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Para começar a falar de “contaminações”, vou relatar uma viagem e uma performance que realizei. No dia 22 de junho de 2007, contrariando todos os conselhos de amigos, médicos e parentes, peguei um avião de Paris para Kiev, na Ucrânia, e de lá parti de carro, com um guia e mais duas pessoas, para Pripyat, a cidade fantasma onde houve em 1986 a famosa catástrofe de Chernobyl. Era uma viagem cheia de riscos, claro. Na cidade, a mais afetada pelo acidente, não se pode morar, não se pode comer, não se pode ficar muito tempo. Ali estávamos expostos a uma média de 130 microroentgens por hora de radiação gama, proveniente do césio que paira no local. Isso nos permitiria ficar, no máximo, duas horas. Ficamos quase seis. Apesar de não ser uma cidade propria mente turística, a arquitetura uniforme, remanescente do antigo bloco comunista, os edifícios em ruínas e de arestas enferrujadas, os objetos contaminados, deixados pelos mora dores há vinte anos, as ruas invadidas pelo mato causavam um estranho fascínio. Em determinado momento, avisei que eu precisaria me afastar do grupo e, diante do Palácio da Cultura, bem no centro da cidade, realizei a primeira (e provavelmente única edição da) Conferência poético-radioativa de Pripyat. A conferência contava com abertura solene, leitura de poemas meus e de Paul Dehn “poeta que escreveu sobre e sob a era atômica” e com o “abandono” de alguns livros no lugar. Ali, na solidão daquela conferência de um homem só, a milhares de quilômetros de qualquer coisa familiar, circundado pelo silêncio do fim do mundo, eu fazia, ainda que sem saber, um hino às contaminações, além, claro, de me contaminar, tornando-me, provavelmente, o primeiro poeta radioativo do mundo. Sim, haviam me alertado do risco de desenvolver um câncer ou gerar um filho anormal. Mas pergunto: não faria isso também parte da performance?

Poetry began as a spoken art and remains one to this day, but readers tend to view the poem on the page as an impenetrable artifact. This book examines the performance of poetry to show how far beyond the page it can travel. Exploring a range of performances from early twentieth-century recitations to twenty-first-century film, CDs, and Internet renditions, Beyond the Page offers analytic tools to chart poetry beyond printed texts.Jill S. Kuhnheim, looking at poetry and performance in Spanish America over time, has organized the book to begin with the early twentieth century and arrive at the present day. She includes noteworthy poets and artists such as José Martí, Luis Palés Matos, Eusebia Cosme, Nicomedes Santa Cruz, Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, and Nicolás Guillén, as well as very recent artists whose performance work is not as well known. Offering fresh historical material and analysis, the author illuminates the relationship between popular and elite cultural activity in Spanish America and reshapes our awareness of the cultural work poetry has done in the past and may do in the future, particularly given the wide array of technological possibilities. The author takes a broad view of American cultural production and creates a dialogue with events and criticism from the United States as well as from Spanish American traditions.Oral and written elements in poetry are complementary, says Kuhnheim, not in opposition, and they may reach different audiences. As poetry enjoys a revival with modern media, performance is part of the new platform it spans, widening the kind of audience and expanding potential meanings. Beyond the Page will appeal to readers with an interest in poetry and performance, and in how poetry circulates beyond the page. With an international perspective and dynamic synthesis, the book offers an innovative methodology and theoretical model for humanists beyond the immediate field, reaching out to readers interested in the intersection between poetry and identity or the juncture of popular-elite and oral-written cultures.

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.

Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word brings together seventeen essays, written especially for this volume, on poetry readings, the sound of poetry, and the visual performance of poetry. While the performance of poetry is as old as poetry itself, critical attention to modern and contemporary poetru performance has been negligible, despite the crucial importance of performance to the practice of the poetry of this century. This collection opens many new avenues for the critical discussion of the sound and performance of poetry. Paying special attention to innovative work. More important, the essays collected here offer original and wide –ranging elucidatiions of how twentieth-century poetry has been practiced as a performance art. Introduction. Charles Berstein I.-Sound´s Measures 1. Letter on Sound. Susan Stewart. 2. The Aural Ellipsis and the Nature of Listening in Contemporary Poetry. Nick Piombino. 3. Praxis: A Political Economy of Noise and Information. Bruce Andrews. 4. After Free Verse: The New Nonlinear Poetries. Marjorie Perloff. 5. Ether Either. Susan Howe. II. Performing Words 6. Visual Performance of the Poetic Text, Johana Drucker. 7. Voice in Extremis. Steve McCaffery. 8. Toward a Poetics of Polyphony and Translatabilityl. Dennis Tedlock. 9. Speech Effects: The Talk as a Genre. Bob Perrelman. 10. Sound Reading. Peter Quartermain. III-Close Hearings/Historical Settings 11. Understanding the Sound of Not Understanding. Jed Rasula 12. The Contemporary Poetry Reading. Peter Middelton 13. Neon Griot: The Functional Role of Poetry Readings in the Black Arts Movement. 14. Was That “Different”, “Dissident” or “Dissonant”? Poetry (n) the Public Spear: Slams, Open Readings, and Dissident Traditions.Maria Damon. 15. Local Vocals: Hawaii´s Pidgin Literature, Performance and Postcoloniality. Susan M. Schltz Afterword: VWho Speaks: Ventriloquism and the Self in the Poetry Reading. Ron Silliman Audio Resources Bibliography