A sua pesquisa

El ensayo parte del análisis de la novela “Leviatán” de Paul Auster para reconstruir un contrapunto entre dos formas de concebir una práctica literaria crítica, políticamente comprometida, ligada a diferentes presupuestos acerca del autor, el lenguaje y el lector. A partir del análisis de esas concepciones, se formulan algunos interrogantes que permiten elucidar críticamente las implicaciones de cada posición.

En las páginas que siguen examinaré algunas consecuencias de la inestabilidad funcional del sujeto poético en la poesía actual, entendido este como algo más que una manifestación morfológica o un distribuidor deíctico que operan en el poema para sustentar una determinada cohesión enuncia¬tiva y discursiva. Esos dos parámetros, en concordancia con lo resuelto previamente por la narratología respecto a la figura del narrador en el relato, resultaron largamente privilegiados por las aproximaciones formal-estructuralista y semiótico-sintáctica al texto poético. Lo fueron, es cierto, en un segmento histórico en el que el propio concepto de poema solía ser más restringido en términos formales, elocutivos y culturales que el hoy comúnmente manejado, quizás por ins¬cribirse aquella coyuntura en lo que Jacques Rancière (2005) ha llamado régimen representativo del arte y de la literatura. En él, por cierto, la postulación desde la propia obra de un sentido de comunidad ética se impone a cualquier movimien¬to emancipatorio, algo esto último que para Rancière es más propio de un segundo régimen de identificación actuante en el terreno artístico, el estético. En correspondencia, el público, la audiencia, quienes leen en aquel primer régimen, se recono¬cerían como espectadores antes que como actores en el espacio material y simbólico por ellos ocupado. Justo por esto nos interesará igualmente la proyección que lo anterior introduce en los planos de la intersubjetividad y de lo público. Si bien, para creer que tal proyección resulte en algún sentido efectiva, o por lo menos real, en cualquiera de los dos regímenes de identificación indicados, no es exigible ya la convicción de que la poesía sea un arma cargada de futuro al modo –referencial, temático, retórico, performativo…– en el que determinados programas literarios e ideológicos próximos al socialrealismo comprendieron el lugar político del poema y en general del arte a lo largo de una buena parte del siglo XX.

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.

En 1990, Llorenç Barber explicaba nun programa de televisión, Sitio Distinto, como todos os seres humanos levamos un campanario na nosa memoria. O conxunto de badaladas que se produce no noso sistema neuronal e social fai que a vida teña sentido, que teña musicalidade. Porén, o conxunto de badaladas poden derivar nun ruído que deriva en confusión. Isto mesmo é extensible na hora de realizar exercicios memorísticos. Ás veces é o ruído o que non nos permite chegar a un produto que non figura no canon ou tamén nos imposibilita a manexar coa maior autonomía conceptos, ideas ou textos dende os postulados que os orixinan. Isto último é o que pretendemos acometer neste artigo. Escollemos facer memoria dun pasado moi próximo, pero á vez moi afastado por descoñecemento. Para tal finalidade, focalizamos un produto pluridisciplinario: o programa Sitio Distinto, dirixido por Antón Reixa e emitido pola Televisión de Galicia (TVG) en 1990. Con el, contemplamos atinxir dous obxectivos. O primeiro é o de describir e dar a coñecer un produto cultural que define un habitus (Bourdieu, 1992) que se desenvolveu na praxe artística do campo entre a Transición política do franquismo á democracia e o seu asentamento nos anos oitenta.

Esta tese de doutoramento pretende nun primeiro momento afondar na historia e análise do grupo poético Rompente, así como no seu contexto social e cultural. A partir deste marco examínase o concepto vangarda e como se desenvolveu no espazo temporal da Transición á democracia e autonomía de Galiza. Desta forma, a dixitalización e establecemento da obra de Rompente en soporte dixital facilitará o posterior estudo e dotará a comunidade investigadora dunha serie de documentos que, en moitos casos, ficaron inéditos ou descatalogados, polo cal o seu acceso era difícil de encamiñar. Estes pretenden focalizar o discurso de vangarda na Transición e na construcción do campo literario galego nesta altura. Así, o marco cronolóxico que abrangue a investigación é o que corresponde ao período de 1975 (nacemento da formación) até 1983 (disolución do grupo). A partir das novas interpertacións verbo da Transición revísase o campo literario galego, especialmente no que atinxe ao xénero lírico, mais dende un prisma socioliterario. Paralelamente, o marco teórico empregado encádrase nas dinámicas sociolóxicas de P. Bourdieu, E. Sanguineti e X. González-Millán. Este modelo de traballo permítenos entender mellor o desenvolvemento do campo, o rol da vangarda como repertorio a camino entre ideoloxía, política e praxe literaria, e tamén para desglosar a historia do grupo Rompente da forma máis exhaustiva posible. A revisión de conceptos chave como literatura nacional, vangarda, posmodernidade ou vangarda posmoderna, historiografía ou desconstrucción forman parte da escrita da tese. Non se busca nesta investigación unha reflexión dende a teoría da literatura destes conceptos. Forman parte do modelo teórico e explícanse en documento anexo, así é como se aportan apuntamentos verbo das dinámicas destes termos e como foron entendidos e practicados neste momento da historia do campo. O grupo Rompente amosou no seu devalar tres tipos de escrita: a) ensaio, b) creación poética e c) performance e produción radiofónica. Desta forma, desenvolveranse dous tipos de análise paralelos. Por una banda imos atender a produción teórica (sempre en cotexo coa teorías contemporáneas e practicadas en campos paralelos), para nun seguinte capítulo entender mellor a praxe literaria emanada do grupo. Atendendo a este último espazo de análise imos destacar tres tipos de texto. En primeiro lugar teriamos o texto poético estrictu senso, no que se analizan os documentos publicados (Crebar as liras, Follas de Resistencia Poética, Silabario da turbina, Triloxía dos Tres Tristes Tigres e A dama que fala), o manifestó Fóra as vosas sucias mans de Manoel Antonio! e tamén aquelas colaboracións illadas en revistas da época. A performance sería a segunda liña de traballo do grupo, da cal daremos conta a partir das análises practicadas por axentes críticos como A. Kaprow ou R.-L Goldberg, pretendendo demostrar como na Transición se deron experiencias vanguardistas que empatan coas dinámicas máis innovadoras na esfera internacional. En último lugar focalizaremos a experiencia radiofónica con Radio Esquimal e aqueles textos inéditos que rescatamos para dixitalizar e dar a coñecer. Estes tamén os imos pór en diálogo con outras experiencias paralelas noutros campos como o traballo desenvolvido por S. Beckett. A nivel xeral, desenvolveranse diferentes interpretacións do fenómeno literario de vangarda e do concepto de ideoloxía. Considero que as teorías da socioloxía da literatura e as dos Cultural Studies poden amosar un rendemento óptimo, xa que se intenciona describir como o grupo Rompente desconstrúe socio-literariamente e ideoloxicamente a vangarda mundial para o campo literario galego.

This study presents an analysis of the appropriation of public space by cultural producers in Cuba, with a focus on art collectives, in particular, OMNI Zona Franca from Alamar, east of Havana. Based on primary research conducted with the artists, cultural producers, and scholars, I discuss OMNI’s work in the context of the history and formation of a nascent movement for civil society in Cuba, locating the collective’s work within the matrix of alternative and African diasporic cultural production. The latter is framed as part of a historical continuum and in the context of the discussion of race that emerged in Cuba’s public sphere during the 1990s with a concurrent movement among black Cuban artists to address issues of race. Situating OMNI’s work in a longer history of Afro-Cuban cultural production in Cuba as well as within the history of art collectives this study demonstrates how OMNI’s participation in the public sphere relates to social practice, appropriation of space, alternativity, and the forging of a wide coalition of civil and artistic alternatives among diverse communities. I draw on discourses on the production of space, particularly those of Henri Lefebvre and Raymond Williams, and argue that the unique and specific history of Alamar provided a fertile ground for alternative culture where multiple and countercultural expressions could be incubated and take root. The struggle over public space and the attempts by artists to create an autonomous public sphere in Cuba have led to continual conflict with the state. Using Gramsci’s theorization of civil society as incorporating both the hegemonic and contestatory realms, I contend that the level of contestation in OMNI Zona Franca’s work should be seen as counter-hegemonic expression aimed at altering the status quo. Producing new social relations, the collective’s practice is offered as an example of how art and cultural production is inaugurating alternative counter-spaces in the context of a demand for a more inclusive and representative Revolutionary public sphere.

He is the outlaw who has been dragged reluctantly, but relentlessly, ever closer to the art establishment. He is the artist who mocked museums and art galleries alike. Yet he chose to mount his first major exhibition in one of the crustiest museums imaginable – amidst the stuffed animals and the antique pianos of Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery – and made a huge success of it. When, in 2010, Time magazine selected him for its list of 100 most influential people in the world, along with the likes of Barack Obama, Apple’s Steve Jobs and Lady Gaga, he supplied a picture of himself with a paper bag (recyclable of course) over his head. For he is an artist unique in the twenty-first century: famous but unknown. He claims he needs this anonymity to protect himself from the forces of law and order. This was true in the past, but at this stage in his career most cities would welcome a new Banksy on the wall. The argument would be how best to preserve it, not how to lock up its creator. This book does not attempt to unmask him. Tales of scuttling around his home town of Bristol trying to convince childhood friends to reveal his identity would not make for very interesting reading. More important is the fact that fans, followers and even those who are just vaguely aware he exists, don’t want to know who he is. The New Statesman critic who derides it all as ‘ostentatious anonymity’ is very much in the minority. We all enjoy the mystery of the man who has somehow managed to get himself described as ‘Robin Hood’ even though he is hardly robbing the rich to feed the poor. What this book does do, however, is to follow his upward spiral from the outlaw – just one of many – spraying the walls of Bristol in the 1990s to the artist whose work commands hundreds of thousands of pounds in the auction houses of Britain and America. The outsider who has become an insider.

Introduction The experiences of democratization in Latin America and Eastern Europe in the 1980s and early 1990s brought attention to the forces of civil society as key actors in the demise of authoritarian rule (O’Donnell and Schmitter 1986; Cohen and Arato 1992; Bernhard 1993; Linz and Stepan 1996). More recent literature questions the inherently pro-democratic character of civil society activism (Warren 2000; Armony 2004; Jamal 2007). In both lines of argument, societal associations or social movements are at the core of the inquiry. However, Hirschman’s category of “voice,” which encompasses as much articulation of discontent as it does actions of protest (Hirschman 1970), reminds us that for civil society activism to evolve, something fundamental is necessary: an arena in which voices can be raised and heard and in which government and society interact. The question of civil society, thus, is intrinsically linked to the conditions, contours, limitations and possibilities of communication, media and the public sphere. Ever since the term “Facebook revolution” (Smith 2011) was coined for the social mobilizations that led to the downfall of the Mubarak regime in Egypt, this link between communication, civil society activism and democratization has received great media attention. However, most of this attention focused on the mobilizing potential of the digital media at the moment of rupture. This chapter takes a contemporary perspective as it seeks to contribute to our understanding of the Internet’s impact on civil society dynamics in a non-pluralist context through a diachronic comparison. Based on an empirical study of the Cuban case, the argument is as follows. Prior to the entry of the Internet, the civil society debate centered around the quest for higher degrees of autonomy for associations and institutions within the framework of the state-socialist regime. In contrast, the new media enabled the emergence of a new, less state-dependent type of public sphere; as a consequence, the civil society debate has become increasingly centered on the assertion of individual citizenship rights within andvis-à-vis the state. The reformist civil society quest of the pre-Internet period failed in part because of its character as behind-the-scenes-struggle, shielded from public view, which impeded a broader mobilization of protest when the state decided to rein in the incipient push for civil society. In contrast, the current drive for civil society indeed finds strong public repercussion; for its democratizing potential to come to fruition, the crucial fault-line is to connect web-based voice to public debate and social action in the country’s physical off-line environment. By taking Cuba as object of empirical analysis, this study selects a case with a particularly thorough form of authoritarian hold over the public sphere: a formal monopoly of the Cuban state on mass media, established in the historic experience of twentieth-century state-socialism and upheld even two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the same time, Cuba is strongly exposed to transnational influences and a transnational articulation of voice, due to a large number of emigrant and diaspora communities that remain highly attached to their country of origin (Fernández 2005). The approach chosen to analyze the impact of the Internet on state-society relations is through a diachronic comparison of the Cuban development in two distinct periods: the pre-Internet period, i.e., Cuba in the early to mid 1990s, when the Cold War alignment had already become history but web-based technologies did not yet have a major presence on the island; and more than a decade later, since the mid to late 2000s, when web-based media had made their entry on the island. Formal data on Internet access and use are scarce and unreliable. For 2009, the Cuban Ministry of Informatics and Communications gives the figure of 1,450,000 Cubans, or 12.7 percent, as “Internet users” (ONE 2009)1 without specifying the precise uses this number includes. The figure certainly should not be mistaken for access to the World Wide Web, which remains severely restricted. Instead, the figure most probably includes all Cubans with some kind of (even if only sporadic) access to closed domestic networks or with access to e-mail services. At the same time accounts are shared and, as for other goods and services, also Internet access has a black market side that escapes official statistics. Moreover, Internet content “travels” by USB stick also to many who do not have access themselves. For both these periods, the study relies on the analysis of numerous primary documents, as well as newspapers and secondary literature. In the case of the post-Internet phase, in addition to the above, documents published on the web have been a primary source of analysis. While some authors link issues of civil society and Internet voice merely to the political opposition, this chapter does not limit its focus to this divide but analyzes as much societal actors working within the established institutions of the socialist state as well as those outside of it. In both periods under scrutiny field trips to the island were undertaken in which actors from a broad range of positions were interviewed. While these interviews are not cited directly due to political sensitivities, they provide an invaluable background for the trends described.

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').

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).