A sua pesquisa

[A1] “Exuberancia selvática” (Naval, 2010: 119), “maraña” (Prieto de Paula, 2010: 28), archipiélago de “poetas-isla” (Sánchez, 2015: 6), “convivencia sosegada de idearios” (Morante, 2016: 12), “diáspora” (Floriano y Rivero Machina, 2016: 225), “insobornable pluralidad” (Díaz, 2016: 11): son algunos de los términos y metáforas que la academia ha empleado a la hora de referir la multitud y variedad de autores y propuestas que desde hace quince años jalonan el escenario poético de la España actual. Puestos a elegir un concepto para proyectar y pensar este horizonte, nosotros preferimos, sin embargo, la imagen del desierto. Por dos motivos. Primero, porque este es un paisaje en permanente y rápida (re)construcción cuyo ecosistema resulta análogo al funcionamiento del campo poético, esto es: un espacio habitualmente considerado como un lugar inhóspito e inexplorado por unos pocos sujetos que en realidad se rige por unas dinámicas vertiginosas de visibilización/invisibilización que ocultan bajo la arena un gran registro de especies. En segundo lugar, porque, si cambiamos el foco de observación, la crítica (tanto por su cercanía temporal a los más recientes creadores como por la avalancha indiscriminada de publicaciones, editoriales y antologías de nuevos nombres, entre otros muchos motivos) todavía no ha abordado las dunas de la poesía actual con una visión global y panorámica. Sí ha dado constancia de su presumible diversidad, sobre todo a través de estudios parciales, aunque sin adentrarse en sus detalles. Somos conscientes, por tanto, de que este paraje puede parecer caótico, inconexo o efímero en un primer vistazo –de hecho, quizás lo sea, como la propia orografía de un desierto–. Ahora bien, creemos que un estudio sistemático podría revelar huellas, rutas y senderos sobre los que no se ha focalizado, e incluso destacar tendencias y puntos de inflexión en la poco transitada, pero bulliciosa, historia de la poesía española joven de los últimos años. En este sentido, los párrafos que siguen se ofrecen como un intento de exploración –y palimpsesto para futuros mapas– de sus coordenadas esenciales; también de las temporales.

En la escena poética de fines del siglo XX, un nutrido conjunto de voces ha vueltoa interrogarse sobre el sentido del binomio literatura-compromiso, reabriendo el debate entorno a un asunto que parecía cancelado por las conquistas democráticas y la condiciónescéptica de la posmodernidad. Se trata de una serie de propuestas que, desde planteamientosestéticos a veces enfrentados, colabora en la elaboración de respuestas, o siquiera deincómodas preguntas, ante las urgencias del espacio público originadas por el nuevo escenariode la globalización, las contradicciones del capitalismo postindustrial y las presioneshomologadoras de la sociedad contemporánea. A la luz de un corpus significativo de poéticas,que postulan modos diversos de encarar las relaciones entre poesía, historia, ideología opolítica, este trabajo persigue aquilatar el significado y los matices que en la coyuntura deentresiglos ha ido tomando la noción histórico-literaria de compromiso. Una noción que, porun lado, se encarna en discursos poéticos retóricamente heterogéneos; y, por otro, acusa unavisible renovación de sus fundamentos teóricos, y de sus ideales formales y temáticos, queautoriza a hablar de un compromiso después del compromiso, al romper con algunas de susclaves más arraigadas e instaurar una quiebra con los modelos históricos más emblemáticos.

La poesía está desnuda, siempre lo estuvo, a pesar de su corte de aduladores que nos dicen que solo se engalana con los más absurdos ropajes de su conveniencia. La extensa red de silencios, complicidades y favores que recubren su visibilidad, convertida en producto cultural de las élites, ha hecho imposible la evidencia: la poesía está desnuda y su historia tiene más que ver con la exclusión y el sectarismo, que con el rigor crítico e histórico. Mientras siga en manos de las élites intelectuales, ellas mismas producto de un nepotismo y un clientelismo servil y endogámico, mientras siga disuelta entre los mitos que esa misma élite intelectual sostiene, y mientras siga presa de una investigación crítica perezosa, enrocada en el precedente, la cita y la reproducción de las tesis de los facultados para favorecer la promoción discipular y académica, nunca sabremos qué es lo que ha pasado en nuestras letras. La historia quedará escrita como hasta ahora en función de mandarinatos, redes clientelares muy disciplinadas que tejen auténticas tramas de control e influencia institucional, políticas editoriales y operaciones de promoción de determinados relatos en consonancia con el discurso dominante y, de paso, silencian o barren toda disidencia, toda oposición. Sobre esta contradicción fundamental, la desnudez de la poesía y el exceso de vestuario producido por los que han querido agostarla a su gusto, se ha construido la historia de la poesía española contemporánea. Juicios que defienden los intereses de la familia o la tendencia, constituyendo una especie de egoísmo gregario que sólo protege sus intereses de grupo; unido, paradójicamente, a un fuerte individualismo y egocentrismo a la hora de juzgar la realidad no como lo que es, sino como a uno le parece que es, en tanto guerra por el significado y el control de la palabra, de cara a establecer un discurso totalitario y hegemónico, y la ignorancia de la ideología como un serio obstáculo para interpretar la realidad en la medida que la ideología construye lo real. Sobre estos pilares se construye hoy la poesía española y se impide el conocimiento liberador, pero los mitos y los ídolos no son obstáculos insalvables, más si, a cambio, lo que proponemos es una solución reactiva a unas prácticas amorales y prepotentes.

El escenario poético español de los últimos treinta años ha reformulado el compromiso desde distintos ángulos estéticos e, incluso, como una opción inicial que marque toda una producción textual, ajena a la urgencia y la exigencia histórica. Este pequeño giro con respecto a la concepción primitiva del compromiso poético español y el engagement sartreano rompe, sin lugar a dudas, las barreras de la provisionalidad estética en aras de una responsabilidad ética-moral que ya no es opcional, sino que se incorpora como un derecho y un deber del contrato social-poético.

Questions of public space – and in particular their visual aspects – have been central to debates over public engagement and belonging, but the city’s audible spaces have not received the same attention. What is surprising is that language, itself an essential instrument and domain of the public, the medium through which public discussion takes place, is simply taken for granted. Despite the sensory evidence of multilingualism in today’s cities, there has been little sustained discussion of language as a vehicle of urban cultural memory and identity, or as a key in the creation of meaningful spaces of contact and civic participation. This special issue aims to nourish debate on urban language by introducing the idea of the translational city. What is the difference between the translational and the multilingual city? Multilingualism calls to mind a space of plurality and diversity, with no particular idea of hierarchy or organization. Translation proposes an active, directional and interactional model of language relations. Translation becomes a key to understanding the cultural life of cities when it is used to map out movements across language, to reveal the passages created among communities at specific times. All cities are translational, but there are historical moments when language movements are key to political or cultural reversals.

This article explores the semantic implications of the concept of tedio through a comparative analysis of Rosalia de Castro´s novel, Flavio, and Edgar Allan Poe’s tale, «The Man of the Crowd». Like spleen and ennui, hispanic tedio is an emotional concept inseparable from the industrial dynamic of the modern city. In this sense, it can be read as a symptom of the profound modification of aesthetic and sociological aspects of narrative which took place in the second half of the XIX century.

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.

In October 2007, over the course of a weekend, several hundred people descended on Coronel Pringles, a small town in the Argentine pampas. For two days they would participate, along with many of the town’s residents, in a series of workshops and performances held under the aegis of the Asociación Civil Estación Pringles, an organization founded in 2006 and headed by the poet Arturo Carrera. This inaugural event centered on the practice of declamation, one of the ‘viejas prácticas sociales y artı́sticas’ (‘timeworn social and artistic practices’) that Estación Pringles seeks to place into dialogue with the work of contemporary artists, writers and performers. In its founding statement, the project casts this dialogue in theatrical terms, calling itself ‘una plataforma o una escena donde prácticas estéticas dispersas en un espacio lateral puedan agregarse, articularse, hacerse visibles’ (‘a platform or scene where aesthetic practices, scattered throughout a lateral space, might come together, be articulated, become visible’). Indeed, an emphasis on theatricality would reappear in Carrera’s closing remarks to the 2007 gathering, in which he couches the practice of declamation in terms of a ‘teatrito,’ a ‘little theater’ (Estación Pringles).

El objetivo de este trabajo es realizar un análisis comparativo de la semiosis del espacio urbano en cinco poemarios publicados recientemente en la ciudad de Buenos Aires: Aquel corazón descamisado (2002) de Luis Tedesco, El carrito de Eneas (2003) de Daniel Samoilovich, La rebelión del instante (2005) de Diana Bellessi, Solos y solas (2005) de Tamara Kamenszain y Poemas del sin trabajo (2007) de Eduardo Mileo. En todos ellos se textualizan voces, miradas e itinerarios que atraviesan la ciudad contemporánea, apelando a una gran diversidad de imágenes, tópicos y estrategias discursivas. La tríada conceptual crisis-deconstrucción-empatía permitirá leer en conjunto diferentes modalidades en que los textos poéticos traducen y reenvían a las complejidades del imaginario social.