This paper argues that Jesuits promoted modernity in the Latin American colonies through a Baroque rhetoric and ethos. It analyzes De procuranda indorum salute, a text published in 1588 by Jos & eacute; de Acosta, one of the most influential organic intellectuals of the Society of Jesus. Acostas' text constitutes a fundamental guide for evangelization and embodies the Jesuit modernizing impulse. Based on this work and supported by the thinking of the philosopher Bolivar Echeverria, among various historiographic sources, this paper disputes the widespread thesis that establishes a relationship of exclusivity between modernity and Protestantism, a thesis that portrays Catholicism and the Latin American region as retrograde and feudal. Second, this paper proposes, this time in clear opposition to Echeverria, that the program represented by Acosta seeks to orient the colonies toward a modernity with capitalist characteristics instead of an "alternative modernity," as the Ecuadorian philosopher argues. Finally, it concludes that Acostas' strategy requires a solid subjective transformation that falls not only on the Amerindians but, above all, on those who dominate; that is, settlers and missionaries.
This article explores how Aurelio Arturo and Fernando Charry Lara appropriate the conventions of the Western pastoral tradition to tackle the histories ofunequal land ownership and violence in the Colombian countryside. The article demonstrates that Arturo infuses his monumental poem "Morada al Sur" with pastoral tropes to naturalize an order of relationships between rural laborers and wealthy landowners. This order is mirrored in the mental powers Arturo attributes to these social types during moments of idleness: the workers remain intellectually inactive, while the landowners are shown to be engaged in keen mental activity. In making this distinction, Arturos' poem casts meditation on the rural landscape as a privilege ofthe landowners, thus mobilizing aesthetic contemplation to reproduce deep social hierarchies. The article also claims that Charry Laras' poem "Llanura de Tulu & aacute;" turns upside down the pastoral trope of the locus amoenus by reworking several poetic models, particularly Rimbauds' poem "Le Dormeur du val." The article shows that Charry Lara rewrites pastoral to criticize urban misconceptions about the Colombian countryside and stage how trauma renders an experience inaccessible to consciousness. In doing so, Charry Lara reclaims landscape as a space of oblivion where human violence is inscribed and ultimately erased.
This article offers a reading of Contrabando (2008) by Victor Hugo as well as in theoretical and political debates in the field of Latin Amerinovel within the so-called narcoliterature debate in Mexico. It proposes that there is no debate, because there is no genre; or rather, that the genre itself exists in one single novel, Contrabando. This article also develops understanding of politics as an accumulation of social strategies that forms of politics, or rather infrapolitics. Finally, this article introduces and develops the notion of cumulation, which underlies (and subverts) capitalist accumulation. Contrabando illustrates how any attempt to transform cumulation into accumulation has vanished. That is, the novel invites us to (re)think the literary and political landscape, in an epoch of narco-accumulation, as a work of cumulation where history, politics, and economics cumulate in an entropic order.
Miguel de Silveiras'El Macabeo (Naples, 1638), a sacred epic in Gongorine style based on the biblical Books of Maccabees, has generally been read in terms of the New Christian authors' supposed crypto-Judaism or, conversely, his Catholic orthodoxy. Through a case study of a single lyrical episode, the lamentation of an allegorical Jerusalem as a grieving widow, the article goes beyond this binary to demonstrate how the poem appeals to a readership not defined by adherence to one faith or another. This passages' complex layering of allusions to the prophetic and poetic books of the Old Testament, the epics of Tasso and Lope, and the major poems of G & oacute;ngora from the 1610s, primarily his Soledades, are united by dense imagery of seafaring and drowning. They articulate a penitential vision of exile accompanied by an apologetic promise of redemption in dialogue with the sacred history of the period. Methodologically, the analysis also proposes an appraisal of literary biblical adaptation, which brings into consideration the affective resonance of the readers' experience of public performance of sacred texts-in this case, through the Tenebrae liturgy and music-in the reception and exegesis of an open-ended text.
This article revolves around statements by a variety ofpublishers on the role of independent presses in fomenting new reading practices, strategies, and tastes in contemporary Latin America. We asked thirteen publishers from throughout the continent (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, M & eacute;xico, Per & uacute;, and Puerto Rico) to respond to a series of questions about how they conceive of their publishing practices, the methods they use to create and maintain their reading publics, and the economic and political obstacles they face in pursuing their aims. A brief introduction by the compilers situates the publishers' responses in relation to the changing conditions of the Hispanophone publishing industry and the resurgence of independent presses in Latin America in the early twenty-first century.
This article analyzes Cuban poet Ram & oacute;n Hondals'Pr & oacute;tesis, published in 2019, alongside the eponymous musical performance of the work that formed part of artist Luis L & oacute;pez-Ch & aacute;vezs'2019 show El acto total. As with the first two books in his trilogy (Di & aacute;logos and Scratch, published in 2014 and 2019, respectively), in Pr & oacute;tesis Hondal intimates the importance of imagining new (third)spaces of identity. Collaborating on the Pr & oacute;tesis performance with artist L & oacute;pez-Ch & aacute;vez, as well as sound engineer Esteban Bruz & oacute;n, composer Santiago Barbosa, and the musical ensemble Vocal Luna, Hondal also emphasizes the importance of reading beyond books. With print increasingly devalued in our digital, consumerist world, Hondal suggests that artistic collaborations are critical in creating poetic prostheses to remember the past and create new, if evanescent, imaginaries.
As technology evolves, Augusto de Campos has adapted early concrete poems to media formats beyond the page. His works, spanning the verbivocovisual range, include concrete, visual, kinetic, video and digital poetry, poetic sculpture, painting, experimental music, and performance, and elicit kinesthetic practices of embodied reading. Reinventing poems from one medium to another, de Camposs' works become material, three dimensional, sonorous, and kinetic, encouraging a multi-sensorial reading experience. His poems move and acquire a corporeal existence, actualizing a kineticism that was always present in a virtual or potential state. For de Campos, kinetic poetry is a type of concrete poetry in which motion becomes a primary way to signify, endowing words with expressive force and transmuting them into animated word-objects. As words drift, appear, and disappear, whether viewed on a computer screen, a virtual reality headset, or projected against surfaces, the poem becomes an assemblage that the reader can relate to in an embodied way. Readers experience de Camposs' poetry as an "interactive ensemble" (Shellhorse). Through multiple transcreations poems accrue affective and semantic charge, and increased physicality. By returning to the same poems, de Campos generates multilayered poetic assemblages, materializing William Carlos Williamss' definition of the poem as a machine: a mechanism that the embodied reader can experience through multiple senses.
Julio Cort & aacute;zar and Cristina Peri Rossi are two Latin American mid-twentieth century writers who were close friends and enjoyed an ongoing personal correspondence, including published poetry and essays dedicated to one another. This essay explores a fictional correspondence between them by comparing the striptease scenes in two of their novels, Cort & aacute;zars'Libro de Manuel and Peri Rossis'La nave de los locos. Both novels feature expatriate and exiled characters in European cities who perform in or become spectators of striptease shows held at clubs in gritty urban surroundings. Although some ten years separate the publication of the two novels, the significance of these scenes in their respective works suggests some heretofore unexplored themes in their shared preoccupation with urban space, exile and displacement, political resistance, gender transgression, sexuality and the body. Rereading these scenes alongside feminist, gender, and performance studies theory from the decades in which the novels appeared, as well as in light of more recent theories on cross-dressing, trans performance and globalization, uncovers new dimensions in the politics ofspace, the body, exile and belonging in these two writers' work.
What happens when a single book becomes multiple? What relations and processes are activated as a book travels across different territories and gets remade by different people, in different places, with different ideas, experiences, and materials? This essay considers these questions by examining the practices and products of networks of small, radical presses in Latin America, drawing on insights from the growing fields of feminist translation studies and feminist bibliography. Over the past decade, radical publishing in Latin America has been profoundly impacted by the new feminist movements. In this context, the print book has become a renewed site ofpolitical, cultural, and economic intervention, with experimentation flourishing around the ways knowledge production and material culture can foster and promote transnational solidarity by connecting diverse communities of readers across territories. Through the story of the multiple editions of The Book in Movement, I explore how the materiality of print books can be understood as a site of various modes of feminist translation, not only linguistic, but also cultural, economic, and political. In doing so, I argue that these operations of translation articulate and make visible heterogeneous networks of producers, while radically expanding understandings of, and possibilities for, readership.
This essay traces textual and visual representations of newspaper sellers (known as voceadores or papeleros) in Mexico City at the turn of the twentieth century, from the era of the Porfiriato to the early post-revolutionary period. Drawing from such representations in chronicles, novels, illustrations in the press, and photographs from the Casasola archive, the essay contends that these child newspaper sellers functioned as unstable signifiers that signaled both the potential reach and the stark limits of the lettered city. Although in the late nineteenth century papeleros were primarily associated with crime and urban problems, by the 1920s they were discursively and visually incorporated into the narrative of the post-revolutionary nation-state.
A book exchange near a burned-out police station marked the beginning of the Maloca Comunitaria Nicol & aacute;s Guerrero (MCNG), one of Calis' grassroots libraries that emerged during Colombias' 2021 national strike. By creating a space for reading and writing amid ongoing street clashes, neighbors reclaimed public space to resist state repression and honor its victims. This article explores how initiatives like MCNG redefined protest by countering official narratives that criminalize dissent. Drawing on interviews with MCNG members and participant observation, and in resonance with Jos & eacute; Medinas' Epistemology of Protest and his concept of epistemic activism, I argue that these initiatives challenge the repression and delegitimization ofprotest by shifting its meaning from a communicative act to a process of (re)constituting collective identities. The article first situates Colombias' social uprising, emphasizing Calis' pivotal role and the symbolic use of public space, before detailing MCNGs' constitution and guiding principles in resignifying urban space. I then analyze how MCNGs' aesthetic interventions constructed alternative protest narratives through collective practices of reading and writing, forming a community in resistance that reclaims silenced struggles and builds collective memory. These actions foster new "grammars of listening,"as conceptualized by Maria del Rosario Acosta, contributing to a broader redefinition ofprotest in Colombia.
This article analyzes the book of poems Hijos de la bonanza by Spanish writer Roc & iacute;o Acebal Doval. Starting from the explicit intertextuality of its title, the article uncovers the connections between Acebals' poetry collection and Ben Clarks' Los hijos de los hijos de la ira and D & aacute;maso Alonsos' Hijos de la ira, weaving a long lyrical thread that draws together several generations through the reimagination of the concept p"oes & iacute;a desarraigada." Above all, in its search for new ways of understanding millennial lyrical epistemologies and production, this article refutes the use of the label "social poetry" and defends the creation of new critical terminologies that better serve the context in which Spanish poetry is being produced today.
This essay traces the cultural debates on communication and infrastructural development in 1920s Mexico City, during the early years of postrevolutionary reconstruction. Specifically, it dwells on the weekly cultural supplement El Universal Ilustrado and its coverage of networked infrastructure projects such as the expanding telephone network, the magazines' investments in commercial radio, and governmental "innovations" in traffic systems. The essay dwells on an eclectic archive of articles, advertisements, comical poetry, art, and photography, as well as opinion columns and chronicles by young avant-garde estridentistas like Arqueles Vela and Adela Sequeyro. In general, the magazine tended to frame the development of "networked infrastructure" (Graham and Marvin) as a "promising" (Larkin) innovation necessary for Mexicos' recovery, insofar as capitalist development could reintegrate Mexico politically and economically. However, the magazines' eclecticism also welcomed voices that dwelled critically on capitalist modernization. Therefore, along with infrastructures' p"romise,"I analyze three cyborg figures that express contradictions surrounding modernization: the female telephone operator, the radio listener, and the traffic agent. Overall, the essay explores the role an influential urban periodical and the Estridentismo avantgarde had in shaping conflictive imaginaries of networked infrastructures and urbanization in postrevolutionary Mexico City.
This article offers a way of reading literature published in illustrated magazines from the first half of the twentieth century, particularly from the 1920s and 1930s, with a focus on the relationships established at a semiotic-material level between verbal texts, drawing, and print culture. The expressive effects of fiction in illustrated periodicals cannot be dissociated from drawing as a medium interrelated with other media, such as photography in modern periodical print culture. To further develop this proand examines how they contribute to "expanded materialities," that is, the materialities of illustrated print journals in which stories are interwoven in networks of relations with other contents in the magazine issue and with other print culture of the period more widely. The article argues that it is by virtue of these relations that short stories produce certain meanings about modernity through magazines, ones that are overlooked when readers only consider them as textual blocks that can be extracted from a magazine and printed in a book, ignoring their significant semiotic transformations.
This article examines the identification between the figure of the tree and the male homosexual in a selection of essays published by Uruguayan-Argentinian writer Alberto Nin Frias (1878-1937) in the early 1930s. Through the lens ofqueer ecology, the study explores how the relational bonds between humans and nature express subjectivities that challenge both human-centered and traditional sexual norms. The first section discusses the connection between Nin Friass' queer discourse and queer ecology, exploring the sensitive nature of environments that encourage affective and intimate multispecies interactions. These interactions, which Nin Frias describes as bonds of friendship ("vinculos amistosos"), allow for and validate relational forms deemed non-normative or deviant. The second part of the study illustrates the interplay of nature, sexuality, and gender through the writers' reading of Walt Whitmans' "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing". Inspired by the environmental eroticism in Leaves of Grass, Nin Frias challenges the predominantly anthropocentric attitudes that enforce heteronormativity on both humans and more-than-humans.
This article analyzes the final set of notebooks of Ana Roqu & eacute;s'Bot & aacute;nica antillana. The project of these notebooks, to which Roqu & eacute; dedicated some 30 years of her life, presents methodological and statistical innovations while scrupulously observing the practices of the scientific discipline. It combines a standard presentation and analysis of plant species with poems, illustrations, and historical and cultural observations, including information on the local populations' practical uses of plants. In particular, it is a treatise written by a Puerto Rican woman in a context of overt subordination of women, which among other restrictions denied them the right to vote and provided them with only a limited education. The mere existence of these notebooks and the efforts Roqu & eacute; made to publish them constitute an act and a program of intellectual, feminist, and national emancipation. With its scientific character, methodological eclecticism, and political significance, Bot & aacute;nica antillana crystallizes the multifaceted and systematic character of Roqu & eacute;s'intellectual project. It is a work in which the author asserts her expectation for a theoretical, aesthetic, and practical synthesis of the multiple scientific, pedagogical, and political initiatives that she developed over the course ofher life.
This text analyses the relationship between allegory, gender/sex system and extractivism in the novel Do & ntilde;a B & aacute;rbara (1929), by R & oacute;mulo Gallegos. The focus of this article is to prioritize the comparison between the character ofMarisela and a precious stone. In contrast with the masculine aspect and manners of Do & ntilde;a B & aacute;rbara, Marisela represents an idealization of women as a malleable matter. The possibility and process of her refinement makes her a convenient subject for the patriarchal civilization that Santos Luzardo wants to establish in the Arauca. Therefore, Do & ntilde;a B & aacute;rbara, the masculine, independent, autonomous, murderous, and impossible-to-refine woman, portrays economic and social backwardness in the region. Considering the structural opposition between civilization and barbarism in the novel, this article proposes a reading of how Gallegos conceptualizes civilization as a heteronormative and extractive society.
The presence ofghosts can shape how nations are understood. This article analyzes how the appearance of three ghostly presences, namely those of the dictator Juan Vicente G & oacute;mez, the Independence heroes, and the writer R & oacute;mulo Gallegos, continuously shape the Venezuelan nation in the novel Falke (2005) by Federico Vegas. By exploring what each of these ghosts represent and signify, one can understand how two different ideological dynamics have shaped Venezuela throughout its modern history. While one of these dynamics, repeated through political discourse, elevates the nations' heroic past, the other seeks to contravene this view through old literary positivist patterns. Still, both represent the deterioration of the nation.
