection of essays on the antiphilosophers Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Lacan, and Žizek in dialogue with Badiou, titled ¿Qué es la antifilosofía? (forthcoming with Prometeo Libros); and the third, a collection of recent and previously unpublished essays forthcoming under the title The State and Insurrection: New Interventions in Latin American Marxist Theory (University of Pittsburgh Press).

Christopher S. Wood is Professor in the German Department, New York University. He is the author of Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape (1993), Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (2008), Anachronic Renaissance (with Alexander Nagel) (2010); A History of Art History (2019); and The Embedded Portrait: Giotto, Giottino, Angelico (2023).

Iván Hofman is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at New York University.