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- Convenors:
-
Tomás Peters
(Birkbeck, University of London)
John Kraniauskas (Birkbeck, University of London)
- Location:
- Malet 353
- Start time:
- 3 April, 2014 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
The main aim of this panel is to bring together researchers interested, on the one hand, in contemporary Latin American art (literature, visual arts, etc.) and, on the other, in how to read, interpret and criticize these artworks using new, reconfigured, forms of Latin American cultural criticism.
Long Abstract:
Characterized by its multidisciplinary methodology, theoretical experimentation and emancipatory politics, and influenced by the Frankfurt School, post-structuralism, Latin American philosophy and Cultural Studies, Latin American cultural criticism (LACC) has been a significant intellectual current in the region since the mid-1970s. However, LACC has been challenged in recent years by a series of new artistic and critical practices emerging from new social and political contexts. New kinds of social movements, the traumatic memories of the recent past, forms of violence related to drug trafficking, and reterritorializing global/local flows of capital, among other issues, have produced new forms of artivism that question the avant-gardist discourses of the 1970s from which LACC also emerged - although similarly evoking the foundational cultural transformations that took place in Latin America in those years. Forty years after Pinochet's military coup, for example, a number of films, books, documentaries, TV series and performances have emerged that reflect on questions of memory, justice and truth in new ways.
How to read these new 'refractory texts and cultural activities' using and developing the frameworks established by LACC? What do we understand by LACC and what is the relationship between aesthetic materiality and critical theory today? What role does LACC play in Latin American society today? This panel will consider newly 'emergent' issues as they have been posed in new contexts, and which are now the object of renewed critical treatment by researchers, academics and students.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
The purpose of this paper is to explore the representation of collective memories in contemporary Chilean urban chronicles, focusing on the work of two Chilean authors: Pedro Lemebel and Francisco Mouat.
Paper long abstract:
My paper explores the representations of memory in the contemporary Chilean urban chronicle, taking into account the genres' contribution as contested and contesting sites of memory. The urban chronicle has been able to depict the voices of ordinary people who have remained on the margins of the official Chilean discourse of successful modernization and stable democracy. Through a close reading of Chilean writers Pedro Lemebel and Francisco Mouat, specifically their books Háblame de amores (2012) and Crónicas Ociosas (2005), I show how these authors depict everyday life stories of ordinary people. I argue that the contemporary urban chronicle, even though it has until recently been marginalized by Chilean literary scholars and has been considered a 'minor' and hybrid genre, can be seen as an alternative form of historical memory in the Chilean neoliberal context. Precisely the flexible character of this genre, which incorporates literature, history and journalism, allows these texts to show another side of quotidian Chilean urban life.
Paper short abstract:
The main aim of this communication is to offer a reading of two recent Chilean artworks –namely, a dramaturgic text and a novel– from the viewpoint of the fractures of the collective memory and its reconfiguration through the experiences and forms of social, anti-neoliberal mobilization.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation aims to introduce conceptual elements around the role of "memory" in the comprehension of the recent Chilean social movements' narrative. In doing so, it is pretended to problematize the political meaning of memory through experiential registers which cut across history and biography.
The starting point establishes the immanent -though no evident- relationship between, on one hand, social mobilization as experiential space (that of praxis) where narrative reconstruction from subaltern positions operate, and on the other, active memory as a contingent, unstable outcome of such reconstructions. In a Benjaminian register, the mobilized reconstructive practices in Chile would trigger a "memory shock", an interruption of the continuum of the historical narrative bounded in the cleavage "dictatorship/democracy". Conversely, such a shock overlaps the "doctrine of shock" of neoliberal order instituted by the Chilean dictatorship.
Counter-hegemonic narrative practices of Chilean students and other regional movements allow us to give account of a field of memory's ruptures and dislocations. In a literary register, I shall analyse -as "narrative symptoms"- two works contingent to the period. The first is the dramaturgic text "Las Analfabetas" (The Illiterate Women) of Pablo Paredes, and the second is novel "Formas de Volver a Casa" (Ways to Go Back to Home) of Alejandro Zambra. Both come together to diagnose, from different perspectives, the discomfort and malaise derived from a fragmented, discontinuous memory, envisioning thus new emergent subjectivities.
Paper short abstract:
Néstor Perlongher claimed the annihilation of the figure of the subject crucial to the functioning of capitalist logic. This paper will examine some of his poetic cartographies in order to show how the discontinuous relation between space, bodies and language open emancipatory possibilities.
Paper long abstract:
Within the field of Latin American cultural criticism stands the poetic and critical work of Néstor Perlongher. His figure in current Argentine contemporary debates has become a reference point to current generations of cultural critiques and writers.
In Perlongher's oeuvre his anthropological, poetic and critical oeuvres complement each other to create a comprehensive poetic social thought from where to think the relation between subject, language and social space. He was interested in dissident forms of subjectivation able to confront State power (more specifically the authoritarian regimes of Argentina and Brazil which at that time were engaged in a neoliberal economic project): 'El tan mentado 'sistema' no se sustenta solamente por la fuerza de las armas ni por determinantes económicos; exige la producción de cierto modelo de sujeto 'normal' que lo soporte', he states in his essay "Los devenires minoritarios". Yet, despite his activism in homosexual movements, Perlongher's work should not be read as a demand for recognition of sexual minorities or representation of any particular identity, but as an attempt to dismantling the stability of identity as the only way of destroying the basis on which the logic of capitalism functions.
This paper will examine different types of poetic cartographies made by the poet in order to show how the discontinuous relation between space, bodies and language open emancipatory possibilities where perception plays a key role. Finally, it will discuss the influence of this poetic social thought in current critical debates and literary works in Argentina.
Paper short abstract:
This paper approaches the transition from the Cold War into globalization as a shift from static to fluid dynamics in territorial violence and its portrayal in literature, taking the case of the 1969 war between El Salvador and Honduras.
Paper long abstract:
Cultural criticism has suggested an increasing aesthetic of violence and destruction in Central American cultural production as armed left-wing struggles came to an end and the region began to undergo transformation by forces of global capital and drug trafficking. Conversely, territorial disputes among Latin American states frequently caused violent conflict during the Cold War, while increasing regional economic and political integration have diminished the frequency of such disputes in recent years. This paper approaches these political and economic transitions as a shift from static to fluid dynamics in territorial violence and its portrayal in literature. Taking as its case study the so-called Football War of 1969 between El Salvador and Honduras, the paper examines flows of migration and international influence at the time of the war. It then shifts to a longer historical view of the conflict and its aftermath, specifically focusing on images of fencing in spite of (or because of) increasing liquidity. Using newspaper articles, poems, and narrative, the paper considers the tension between, on the one hand, static and delimited and, on the other hand, fluid and mobile representations of the war. It then expands these countervailing dynamics to the ways in which globalization is treated in cultural criticism more generally, as either continuity or discontinuity. The paper suggests that the transition is not as smooth as deterritoritorializing and reterritorializing flows of capital over shorter or longer historical views; the transition sticks on territorialized violence, mixing the static and the dynamic, fencing and liquidity.
Paper short abstract:
La pregunta que pretendo plantear y eventualmente responder en este trabajo es la siguiente: ¿qué implica la legalidad del arte barroco para la teoría crítica? En otras palabras: ¿por qué esta ley formal, esta mímesis barroca, puede ser ejemplar para el discurso crítico?
Paper long abstract:
Durante siglos, ha sido la representación romántica la que ha guiado la configuración del discurso crítico. La idea central de transformar al mundo y emancipar las vidas humanas ha prefigurado un tipo de teoría que se coludió y confundió con el relato utópico y el discurso revolucionario. Al proceder de esta forma, se olvidó la parte central de la teoría crítica derivada del marxismo: su poder de deconstrucción de la discursividad apologética del capital o, dicho en términos ya es desuso, su crítica a la fenomenología idealista que tuvo su materialización en los discursos de la economía y política del cuerpo social moderno. El proceder barroco, por el contrario, precisa para su propia existencia del desmontaje constante de los mundos y estilos establecidos. No es un arte que cree nuevos materiales, ni figuraciones, sino que desmonta y reconfigura lo que está dado; de ahí su caducidad en el tiempo, su vuelo sublime, su estrategia oportunista. Es un arte de misa en escena, donde se apuesta radicalmente a la "representación" y "reproducción" absoluta, en términos de Bolívar Echeverría. Por esto es elocuente el hecho del mestizaje cultural y semiótico que se observa constantemente en el discurso y el arte barroco y neobarroco; por esto es un arte y estilo tan atraído por aquello que es desechado y que puede retomar para su ornamentación, representación, reproducción y teatralidad infinita. En este trabajo se mostrará cómo la teoría crítica contemporáneo en Latinoamérica no ha sido ajena a este proceder.