Mapping the Invisible: Literature, Politics, and Vision

Catedral Tomada: Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, 2016

What is literature? In her latest work, Representación y resistencia en la literatura brasileña contemporánea, Regina Dalcastagnè responds to this question by interrogating literature as a social construct that acts as both producer and product of systems of social inequality. Critiquing the portrayal of literature as a perfect art form exempt from ideological contamination, Representación y resistencia argues that literature is neither better nor worse than society, but rather part of society, and as such, is shaped by many of the same hierarchies, exclusions and inequalities, which define our world. Yet, it is this same existence as a societal construction that imbues literature with the potential to operate as a democratizing force. This duality guides this book's investigation of literature as a contested territory where questions of literary representation intersect with struggles over political and cultural representation, and where resistance to one's own literary erasure requires an equally impressive variety of tactics and strategies as those employed by social movements.

Revista Hispánica Moderna, 2020

Gragoata, 2018

Seeing was written by José Saramago in 2004, and starts from the assumption that the population can start a silent backlash by casting blank votes in local elections, thus disrupting the normality of the democratic system. Between culpability and action, free choice and the decline of human rights, this book questions the authenticity of democracy as it stands in the present Western societies. Confronted with the dangers of a biopolitical manipulation, casting blank votes hints the potency of a state of exception, in which the population can exercise power based on conscience. This essay looks into the confronting positions of the ruling power and of the population that is governed by that very power. 1 Although I use the title Seeing, which is the translation of the or ig i nal Port ug uese t it le En s a i o s o b re a Lucidez, all references and quotations concern the Portuguese edition. Footnotes include all the quotations I translated f r o m t h e s o u r c e lang uages of all the books used in this essay.

Journal of Lusophone Studies, 2019

This volume's ambition is to respond to major interpretations of Latin American literature—such as Ángel Rama's Transculturación narrativa en América Latina (1982), John Beverley’s Against Literature (1993) and Testimonio (2004), Alberto Moreiras's Tercer espacio (1999), and Brett Levinson's The Ends of Literature (2001)—and to define the contours of this counter-tradition conceived as "a multidisciplinary, minoritarian, and multimedial 'body' of writing that produces affects and new modes of perception" (7).

). PHI Series: Creating Through Mind and Emotions, 2022

Across the world, nationalism and populism are on the rise and wrap up debates about immigra tion, human rights, refugees, and moral responsibility. Whilst nationalism ascertains who is in and out of a community, populism relies on the emotional appeal that common people need to overcome the disinterested and corrupted elite. What is particularly disturbing is the tendency for nationalist and populist policies to introduce legislation that infringes human rights and curbs the independence of the judiciary and democratic institutions, pillars of the rule of law. In this regard, dystopian speculative fiction warns readers about the possible outcomes of the present world by extrapolating key features of populist right-wing rhetoric. This chapter examines two recent novels by Portuguese writers António Ladeira and Nuno Gomes Garcia to show how they operate within what Tom Moylan defined as a critical dystopian narrative. I argue that António Ladeira's Montanha Distante (2020) and Nuno Gomes Garcia's Zalatune (2020) experiment the radical limits of the political and social practices of populist policies, showing their devastating result on the individual and his or her sense of community. I also con tend that these dystopias offer a glimmer of hope by returning to the basic concept of empathy, the cornerstone of cohesive communities, able to face down the corrosive effect of cold and calculating populist policies.

Cosmos and History: the Journal of Natural and …, 2010

Synthesis: an Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies

The crossings between literary theory and criticism, cultural critique, and philosophical thought assumed radically new guises in the wake of poststructuralist discourses in the 1960s. Against the backdrop of the shift of emphasis from the value attached to works and authors to the singularities and multiplicities of readings and readers, the categories of text, language and narrative came to be seen as the structures and processes through which culture, history, and society-the contingent world of the praxis of life even-are mediated. Text and reading soon became malleable categories with which to approach any one form and area of cultural production and historical experience.

In a close reading of a poem written by the Peruvian César Vallejo in 1930, I attempt to stress its philosophical valence by reflecting on the way in which the distinctive experience of thought and of language that it puts into motion may allow us to advance in the direction of at least two questions that, as I try to argue, Derrida’s philosophical discourse opens up in a very provocative way but, nonetheless, leaves rather unexplored. First, the question concerning how to understand the passage from the general description of language and the process of linguistic signification thought in terms of “writing”, to the characterization of the differential potency of transforming a given context of enunciation that certain singular acts of language might have more than others, singular acts of language thought by Derrida in his attempt to account for the specificity of literature. And second, the question concerning how to think the relation, if there is any, between the political effects that literature may have in virtue of this transformative force it enacts, and the configuration of a collective form of political action capable of disrupting and reconfiguring a given social order. As I attempt to show, the philosophical relevance of Vallejo’s writing might derive from the way in which it allows us to think the circuits of affective intensities that a poetic artifact can deploy and, with this, from the way in which it gives us resources to approach these two questions that Derrida’s discourse opens up, but leaves largely unexplored.