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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.

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.

Los estudios sobre performance han proliferado de manera excepcional a lo largo de las últimas décadas alentados por el “giro corporal” de las ciencias sociales. A las investigaciones antropológicas y sociológicas se le suma la llamada de atención que desde la teoría del arte se desarrolla a razón de las correspondencias y antagonismos de la acción creativa en los espacios públicos. En esta estela discursiva se imbrican experiencias que se soportan a través de lo corporal, resignificándolo y operando como un nuevo modo de autorreconomiento individual y colectivo. Este artículo trata de proponer una mirada reflexiva hacia el espectro de éstos estudios a través de las experiencias que el artista Nel Amaro ha desarrollado a fin de visibilizar y señalizar cómo las prácticas estéticas intervienen en lo común, en los modos de hacer y habitar.

A medio camino entre el centro barroco de La Habana y las playas situadas al este de la ciudad que anteceden al esplendor de Varadero, la barriada de Alamar forma parte del municipio de La Habana del Este: una ciudad dentro de la ciudad, separada de La Habana Vieja por un túnel tras el cual empieza un mundo que el yuma (término despectivo del argot callejero que designa al turista o al extranjero) tiene pocas posibilidades de contemplar como no sea por la ventanilla de uno de esos taxis que recorren sin paradas el espacio comprendido entre el centro y la costa. Cien mil habitantes divididos en veinticinco barrios construidos entre los años setenta y la mitad de la década de los ochenta. Alamar es la antítesis de esa Habana Vieja disneyficada, con sus calles coloniales y su flujo ininterrumpido de turistas: un tiempo y un espacio dilata-dos, edificios racionalistas separados por unas fluidas arterias que conectan los diferentes barrios, espacios agrícolas, un río, vastas áreas militares en desuso, una decrépita y decadente fachada litoral cubierta de hormigón desde la que se vislum-bran las diferentes áreas y etapas de la zona. Una zona que es la plasmación física del diseño y del fracaso de la Utopía, una vasta Unité d'habitation reproducida a gran escala y en la actualidad deshaciéndose poco a poco por la falta de mantenimiento, infraestructuras, servicios comunitarios, comunicaciones y transporte. Una metáfora perfecta de las paradojas y singularidades de Cuba: la instalación abstracta del modelo socialista (y de su fracaso) en una realidad caribeña hecha de lentitud, relaciones y mestizaje. La expansión urbana de la capital cubana llegó a su culmen y al máximo de su decadencia en esta zona, construida por las Microbrigadas, unos grupos de hombres traídos por el gobierno para edificar uno de los proyectos de urbanización de viviendas sociales más imponentes del país. Un periodo constructivo que quedó interrumpido por la crisis econó-mica que siguió a la caída del Muro de Berlín y a la disolución de la URSS (Periodo especial').

First of all, PICHACAO; is not graffiti. It is something distinct that only happens in Brazil. What a subversion is to sign the city with your own made-up name, especially a city that seems not to be projected for you? Lights, Ca...

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.

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.

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.

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.