Papers by Victor Goldgel-Carballo
Latin American Literature in Transition, 2022
With a focus on Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, this chapter examines the sense of belatedness in ... more With a focus on Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, this chapter examines the sense of belatedness in abolitionist and post-abolitionist literature published between the 1860s and the 1930s. Belatedness implied an affective relationship to the global temporality of abolition—a way of feeling time as shame that shaped literature in long-lasting ways. Writers like José Martí and Machado de Assis reflected on the apparently anomalous status of their nations, where slavery was not abolished until 1886 and 1888, respectively. By analyzing canonical literature in light of the black public spheres that emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth-century, this chapter explores questions such as the rejection of African cultures, whitening ideologies, the fantasy of the submissive slave, the myths and realities of racial democracy, maroonage, and other forms of slave resistance. Other writers analyzed include Maria Firmina dos Reis, Antônio de Castro Alves, Alfonso Henriques de Lima Barreto, Martín Morúa Delgado, and Francisco Calcagno.
On the basis of a previously unstudied testimony, this study approaches the life of a slave from ... more On the basis of a previously unstudied testimony, this study approaches the life of a slave from a methodological standpoint at the crossroads between Literary Studies and History. On 4 October 1853, a black man stepped into the U.S. consulate in Havana. According to the testimony he gave that day, he had been born free in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1812, at the age of ten or twelve, he was hired to work on a sloop that took him to Cuba, where he was kidnapped and sold as a slave. It would take him about forty-one years to reach the consulate and petition for his freedom. Opposing agnosia ("not-knowing") to anagnorisis ("to recognize"), I explore different ways of (not) knowing linked to complicity, hypocrisy, and illegal slavery, while at the same time analyzing the slave's storytelling as a form of mobility.
Piracy and Intellectual Property in Latin America: Rethinking Creativity and the Common Good, 2020
This essay identifies and examines several characteristics of pirate aesthetics, including “impro... more This essay identifies and examines several characteristics of pirate aesthetics, including “improper” forms of reproduction, antielitist access, cheapness, and the perception of the “fake” as real in its own way. Focusing on book production in the context of contemporary Argentine literature, I begin by analyzing piracy in its relation to plagiarism and parody, using El Aleph engordado (The Fattened Aleph) as a clarifying example. The book was first published in 2009 by Pablo Katchadjian, who interpolated words to, or “fattened,” a famous short story by Jorge Luis Borges. In 2015, while Katchadjian was being formally charged with IP fraud, an editor released a new edition of his book. I examine this edition in terms of its materiality (its form, size, binding, etc.) and use it as a springboard for a broader analysis of pirate aesthetics. Precisely because they are noticeably cheap and pirate, I argue, books like El Aleph engordado disrupt the abstract logic of commodity exchange and draw awareness to the fact that IP rights, brands, originals, and single authors are politically and economically motivated social forms that regulate our access to art and knowledge.
Focussing on Cirilo Villaverde's canonical novel Cecilia Valdes (1882), this article explores the... more Focussing on Cirilo Villaverde's canonical novel Cecilia Valdes (1882), this article explores the neglected spectral dimension of its realism. I argue that, while explicitly denying the existence of ghosts, Villaverde engages with their false but real appearance as the only way to accurately represent a world marked by the invisibilization of certain lives. I call this dimension of his writing spectral realism: a mode of representing socially produced absences that is deeply dependent on the 'world of illusions' that the realist writer claims to have left behind and, in particular, on the interweaving of Gothic tropes and Catholic imagery.
Through an analysis of two post-crisis films (Estrellas, Federico León and Marcos Martínez, 2007;... more Through an analysis of two post-crisis films (Estrellas, Federico León and Marcos Martínez, 2007; El nexo, Sebastián Antico, 2005) shot in the largest slum in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this essay sketches the terms for conceptualizing a cultural dimension of the Global South marked by the aesthetic reappropriation of poverty. Working against what has been called Latin America’s persistent “melodrama of poverty,” and avoiding the type of cinematic representation that depicts the slum in terms of violence and uncertainty, the directors of these films highlight the fact that the reappropriation of poverty is often at the base of alternative forms of social and artistic agency. While the ability to work under conditions of material lack has long been an important dimension of Argentine artistic production, their films flaunt deprivation in order to transform precarity into an ideological and aesthetic weapon, re-staging social inequality in a spectacular fashion and advancing inventive modes of action. In this way, they argue that “making do” can also become the basis for an alternative creative paradigm. In their exploration of this paradigm, which allows
slum inhabitants to build a house in two minutes and create a
spaceship out of junk, both films pose far-reaching questions: who has a right to perform? What roles are available for the people of the slum? And, what are the conditions for having artistic and social agency in economically deprived areas?
El pueblo que no participa del movimiento de la moda, es un pueblo muerto para la época. "Modas".
In El llano en llamas, the multiplication of points of view and narrative voices bring about a re... more In El llano en llamas, the multiplication of points of view and narrative voices bring about a reflection on the potentialities and dangers of ambiguous meaning. By appealing to a multiperspectivism that emphasizes discontinuity, Rulfo invite us to examine the violence inherent to the encounter between different voices, and upon the ways in which the coercion and silencing of the other support the construction of hegemonic meaning.
Víctor Goldgel. caleidoscopios del saber... Estudios 18:36 (julio-diciembre 2010): 272-295 recibi... more Víctor Goldgel. caleidoscopios del saber... Estudios 18:36 (julio-diciembre 2010): 272-295 recibido: 12 de noviembre 2010 aceptado: 11 de enero de 2011 the rationalizing project of the lettered city.
Books by Victor Goldgel-Carballo
PIRACY AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN LATIN AMERICA, 2020
Piracy and Intellectual Property in Latin America is the first sustained effort to present an alt... more Piracy and Intellectual Property in Latin America is the first sustained effort to present an alternative framework for understanding piracy and contemporary challenges to global discourses on intellectual property (IP) in the Americas. While piracy might just look like theft and derivative reproduction from the perspective of many right-holders, the contributors to this volume go beyond this economic-driven logic and show how practices of copying are in fact practices of reinvention that reflect the rich social networks and forms of creativity, authorship, commerce, and consumption that characterize informal economies. From a perspective informed by contemporary scenarios in Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Guatemala, and the United States, they engage in a discussion of alternatives that-predicated on the importance of protecting culture-allow for other ways of conceiving prosperity at local, national, regional, and global levels. Examples discussed include video games, clothing, trinkets, music, film, TV, and books.
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Papers by Victor Goldgel-Carballo
slum inhabitants to build a house in two minutes and create a
spaceship out of junk, both films pose far-reaching questions: who has a right to perform? What roles are available for the people of the slum? And, what are the conditions for having artistic and social agency in economically deprived areas?
Books by Victor Goldgel-Carballo
slum inhabitants to build a house in two minutes and create a
spaceship out of junk, both films pose far-reaching questions: who has a right to perform? What roles are available for the people of the slum? And, what are the conditions for having artistic and social agency in economically deprived areas?