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The long and labyrinthine process that Latin America has undergone in its way towards democracy has been marked by the same confrontations and quarrels present throughout the Western intellectual history, which have sometimes been expressed as a fight between "ideas and emotions." In Latin America, this intellectual quarrel may be described in Julio Cortazar’s terms, as a struggle between "Baroque cronopios" versus "Gothic fames," or as a war between two cultures: "that of blood and that of ink," echoing the erosion of the great theories and traditional ideologies. Thus, in the wake of the political and cultural developments resulting from globalization, the Latin American democratic transitions, and the fall of the socialist bloc, we know that we are witnessing the end of an era, but we cannot yet define the new age. This article ponders, thus, what the revival of romantic views and emotions may mean at the beginning of the 21st century. Mexico, in particular, faces a major political and cultural challenge, resulting from the fact that the Mexican society is still immersed in the culture of the Revolution’s nationalism. The perennial struggle between ideas and emotions has become manifest again in the form of a dilemma between attaching to an identity in crisis and trying to reconstruct it, or rather looking ahead with the aim of creating a new democratic civic culture. [P1] Tras los desarrollos políticos y culturales derivados de la globalización, las transiciones democráticas en América Latina y la desaparición del bloque socialista, sabemos que estamos ante el fin de una época, pero aún no podemos definir los nuevos tiempos. A partir de ello, este artículo reflexiona sobre lo que puede significar el retorno de algunas visiones y emociones románticas a comienzos del siglo XXI. En particular, México tiene frente a sí un gran reto político y cultural, que parte del hecho de que su sociedad sigue inmersa en la cultura del nacionalismo revolucionario. Se presenta, así, como nueva expresión de esa perenne lucha entre ideas y emociones, la disyuntiva de dirigir los sentimientos a una identidad en crisis e intentar reconstruirla, o bien mirar hacia adelante para darle vida a una nueva cultura cívica democrática.

Emisión del programa Metrópolis titulado South Graff. Pintando la voz del barrio. El programa Metrópolis invita al experto e investigador en graffiti y arte urbano Fernando Figueroa a que seleccione una serie de proyectos en los que artistas procedentes del graffiti han dado voz a sus barrios, dignificando estos espacios desde la creatividad colectiva y desde la convivencia.

There is an abundance of books, magazines, films and internet-forums dedicated to graffiti. How this documentation has influenced and been a part of the graffiti subculture has not been studied much. Drawing on personal experiences, as a documentarian and publisher of graffiti media over 27 years, Malcolm Jacobson recollects how the positions of participant and observer incessantly have twisted around each other. This has been mediated through development in media technology as well as by the coming of age of graffiti and its practitioners.

When discussing the paradox of displacing the street art aesthetic, i.e. commissioning street artists to create work for art galleries, museums, or public murals, one inevitably has to address issues of co-opting, appropriation, and the institutionalization of a movement that began as a countercultural form of expression. Two commissioned pieces by OSGEMEOS are used as a case study. This paper parses through the discourse surrounding their production and removal. The goal therein is to break down these narratives and gain insight into the mechanisms at work and the inherent contradictions in the process of institutionalizing street art.

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.

The published works of Andi Nachon (Buenos Aires, 1970) comprise more than half a dozen single-authored collections of poetry, inclusion in several recent anthologies, and her own anthology of Argentine women poets. Her name appears in articles and works on recent poetry from Argentina, as in Diana Bellessi’s La pequeña voz del mundo. She also gives frequent readings on the Buenos Aires poetry circuit. Her work, though, lacks a sustained critical study. This is surprising. Nachon’s poetry occupies, in form and technique, a space between the dominant trends of 80s and 90s poetry – broadly speaking, the neobarroco and objectivismo – whilst her themes take in contemporary pop culture, political memory and resistance, and what might be termed the psychogeography of the city. Ambiguity – of subject or narrative position; of syntax; of geographical or physical position; and of gender – characterizes much of her work. For these and other reasons, a detailed reading of a selection of poems from throughout her career is somewhat overdue. This paper sets out to examine a number aspects of her poetry: the context from which her earliest work emerges; its development of novel forms of address, in relation to comparable near-contemporary poets; explorations of space, including a form of psychogeography, in both her early collections and her volume Taiga (2000); the subtle political engagements found in her poetry, including a later collection Plaza real (2004); before looking at her most recent poetry and its interaction with non-poetic forms. Questions of the lyric and what has been called by Baltrusch and Lourido (2012) and Casas (2012), amongst others, “non-lyric poetry”, are central to these analyses.

Resumen:El presente artículo propone el examen de cuatro categorías y cuatro paradojas de la experiencia política moderna, que a partir de su problematicidad y significación, pudieran ser repensadas y reinscritas en una «concepción trágica de lo político». Primera paradoja: La «comunidad» se quiere y no se alcanza. Segunda paradoja: la tragedia deviene «sentido trágico». Tercera paradoja: Gubernamentalidad biopolítica: queriendo libertad, la niega. Cuarta paradoja. «melancolía»: despotencia que en su retiro, deviene fuerza.Palabras clave: Comunidad, Tragedia, Biopolítica, Melancolía*******************************************************************Community, tragedy and melancholia: Study for a tragic conception of the PoliticsAbstractThe present article proposes the examination of four categories and four paradoxes of modern politics experience, which as low as their quandary and signification could be re-thought and registered en a “tragic conception of the politics”. Firs paradox: The “community” is wanted but not reached. Second paradox: the tragedy becomes “tragic sense”. Third paradox: Bio-politics government: wishing liberty, it is denied. Fourth paradox: “melancholia”: de strengthen that in its leaving becomes force.Key words: Community, tragedy, bio-politics, melancholia. *********************************************************Comunidade, Tragédia e Melancolia: Estudo para uma ConcepçãoTrágica do PolíticoResumoO presente artigo propõe o exame de quatro categorias e quatro paradoxos da experiência política moderna, que a partir de sua problematicidade e significação, puderam ser repensadas e reinscritas numa «concepção trágica do político». Primeiro paradoxo: a «comunidade» se quer e não se consegue. Segundo paradoxo: a tragédia devem «sentido trágico». Terceiro paradoxo: Governamentalidade biopolítica: querendo liberdade, a nega. Quarto paradoxo. «melancolia»: dês-potência que no seu retiro, devem força.Palavras chave: Comunidade, tragédia, biopolítica, melancolia.

This article explores the semantic implications of the concept of tedio through a comparative analysis of Rosalia de Castro´s novel, Flavio, and Edgar Allan Poe’s tale, «The Man of the Crowd». Like spleen and ennui, hispanic tedio is an emotional concept inseparable from the industrial dynamic of the modern city. In this sense, it can be read as a symptom of the profound modification of aesthetic and sociological aspects of narrative which took place in the second half of the XIX century.

Introduction The experiences of democratization in Latin America and Eastern Europe in the 1980s and early 1990s brought attention to the forces of civil society as key actors in the demise of authoritarian rule (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986; Cohen and Arato 1992; Bernhard 1993; Linz and Stepan 1996). More recent literature questions the inherently pro-democratic character of civil society activism (Warren 2000; Armony 2004; Jamal 2007). In both lines of argument, societal associations or social movements are at the core of the inquiry. However, Hirschman’s category of “voice,” which encompasses as much articulation of discontent as it does actions of protest (Hirschman 1970), reminds us that for civil society activism to evolve, something fundamental is necessary: an arena in which voices can be raised and heard and in which government and society interact. The question of civil society, thus, is intrinsically linked to the conditions, contours, limitations and possibilities of communication, media and the public sphere. Ever since the term “Facebook revolution” (Smith 2011) was coined for the social mobilizations that led to the downfall of the Mubarak regime in Egypt, this link between communication, civil society activism and democratization has received great media attention. However, most of this attention focused on the mobilizing potential of the digital media at the moment of rupture. This chapter takes a contemporary perspective as it seeks to contribute to our understanding of the Internet’s impact on civil society dynamics in a non-pluralist context through a diachronic comparison. Based on an empirical study of the Cuban case, the argument is as follows. Prior to the entry of the Internet, the civil society debate centered around the quest for higher degrees of autonomy for associations and institutions within the framework of the state-socialist regime. In contrast, the new media enabled the emergence of a new, less state-dependent type of public sphere; as a consequence, the civil society debate has become increasingly centered on the assertion of individual citizenship rights within andvis-à-vis the state. The reformist civil society quest of the pre-Internet period failed in part because of its character as behind-the-scenes-struggle, shielded from public view, which impeded a broader mobilization of protest when the state decided to rein in the incipient push for civil society. In contrast, the current drive for civil society indeed finds strong public repercussion; for its democratizing potential to come to fruition, the crucial fault-line is to connect web-based voice to public debate and social action in the country’s physical off-line environment. By taking Cuba as object of empirical analysis, this study selects a case with a particularly thorough form of authoritarian hold over the public sphere: a formal monopoly of the Cuban state on mass media, established in the historic experience of twentieth-century state-socialism and upheld even two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the same time, Cuba is strongly exposed to transnational influences and a transnational articulation of voice, due to a large number of emigrant and diaspora communities that remain highly attached to their country of origin (Fernández 2005). The approach chosen to analyze the impact of the Internet on state-society relations is through a diachronic comparison of the Cuban development in two distinct periods: the pre-Internet period, i.e., Cuba in the early to mid 1990s, when the Cold War alignment had already become history but web-based technologies did not yet have a major presence on the island; and more than a decade later, since the mid to late 2000s, when web-based media had made their entry on the island. Formal data on Internet access and use are scarce and unreliable. For 2009, the Cuban Ministry of Informatics and Communications gives the figure of 1,450,000 Cubans, or 12.7 percent, as “Internet users” (ONE 2009)1 without specifying the precise uses this number includes. The figure certainly should not be mistaken for access to the World Wide Web, which remains severely restricted. Instead, the figure most probably includes all Cubans with some kind of (even if only sporadic) access to closed domestic networks or with access to e-mail services. At the same time accounts are shared and, as for other goods and services, also Internet access has a black market side that escapes official statistics. Moreover, Internet content “travels” by USB stick also to many who do not have access themselves. For both these periods, the study relies on the analysis of numerous primary documents, as well as newspapers and secondary literature. In the case of the post-Internet phase, in addition to the above, documents published on the web have been a primary source of analysis. While some authors link issues of civil society and Internet voice merely to the political opposition, this chapter does not limit its focus to this divide but analyzes as much societal actors working within the established institutions of the socialist state as well as those outside of it. In both periods under scrutiny field trips to the island were undertaken in which actors from a broad range of positions were interviewed. While these interviews are not cited directly due to political sensitivities, they provide an invaluable background for the trends described.

This book explores the themes of displacement, exile and migration in the work of the most important Argentine poets since the 1950s. The book outlines the poetry of key authors in the second half of the twentieth century as well as writing by younger poets at the turn of the century. It includes generous selections of the original poems with new translations into English by the author.

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.

This article analyses a range of discourses articulated around the figure of the film archive between the late nineteenth and the early twenty-first centuries, accounting for the various possibilities that they open up for considering audiovisual heritage as a potential space either for revolutionary change or for political or textual resistance. Focused mainly on archival discourses in Mexico, the article traces their interaction with both national-historical and anti-imperialist narratives, and the implications of digital and online culture for the encounter between the archiving of film and resistance. It accounts for the position of the archive in negotiations between state and private capital and spaces of artistic autonomy, and for the relationships between the archive, modernity, postmodernity and the notion of posterity.

In October 2007, over the course of a weekend, several hundred people descended on Coronel Pringles, a small town in the Argentine pampas. For two days they would participate, along with many of the town’s residents, in a series of workshops and performances held under the aegis of the Asociación Civil Estación Pringles, an organization founded in 2006 and headed by the poet Arturo Carrera. This inaugural event centered on the practice of declamation, one of the ‘viejas prácticas sociales y artı́sticas’ (‘timeworn social and artistic practices’) that Estación Pringles seeks to place into dialogue with the work of contemporary artists, writers and performers. In its founding statement, the project casts this dialogue in theatrical terms, calling itself ‘una plataforma o una escena donde prácticas estéticas dispersas en un espacio lateral puedan agregarse, articularse, hacerse visibles’ (‘a platform or scene where aesthetic practices, scattered throughout a lateral space, might come together, be articulated, become visible’). Indeed, an emphasis on theatricality would reappear in Carrera’s closing remarks to the 2007 gathering, in which he couches the practice of declamation in terms of a ‘teatrito,’ a ‘little theater’ (Estación Pringles).

Josefina Ludmer en el ensayo más esperado de la década deja de lado las categorías de la teoría literaria utilizadas hasta el momento en busca de nuevas articulaciones y nociones que recorran todas las divisiones actuales y permitan entender la configuración política económica y social de los años 2000 en América latina. El resultado es una serie de esbozos teóricos que parten de un universo sin afueras real virtual al que llama imaginación pública o fabrica de realidad. Un universo que no diferencia entre realidad y ficción y cuya lógica es el movimiento la conectividad la superposición y la sobreimpresión de todo lo visto y oído. La literatura es hilo conductor de la imaginación pública y la vía por la que la especulación entra en esa fábrica de realidad. Las temporalidades y los territorios que instalan las ficciones literarias latinoamericanas de los últimos años (como las de Fernando Vallejo, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Martín Kohan, Perla Suez o Diamela Eltit) definen una forma determinada de “realidadficción”. Un libro decisivo de una de las figuras más lúcidas de la crítica actual indispensable para pensar la América latina del siglo XXI.

Se retoman algunas líneas que permitan explicar la manera en que se introduce en la literatura mexicana la perspectiva maldita o decadentista. Propuesta de un arte inmoral, con la vocación de cuestionar al burgués. Temas del erotismo en la literatura mexicana. Influencia de Baudelaire, RImbaud y Nietzsche en la literatura mexicana del modernismo y la vanguardia.

En su tratado de poética, Horacio afirmaba que la literatura debía ser dulce y útil. Cientos de años después, en la primera mitad del siglo XX, George Bataille escribe: la literatura “no puede ser útil porque es la expresión del hombre ―de la parte esencial del hombre― y lo esencial en el hombre no es reductible a la utilidad”. Utilidad y literatura son excluyentes. Ya no se escribe para servir a los semejantes sino para “revelar a la soledad de todos una parte intangible que nadie someterá nunca”. El escritor debe ejercer su libertad, lo cual significa dejar atrás el servilismo. Este ejercicio a menudo lo destruye, pero eso lo hace más fuerte. Para este escritor francés, la literatura debe expresar la esencia humana porque, de lo contrario, no es literatura y una de las expresiones de esta esencia, la expresión soberana, dice el autor, es el mal, una forma del mal, que no supone la ausencia de moral sino que exige una hipermoral.

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.

Prólogo Capítulo I: Testimoniar en oxímoron (El caso César Vallejo) Capítulo II: Testimoniar sin lengua (El caso Alejandra Pizarnik) Capítulo III: Testimoniar sin metáfora (Los casos Washington Cucurto, Martín Gambarotta, Roberta Iannamico). *** Testimoniar en oxímoron, testimoniar sin lengua, testimoniar sin metáfora. Con estas tres fórmulas, Tamara Kamenszain bordea lo dicho por la poesía en los casos César Vallejo, Alejandra Pizarnik, Washington Cucurto, Martín Gambarotta y Roberta Iannamico. El testimonio no es prueba de la realidad sino en todo caso una muestra de vida. La poesía como testimonio mantiene viva la posibilidad de decir. Poniendo los saberes en falta, la poesía dice, da cuenta de la realidad, pero sin que esto signifique apelar a los realismos. En la imposibilidad indecible de todo testimonio, allí la poesía encuentra su boca. En este marco, los ensayos de Kamenszain registran una nueva lectura, tejen otros textos: el Vallejo de España, aparta de mí este cáliz pone en fecha los hechos, recibe en el propio aliento la boca del otro, mata la muerte. Y así como Vallejo deja entrar lo que de vida hay en la muerte, Pizarnik tramita lo que de muerte hay en la vida, en el punto de cese de la lengua que habla en sus últimos libros. Intentando despegar la escritura poética de su herramienta retórica por excelencia, la metáfora, los nuevos poetas buscan pinchar el efecto de show de la realidad. El realismo atolondrado en Cucurto, la búsqueda de lo real en Gambarotta, y el uso en Iannamico son modos de poner al poema en circulación, justo antes de que la ‘literatura’ se extinga. Precisa, lúcida y emotiva, la mirada de Kamenszain renueva las lecturas de dos grandes poetas de la poesía latinoamericana y descubre modos posibles de leer a las nuevas generaciones de la poesía argentina.

Empreendendo uma análise profunda de três romances representativos da literatura latino-americana recente, Diana Klinger aborda dois elementos fundamentais presentes na ficção contemporânea: a presença marcante da primeira pessoa, em que se identificam aspectos de discurso autobiográfico, e uma perspectiva afastada sobre o outro, caracterizando uma literatura que atravessa fronteiras culturais. Escritas de si, escritas do outro constitui, portanto, obra fundamental para a compreensão das novas tendências da ficção contemporânea e, notadamente, da produção literária latino-americana da atualidade.