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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.

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.

En las páginas que siguen examinaré algunas consecuencias de la inestabilidad funcional del sujeto poético en la poesía actual, entendido este como algo más que una manifestación morfológica o un distribuidor deíctico que operan en el poema para sustentar una determinada cohesión enuncia¬tiva y discursiva. Esos dos parámetros, en concordancia con lo resuelto previamente por la narratología respecto a la figura del narrador en el relato, resultaron largamente privilegiados por las aproximaciones formal-estructuralista y semiótico-sintáctica al texto poético. Lo fueron, es cierto, en un segmento histórico en el que el propio concepto de poema solía ser más restringido en términos formales, elocutivos y culturales que el hoy comúnmente manejado, quizás por ins¬cribirse aquella coyuntura en lo que Jacques Rancière (2005) ha llamado régimen representativo del arte y de la literatura. En él, por cierto, la postulación desde la propia obra de un sentido de comunidad ética se impone a cualquier movimien¬to emancipatorio, algo esto último que para Rancière es más propio de un segundo régimen de identificación actuante en el terreno artístico, el estético. En correspondencia, el público, la audiencia, quienes leen en aquel primer régimen, se recono¬cerían como espectadores antes que como actores en el espacio material y simbólico por ellos ocupado. Justo por esto nos interesará igualmente la proyección que lo anterior introduce en los planos de la intersubjetividad y de lo público. Si bien, para creer que tal proyección resulte en algún sentido efectiva, o por lo menos real, en cualquiera de los dos regímenes de identificación indicados, no es exigible ya la convicción de que la poesía sea un arma cargada de futuro al modo –referencial, temático, retórico, performativo…– en el que determinados programas literarios e ideológicos próximos al socialrealismo comprendieron el lugar político del poema y en general del arte a lo largo de una buena parte del siglo XX.

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.

En una reflexión general sobre los procesos y prácticas culturales emergentes, Wlad Godzich subrayó la imposibilidad de estudiarlos de acuerdo con las categorías hegemónicas y convencionales, para las que en realidad suponen un desafío. La delimitación de la noción de poesía en nuestro tiempo, habida cuenta de su estatus multifuncional e inestable, es una tarea compleja. Refiriéndonos a la hibridación genérica y discursiva podríamos condensar la mayor parte de sus reformulaciones, causadas también por la aceptación de lo popular, lo masivo o lo tecnológico, y por la potencialidad crítica de la subjetividad y el sujeto. En línea con lo señalado por Godzich, tales cambios exigen nuevas perspectivas y metodologías de análisis, que vayan más allá de las derivadas de genologías de base apenas textual. Las poéticas que son objeto de estudio en este libro no serán acotadas en términos lingüísticos, nacionales o interartísticos; de forma correlativa, se presta atención a sistemas de significación no (solo) verbales, al acoger análisis sobre prácticas performativas, grafiti e intervención, poesía fractal o formatos televisivos, privilegiando siempre la investigación de su incidencia como interacción y mediación pública, además de sus efectos socio-políticos.

Un dels poemes més famosos de W. H. Auden, la seva elegia a W. B. Yeats (“In Memory of W. B. Yeats”) conté un vers que difícilment podria haver estat escrit en èpoques anteriors, “perquè la poesia fa que res no passi”; en el mateix poema, just al començament, el poeta dóna una altra imatge que enllaça amb un dels altres grans poemes seus, “Musée des Beaux-Arts”, “Far from his illness/ The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,/ The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays” (W. H. Auden, 1966: 141-143). Molt similar a la imat ge del dolor i del sofriment aliens quan en l’ècfrasi del quadre de Brueghel tot passa en plena normalitat en el moment que Ícar s’enfonsa en l’aigua. Potser en algun instant es pot arribar a pensar que la funció de la poesia no fa que passi res (la relació amb el poema de Yeats és amb la seva activitat política en pro de la independència d’Irlanda) i s’hauria de quedar en la con templació de la bellesa, aquella contemplació desinteressada, plaer desinteressat del que parlava Kant. És en un altre ordre de fets que la poesia no pot “actuar”, no té una incidència en la realitat que, en aquest cas sí, podria arribar a reflectir. Ambdós poemes d’Auden apareixen l’any 1939.

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.

After centuries of symbolic and political oppression, Galicia has been recognized by the Spanish constitution as a historic nationality. However, despite a certain degree of political autonomy, Galician identity is threatened by increasing homogenization in the economic, social, cultural and linguistic fields. In the early 1990s the aesthetic movement Bravú constructed an aesthetic community, sustained by an ideological project, and with the aim to, on the one hand, prevent Galician culture from becoming folklore stuck in a time warp and, on the other hand, to validate Galician identity. The Bravú artists refused the historically inherited outsider position and contributed to a reinvention of Galician identity and of a political ideal within a cosmopolitan, internationalist framework and by reversing social stigmas through their works and performances.

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.

The concept of ‘resistance' has turned into a critical tool in different areas of political, philosophical and sociological thought. At the same time, the notion seems to be as productive as it is diffuse. ‘Resistance' is used in very specific contexts in scientific or technical disciplines, and with extreme flexibility in social and cultural studies. In the latter two areas, the concept is often used without prior reflection on its characteristics and limitations. In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze provides a possible framework for conceiving cultural and political practices of resistance as positions of force, when he defines contraction as ‘a contemplation that preserves the preceding in the following'. The purpose of this article is to understand political ecologism in its activist and poetical dimensions, in light of a Deleuzian interpretation of resistance.

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 offers a pragmatic and relational analysis of the controversial heuristic of cultural resistance and presents some of the problems that affect the production and distribution of the poetic discourses of resistance and emancipation. To that end, it focuses on the incorporation of the historicity and the historic contingency of conflict as key elements of the subjectification constituted by the poem of resistance as “poem for the political”. It also explores the applicability of certain notions common to the contemporary critical tradition, as developed by scholars such as Badiou, Mouffe, Rancière, Bal and Žižek.

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.

The following text provides a conceptual and theoretical introduction to a collection of essays written by members of the multidisciplinary network of scholars, artists and cultural producers named ‘Poetics of Resistance', which seeks to analyse and encourage discussion of the relationships between creativity, culture and political resistance, in the context of neoliberal globalization. The introduction also provides a critical glossary of a set of loosely interlinking keywords, following Raymond Williams, that mark points of encounter and departure between the approaches of the various authors (not to be confused with the list of keywords used to index each article). Rather than presenting a completed research project, this issue serves as a basis for continuing collaborative research and dialogue in the field, and invites readers to join in the ongoing debate. The contributors to this issue are Paulina Aroch Fugellie, Burghard Baltrusch, Arturo Casas, Marí­a do Cebreiro Rábade Villar, Roberto Echavarren, Marcos Giadas Conde, Cornelia Gräbner, Nathalia Jabur, Thomas Muhr and David Wood.

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).

This article contests the popular assumption that literature is ever less politically relevant. Quite the contrary is the case: literature and literary language becomes increasingly important for the alter-globalization movement and for the notion that ‘another world is possible.' The work of four authors - Manu Chao, Eduardo Galeano, Subcomandante Marcos, and José Saramago - are comparatively analysed in light of their contribution to an alternative globalism and to an alternative practice of politics. All four authors contribute from different perspectives to the literary articulation of a political project. Their work shares characteristics such as the permeability of genres, the emphasis on the poetical over the narrative, a meandering structure that expresses the search for and step-by-step construction of a cultural and political alternative, and an emphasis on translation and encounter as principles of interaction with difference.

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.

Conversamos con Chus Pato sobre a temática á que refire a convocatoria deste presente nº de Derritaxes, “Filosofía e literatura”, e comezamos facendo referencia explícita precisamente ao texto da convocatoria, a modo de introdución da conversa.