Your search

Abstract: In the world of Mexican poetry of the 20th and 21st centuries an intense melancholy can be seen. Poets such as Ramon López Velarde, Xavier Villaurrutia, Efraín Huerta, Jaime Labastida, Francisco Hernández or Marco Antonio Campos, among others, may be clearly set into this poetic mode. Each one of these authors has dealt with one or several of the many expressions related to melancholy, from tedium to erotic impulse, patriotic passion or more often, anguish provoked by illness, suicide and death. Given my belief that Jaime Sabines’work springs from melancholic humor, particularly from some of its symptoms described in philosophy, sociology or anthropology, and since this may explain his retreat from writing quite a few years before his death, this article approaches Sabines´ poetry taking into account some of the most relevant and well-known studies on melancholy (Agamben, Bartra, Paz, Castro Santiago or Arancibia). Resumen: En el mapa de la poesía mexicana de los siglos XX y XXI se aprecia una intensa presencia del carácter melancólico. En esta línea podrían ubicarse Ramón López Velarde, Xavier Villaurrutia, Efraín Huerta, Jaime Labastida, Francisco Hernández o Marco Antonio Campos, entre otros. Cada uno de estos autores ha poetizado algunas de las múltiples caras de la tristeza, desde el tedio y el abatimiento hasta la exacerbación erótica, la pasión patriótica o, más frecuentemente, la angustia por la enfermedad, el suicidio y la muerte. Dada mi convicción de que la obra de Jaime Sabines es fruto del humor melancólico –en particular de algunas de las manifestaciones de éste descritas desde la filosofía, la sociología y la antropología– y puesto que puede explicar su casi completa renuncia a la creación poética bastantes años antes de su muerte, este trabajo lee al autor chiapaneco a la luz de algunos destacados estudios sobre la melancolía (Agamben, Bartra, Paz, Castro Santiago o Arancibia).

A poesia oral não pode ser compreendida fora da estrutura social em que vive, nem o funcionamento da comunidade pode ser integralmente apreendido sem um conhecimento da sua poesia de transmissão oral. Por isso, neste estudo, influenciado pelo pensamento de José de Almeida Pavão Júnior e Paul Zumthor, procuramos demonstrar que uma abordagem séria da poesia oral não pode fixar-se unicamente no âmbito do literário, nem apenas nos seus aspectos culturais, antropológicos e sociológicos. A poesia oral, como as tradições em geral, só existe porque cumpre funções. Refletir sobre este aspecto é também pensar sobre o contexto social e cultural da performance literária, a idiossincrasia dos poetas-intérpretes e do grupo social, as diferentes espécies, a linguagem e o estilo, as circunstâncias da composição, da transmissão e da recepção dos textos.

En fechas recientes descubrí términos útiles para la investigación que realizo: la literatura transatlántica, utilizada en los estudios iberoamericanos, y la ecología de la literatura, usada en estudios de literatura comparada. El primer término se refiere a las afinidades y choques continuos que tienen autores capaces de navegar en varias lenguas y culturas, tal es el caso de Jorge Eduardo Eielson. De origen peruano, Eielson vivió gran parte de su vida en Europa, concretamente en Francia e Italia, aunque visitaba Perú más o menos regularmente y viajó brevemente a Estados Unidos. Todo lo anterior resulta útil si se piensa que los poemas y las instalaciones emblemáticas de Eielson encierran la fusión de culturas marginales: los quipus (nudos en quechua) rinden homenaje a las culturas precolombinas oriundas del Perú, pero también son consecuencia de una marcada influencia oriental, particularmente de las lecciones taoístas y algunas referencias anticonceptuales del budismo zen. Sorprende aún más saber que las lecciones de Oriente parecen haber llegado vía Estados Unidos, gracias a la New York School.

Este volumen nace con el propósito de producir conocimiento crítico sobre las prácticas poéticas en el espacio público, sus funciones y su eficacia dentro de éste. A la inestabilidad funcional de la poesía y lo lírico en la actualidad se une la noción de espacio público, entendida tanto desde su vertiente conceptual, filosófica y social, como desde su vertiente material, física, ligada a la (re)presentación escénica. Espacios, sujetos e instituciones se redefinen de la mano de esta combinación. Así, la inclusión de la espacialidad en una teoría poética actualizada, la constitución de nuevos sujetos y subjetividades y la identificación de públicos y prácticas en torno a los conceptos de performatividad e intervención constituyen los vectores fundamentales de este libro. Sin acotación de ningún tipo en términos lingüísticos, nacionales o interartísticos, los trabajos aquí recogidos se reparten entre lo teórico-crítico y metodológico, los estudios de caso y las reflexiones en primera persona, teniendo como objetivo último la valoración de la incidencia de la poesía en el espacio público y sus efectos socio-políticos.

The article presents the celebrated peleja (verse exchange) between Inácio da Catingueira and Romano da Mãe d'Água in the Brazilian North-East. The polemic peleja de cordel (a kind of chapbook), which evokes a poetic contest that allegedly took place in 1874 or 1875 in Recife, is regarded as the first of a kind that forms one of the most important phases in Brazilian cordel literature. On the one side stands a slave poet and on the other a landowner; each aims to defend and to characterize the race and social class to which he belongs. The article aims to demonstrate the influence of scientific thinking in popular literature, particularly with regard to ethnic and cultural miscegenation.

During the twentieth century, two movements in Cuban art played a critical role in creating an expanded space for societal debate and cultural expression: the artistic avant-garde and the Afro-Cuban movement. Initially flourishing in the late 1920s and early 1930s, these collective efforts took on new forms in the changed environment after 1959. After the Revolution, conditions for cultural production changed with the official position that art should serve ideological functions, but both avant-garde and Afro-Cuban production continued, at the risk of conflict with the state. In the face of a restrictive state that sought to control such expressions, the Afro-Cuban movement and avant-garde art collectives developed along parallel, and sometimes intersecting, lines.

Centred around Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony, this paper employs a critical globalisation theory framework to argue that the 1990s notion of ‘changing the world from below', understood as resistance to capitalist globalisation through a ‘transnational civil society', requires re-theorisation in the light of the contemporary developments in Our America. I make a methodological case for a neo-Gramscian approach to argue that ‘counter-hegemony', together with an adequate theorisation of the state and power, should be the preferred concept over the inherently apolitical and under-theorised ‘alter-globalisation'. Whilst the alter-globalisation movement's ideational and normative challenges to hegemony (captured in ex-British prime minister Thatcher's There-Is-No-Alternative-Doctrine, TINA) are undisputed, the transformation of the global geographies of power through local actors alone has remained illusory. Rather, the experience of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America - Peoples' Trade Agreement (ALBA-PTA) strongly suggests that counter-hegemonic globalisation theory will have to consider the roles of both the ‘state-in-revolution' and the ‘transnational organised society'. This will be shown through the analysis and theorisation of the ALBA-PTA as a multi dimensional inter and transnational counter-hegemonic regionalisation and globalisation project that operates across a range of sectors and scales.

Professionalization and political engagement are usually placed as incompatible in the case of journalism and the mainstream press, resulting in an identification of cultural resistance exclusively with alternative/amateur vehicles. I will use the concept of journalistic field as introduced by Pierre Bourdieu to review these assumptions and discuss a form of political resistance that acts in one's own area of knowledge, is not overtly political and whose effects are not immediately accountable for. Drawing examples from my research on two literary newspapers published in the 1950s in Brazil and Uruguay, this paper will focus on the implications of didacticism for literary criticism as a genre of newswriting. The analysis of these newspapers will lead to a reflection on two main issues: a) the conflict between the professionalization and democratization of literature; and b) the definition of resistance as necessarily an action that is against something. The article will reconsider education in journalism as a form of resistance, taking into account its risks of becoming political indoctrination and commercial manipulation, but emphasizing its potential as a way of expanding access to literature.

The poetic space, as I see it, is a space of resistance. Resistance against the media which do not need poetry. Communication among poets is a go-between, a web of messages, performances and presentations, the circulation of books and digital materials. These activities are political, functioning as politics in the Greek sense: discussion in a public arena, exchanges of opinion and criticism, interventions, concerted decisions, group projects, a net of relationships around the production of texts, articulating versions and diversions of language. These activities and exchanges give the participants a sense of fulfillment. In this sense to pass is to think, to question a certain regime, to marvel that it is still there, to wonder what makes it possible, going into its enclaves, looking for traces of the movements which formed it and discovering in those stories apparently in ashes, how to think, how to live otherwise.

In this article, I analyze the notions of sequentiality and simultaneity in Ursula K. Le Guin's science fiction novel The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974). I extrapolate this analysis to the contrasting epistemic sensibilities surrounding the concepts of ‘revolution' and ‘resistance' respectively. I am particularly concerned with the role these concepts play in contemporary academic production in the humanities. My aim is to understand the implications of the different conceptions of time and representation associated with each of those two concepts, and what their actual ideological operativity is in the context of the present status quo.

This essay is a brief study of translation as a practice of aesthetic resistance seen from a historical and philosophical perspective. Translation is perceived as the process of transition and negotiation within the ‘third space' between various different hybrid cultural contexts and their discursive constraints, and referred to as ‘paratranslation'. It summarises the first attempts to think of translation as an almost ‘holistic' paradigm and the aesthetics of intervention from Romantic philosophy onwards. It attempts to show how Walter Benjamin's master narrative, the utopia of ‘pure language', encourages continuous resistance to the totalitarianism of the idea of the ‘original', to aesthetics (within the sense of the perception of the real) and to dominant discourses. It subsequently defines the idea of ‘progress', which considers translation as aesthetic resistance, as a process of construction in constant deconstruction. It concludes by exemplifying the notion of translation as a paradigm of intervention in modernity with a brief analysis of the transcreation performed by Erin Mouré on Fernando Pessoa/Alberto Caeiro's poetic cycle, O Guardador de Rebanhos (The Keeper of Sheep).

Cardboard is hardly a material we associate with new media or digital technology in general. And yet in considering a series of recent editorial projects in several Latin American cities—editorial projects whose last name is always Cartonera and whose defining attribute is a trash aesthetic of hand-painted books made from recycled cardboard—it seems difficult to avoid confronting the present media ecology characterized by these technologies. These editorials produce, on some level, a kind of ‘‘new media,’’ although the mere novelty of their enterprise is only the most superficial of their affiliations with this concept. On the contrary, it seems clear to me that these projects also enact a form of production that should be interrogated within a discussion of the forms of sociality associated with new media and the politico-economic landscape they inhabit and condition.

This article explores the role of poetry in working-class counter-public spheres by examining the work of South Australian working-class performance poet Geoff Goodfellow. Goodfellow's performances at venues like construction sites, maximum security prisons, and pubs create a public space for groups of people usually seen as excluded from literary culture and from the institutions of the dominant public sphere. Goodfellow's readings allow for communal self-reflection and deliberation on such subjects as domestic violence, labour issues, racial questions, and other topics significant to the changing nature of working-class life and identity, and they have had an impact upon corporate and governmental policy in areas like prison reform and labour disputes. His performances suggest the need for working-class studies not only to examine literature by working-class writers, but also to explore issues of reception and performance, and to ask how this literature functions in the social contexts of its production.

(1992). Argentina's secret poetry boom. Travesia: Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 178-184.