Papers by Liliana E . Correa
PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, 2021
Poetics in times of pandemic: There is always going to be a ‘before’ and ‘after’ This paper bri... more Poetics in times of pandemic: There is always going to be a ‘before’ and ‘after’ This paper briefly explores a number of different themes affecting us as creatives living in lockdown in Sydney. Sharing our personal story of how we imagined our lives would be before COVID 19 and the changes we observed after entering in Pandemic mode. Intertwining images taken with a mobile phone and text, we offer our observations on the evolving new language that appears around us, in supermarkets, on walls and on the footpath. Signs determining social interactions and affecting behaviour day by day. We also touch on the idea of how writing can bring us home and make us feel closer to our languages and countries of origin. We mention the importance of the survival of theatre to tell stories from the time of the pandemic. Governments have been found wanting, due to lack of care of the most vulnerable people, in particular First Nations. We reflect on the need for reinvention accepting change and r...
My connection with this land, therefore, is based on dispossession-which is true for the whole of... more My connection with this land, therefore, is based on dispossession-which is true for the whole of settler society. We cannot wave this history away (…). (Connell 2007 p. 203). The whole history of imperialism, migration and colonial settlement involves dispossession and loss of connection. (Connell 2007 p.203) Herstory: Two ends of two southern lands containing histories, as similar as they are different. Close to the ground I can feel the breeze passing over my neck. Slowly, ever slowly, I move. I want to fly, extend my wings, jump onto the air… fly… float… slide and let go. Yes, just let go… Awaken one eye still in midair the other fixed on my ceiling… dislocating my wings in one direction, my legs another, I want to move… A sound is stuck between my heart and my throat and the sound is dead, mute… then I dance, following a stream of light breaking through the glass on the other side of the room. Desire takes me to the other side. Dance the dancer, dance away, breath in and out, let the body float and reach for the window in a continuous line, and if there is no window then make one with the tip of my fingers. Para llegar a casa solo hay que abrir las alas y saltar al vacio. Comenzar al principio y dejarse llevar. All I need to do to arrive home is to spread my winds and jump into empty space. Start at the beginning and let myself go. Begin where all stories begin. Following the line that will make me move from one moment to the next. Then I feel her hand holding mine tracing lines on a kitchen table and the window is hers; her smells and tastes of magically produced neverending sources of nourishment. I learn to make do and to write. And that is herstory, full stop. Arriving at myself-inscribing myself on this land. The sound is finally formed and pushes out of my chest, like a newborn: another story begins one summer in Dorrigo National Park. 1 I feel my culture in my skin. I was made to believe that this does not change. But one can shedááá a skin. Women do this all the time, growing new ones that allow us to cross the next desert. A new skin requires more walking so we keep on walking across, under, or over 1 I have intertwined through the text a personal and creative voice. This is signalled by the use of italics. Also when Spanish is used a translation will follow immediately after. The Politics of Cultural Visibility: Latin American Arts Practice in Sydney highways. Other times páramos appears and we stay still, in one spot, looking far away into the horizon, listening to the call of drums across the ocean. A guarding thought frames my thinking as I begin this journey; a fear of losing and not being true enough to my history. My language was masculine and my concepts around culture, essentialist. Both changed, shifted, shed old skins, and moved on, crossing waters, arriving to the other side, still shaking and sometimes confused. I reiterated myself in the masculine without even realising that the visible 'he' was a travesty of myself. As Connell proposes, my connection with this land and my own is also one of dispossession, a Creole with Guarani and Spanish blood, I cannot speak my mothers' language nor can I claim either ancestry. Daughter of dictatorial regimes, the language I learnt had patriarchal undertones and qualities of resistance. One more skin to shed. In literal translation from Spanish to English I acquired a new language and reinvented myself one more time on this side of another South, without waiving my responsibilities or losing my core. At a personal level this journey made me question, rethink, and challenge how to negotiate my position as a cultural worker in Australia. My thinking changed and literature took me back to the continent I had left and was still trying to understand. I found an intellectual home that does not need me to be in translation. I found my own 'escritura femenina'.2 2 This is in reference to the literature imprinted on my own writing with the influence from French feminists writers such as Helene Cixous. One tension that arose earlier was between the masculinity of a language I learnt as my 'mother tongue'-ironically-and the new acquired language, in a culture I am trying to understand. ~2~ The Politics of Cultural Visibility: Latin American Arts Practice in Sydney ~6~ The Politics of Cultural Visibility: Latin American Arts Practice in Sydney with its own political and historical trajectories influenced by the symbolic productions and living experiences of social realities in Latin America (Trigo 2003 p.3). My proposition is, as Latin Americans in Australia, we can continue to explore the tensions within these social realities as a way to problematise and challenge existing power relations, and to self-reflect as practicing artists, writers and academics on our work in the Australian multicultural context. If cultural practice in Australia has traditionally looked outwards and towards the metropole, that is Europe and the United States, Australian Latin Americans can, in our process of creating and becoming subjects/objects of enquiry, perhaps look inwards and South. Overview of the research Approaching my problematic from interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspectives, I sought to produce an impact on learning across disciplines while engaging in research to provoke larger visions and deeper questioning of each other from our places of practice. This also allowed me to ground my research within a number of different and complementary theoretical paradigms, framed by concepts arising from the critique of post-colonial theory dominated as it is by western epistemologies (Southern Theories perspectives). As a practitioner I also looked at theories used by artists, utilising practice-led research methodologies and new media theories.
PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies
This article is a reflection on the application of the Cuban literacy methodology Yo, Sí Puedo to... more This article is a reflection on the application of the Cuban literacy methodology Yo, Sí Puedo to the Australian setting. The Yo, Sí Puedo / Yes, I Can! model developed in Cuba by the Instituto Pedagógico Latinoamericano y Caribeño, IPLAC (Institute of Pedagogy for Latin America and the Caribbean) has been successfully implemented across the Global South as a strategy of adult literacy. It is a legacy of our Latin American revolutionary roots, with its origin in the Freirean pedagogy of the oppressed. Expanding across continents this model continues to teach reading and writing to disenfranchised adults in marginal and Indigenous communities, from the Argentinean Chaco to Brewarrina in northern NSW, Australia. Its aim is to contribute to the hope of improving the health and educational outcomes of the country’s First Peoples. This article is indebted to conversations with the Cuban advisor of Yes, I Can!, José Manuel Chala Leblanch. Observing him working in the classroom setting of ...
PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, 2010
The lover: plural and fluid Sometimes more the mother than the woman Sometimes more the lover tha... more The lover: plural and fluid Sometimes more the mother than the woman Sometimes more the lover than the mother Never-the-Less nor the-More
PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, 2012
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Papers by Liliana E . Correa