Resumen On the Road to Nowhere: A Reading of Franz Galich’s Managua, Salsa City (¡Devórame otra vez!) This article examines how Franz Galich, in Managua, Salsa City (¡Devórame otra vez!), narrates the Central American neoliberal experience from the perspective of the underprivileged. I explore how, beginning with the title, the author positions his protagonists in the neoliberal, fragmented moment. From there, Galich proceeds to document a night in the life of the marginalized. Here, Beatriz Cortez’s concept of cinismo is used to understand how the role-playing, that is central to the novel, brings into question arbitrary social barriers. In so doing, the role-playing affords the protagonists momentary delusions of being able to achieve something other than what they know, therein giving them the agency they need to survive another day. This cynicism, though, is an object of derision because it is shown to be an inadequate tool of social change since, as the author concludes at the end of his novel, it is ultimately futile because it serves only to perpetuate the current system. Instead, something not yet imagined is needed.
Resumen En este trabajo analizo dos de las novelas mas significativas de la autora chilena Diamela Eltit, Lumperica y Vaca sagrada. Presto especial atencion a la forma en la autora plasma en su prosa el uso del cuerpo como significante y la conceptualizacion del lenguaje como espacio, al tiempo aporto ejemplos textuales de la nocion de zonas de dolor, acunada por la propia Eltit. Si bien la critica se ha referido a sus novelas como ficciones elusivas de su cualidad representativa, ningun trabajo hasta la fecha las ha estudiado desde la teoria no-representacional de Nigel Thrift, sumamente relevante por el modo en conecta practicas espaciales, politicas y afectivas. Apoyandome en las propuestas de Thrift, argumento el poder subversivo de la escritura de Eltit radica fundamentalmente en una exploracion material de la experiencia; dicha experiencia, lejos de resultar en pura experimentalidad formal, produce una escritura intensamente emocional, y las dificultades del sistema simbolico del pinochetismo para mediar en esta emocionalidad esto es, para atribuirle un significadola convierten en una herramienta politica subversiva de instrumentalizacion del dolor: algo que, en palabras de Brian Massumi, supondria recobrar el cuerpo que siente frente al cuerpo que tiene sentido.
Resumen Despite winning several international awards and being praised by the critics, the Peruvian film La teta asustada (The Milk of Sorrow, Claudia Llosa, 2008) was deemed racist by some blogospheres and critics. The indigenous peoples have not traditionally controlled their own representations, and thus have been subject to misrepresentations; exoticization, criminalization, infantilization, etc. This paper offers a nuanced multivalent analysis that regards not only images and stereotypes, but also voices, points of view, music and mise-en-scène, in order to argue that The Milk of Sorrow provides an ethnocentric view. Several trauma authors speak of the moral obligation of talking about trauma, to make the public “know,” to mobilize viewers’ responses and to give an opportunity for critical reflection. This last stance is more pressing in the case of indigenous trauma, as their anguish has been largely obliterated from public discourse. Llosa makes a decisive pro-indigenous move in denouncing the traumas, and the lack of citizenship rights suffered during and after the Peruvian Internal Armed Conflict (1980-2000). But, in the process, Llosa also places the path to recovery in the reconciliation between indigenous and “western” lifestyles, and in the necessity of looking forward to a hybrid society in order to recover from the inflicted trauma.
