Showing papers in "Hispanic Review in 2007"

Are We All (Still) Miguel Ángel Blanco? Victimhood, the Media Afterlife and the Challenge for Historical Memory

Abstract: In current Spanish political discourse, claims to victim status are uniquely persuasive, particularly when they involve political violence. As such, victims constitute a paradoxical source of power. Configured as the site of noble and heroic resistance against assaults on democracy, victimhood has taken on the status of an "empty signifier" (in the sense of Laclau and Mouffe's now classic formulation1) which vying political factions scramble to define on their own terms and thus to use as a means of disqualifying opponents' agendas. Indeed, the figure of the victim is mobilized almost universally in Spain, not only by those claiming to speak on behalf of the victims of ETA, but also through the recent flurry of "victim testimonies" of the Spanish Civil War,2 the political mobilization of the recently excavated mass graves from those years, and even suspected ETA members' public denunciations of police torture and the self-victimization of convicted prisoners' high-profile hunger strikes. After the Madrid bombings of March 2004, the battle to assign a political meaning to the lot of victims (to scavenge the symbolic spoils of political violence) was so fierce that the visibly exasperated spokesperson for the Asociacion de Afectados por el n-M, Filar Manjon, voiced an impassioned indictment against politicians and pundits for having "utilizado [a las victimas] como arma arrojadiza" and "con fines partidistas."3 What appeared to truly trouble Manjon was how the impression of compassion and goodness garnered from alliances with victims can sometimes be disingenuous, if not downright dehumanizing. She was right.Still, the discourse of victimhood is so ubiquitous that a reasonable response to Manjon would be that, nowadays, one can only enter the political sphere by speaking through the victim of one form of political violence or another. For politics in Spain presents itself as an imagined dispute among victims, at times resembling a competition to pile up dead bodies and leave them at an opponent's doorstep, and other times a morbid theater of ventriloquists-or, in the words of the leader of Spain's right-wing Partido Popular, Mariano Rajoy, a "guerra de esquelas."4 Competing modes of enshrinement and moral traps built around victims seek to outdo one another in an ongoing negotiation of what Judith Butler, in a different context, recently called a public "hierarchy of grief" (32). This article does not purport to endorse a specific group of victims as such or to propose a more proper ranking based on academic argumentation. Nor do I wish simply to accuse an entire country of practicing "victimism" as Charles Sykes did in A Nation of Victims, his influential commentary on culture in the U.S. Instead, my goal is to interrogate the symbolic mechanisms by which, again following Butler, "a life becomes, or fails to become, a publicly grievable life," and to question how and why a victim is constituted as such and made to act as "an icon of national self-recognition" (34).Since some of the lives that are becoming publicly grievable in Spain date back to the Civil War, this article inevitably touches on the hot button issue of "historical memory."5 Leftists as well as Basque and Catalan nationalists in Spain increasingly insist-and rightly so, I think-upon the need to unearth (sometimes literally) information and evidence about the atrocities committed and concealed by the Franco regime and, to a lesser extent, by the current constitutional monarchy. Important historical, archaeological, and forensic work has made great strides in this direction.6 Given that the project of historical memory has blossomed in the context of a media obsession with the "lucha contra el terrorismo," though, it is important to be conscious that those killed, wounded, tortured, and imprisoned by Nationalist violence and postwar repression, as they become publicly constituted as victims, implicitly enter into an imagined dialogue with the victims of ETA. …

Manzano's Zafira and the Performance of Cuban Nationhood

Abstract: Domingo del Monte's tertulia, which sought to define Cuban nationalism through literary imaginings, exemplifies Benedict Anderson's belief that the formation of nations is an act of collective will disseminated largely though the medium of writing (73). But the group's white Creole invention of nation was a truncated one that entertained in limited and generally figurative terms the direct participation of Cuba's majority population of color, even within the antislavery narratives it so vigorously cultivated. Despite his periodic mimicry of European models and efforts to placate the tertulia's white readership, Juan Francisco Manzano was engaging in an aesthetic-and political-dialogue with Enlightenment values and ideas of nation that were rather autonomous of white Creole designs. In his last major published work, and his only drama, Zafira: tragedia en cinco actos (Havana, 1842), Manzano responds to Creole literary fantasies of miscegenation as well as Hispanic literary traditions of colonization and delivers his own formula for sovereignty in Cuba, which I suggest holds obscured reference to the 1791 slave revolt of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) and the subsequent establishment of a black republic there in 1804.Late eighteenth-century enlightened, liberal philosophy transformed the political landscape of Europe and sparked successful independence movements in much of Latin America. But nineteenth-century Cuba was characterized by fear and repression, tight censorship, and overt persecution. A series of factors on the island contributed to this continued squelching of autonomy, including what even Simon Bolivar had recognized as a tendency of the white population to remain loyal to the Spanish crown: "Although a handful of progressive individuals favoured independence from Spain, Cuba's economic elite was conservative, fearful of the economic and social consequences of a break with the colonial motherland" (Gott 52). Meanwhile, in Cuba and elsewhere in the Americas, slavery continued to exist in stark contradiction to the values of freedom and equality championed in new and restructured societies. The British impulse towards abolition resulted in its own legal termination of the slave trade, but Spain refused to discontinue its involvement in the practice, despite signing a treaty with Britain in 1817 to do so by 1820 (Gott 59). Moreover, although Spain passed a reformist constitution in 1836 for its own population, it denied the right of Cuba to participate in those reforms, expelled Cuban representatives from the Cortes in 1837, and determined instead that the island would be governed by special rules (Fischer 102).While colonies and new nations in the Americas scrambled to find ways to justify the persistence of slavery in an age that made claims to human equality by birth, Haiti stood as a singular example of black freedom and political self-determination. Its existence in the midst of myriad slaveholding territories was unsettling at best. The slave revolt in Saint Domingue had pushed thousands of wealthy land and slave owners first into Spanish-held Santo Domingo and then into Cuba, bringing with them not only bloody stories of black rebellion that terrified Cuban owners, but also some of their own slaves. Cuba had tried repeatedly to prevent "French" slaves from entering the island in an attempt to prevent the events of Haiti from repeating themselves there. Cuba had suffered its own slave rebellions, which became increasingly frequent in the early nineteenth century. It is difficult to say how many of those were directly influenced by the events in Haiti (Gaspar and Geggus 4-5, 13-18).1 But in white minds, the connection was presumed, and this perpetual fear of slave agency, along with concerns about Creoles seeking independence determined the repressive character of a series of Cuban governorships like that of Francisco Dionisio Vives (1823-1832) and General Miguel Tacon Rosique (1834-38): "Este, que habia apurado la hiel de la derrota en Sur America, trajo con sus amargos rencores la firme determinacion de estirpar con mano dura todo germen de liberalismo para evitar posibles sediciones. …

New Media, Cardboard, and Community in Contemporary Buenos Aires

Abstract: "a modification of the fabric of the sensible, a transformation of the visible given"-Jacques Ranciere, "Art of the Possible" (264)Cardboard is hardly a material we associate with new media or digital technology in general. And yet in considering a series of recent editorial projects in several Latin American cities-editorial projects whose last name is always Cartonera and whose denning attribute is a trash aesthetic of handpainted books made from recycled cardboard-it seems difficult to avoid confronting the present media ecology characterized by these technologies. These editorials produce, on some level, a kind of "new media," although the mere novelty of their enterprise is only the most superficial of their affiliations with this concept. On the contrary, it seems clear to me that these projects also enact a form of production that should be interrogated within a discussion of the forms of sociality associated with new media and the politico-economic landscape they inhabit and condition.The principal project I have in mind was founded in 2003, is based in Buenos Aires, inhabits a modest space down the street from the soccer stadium in La Boca, and bears the name Eloisa Cartonera. The project was launched in post-2001(1) Buenos Aires and has recently opened a sister workshop in Sao Paulo, while also inspiring similar groups in Lima (Sarita Cartonera), La Paz (Yerba Mala Cartonera), Santiago (Animita Cartonera), and Mexico City (Lupita Cartonera). The project has attracted increasing attention since its inception, as much from the world of the visual arts as within the literary sphere proper, a trend visible in its participation in the exhibits "Civilizacion y Barbarie [argentinos contemporaneos] " (2004) and arteBA (2004), both in Buenos Aires, and "Lo Material No Cuenta" (2006-07), in Madrid. Perhaps as a consequence of this notoriety, the editorial recently published, in conjunction with the Akademie Scholss Solitude, a text titled No hay cuchillo sin rasas. Historia de una editorial latinoamericana y antologia dejovenes autores, which, as the title indicates, offers a retrospective glance at the project. No hay cuchillo sin rasas, also the name of Eloisa Cartonera's workshop, is a collaborative text whose introductory section both presents the project's theoretical justification and describes its functioning in some detail. "Making the books," the text tells us, "is simple: We buy cardboard in the street. From it we cut out the books' covers. We paint the title and the author's name with tempera and stencils. Then we print, staple, and bind the originals" (s).2 This activity is regarded as both an educational process-"we learn the different stages involved in making a book: graphic design, printing, binding, cutting, and painting the covers. We also learn to do other tasks like distribution, diffusion, and the sale of the books at fairs, poetry festivals, and other places we are invited to attend" (5)-and an attempt at constructing an alternative economic ethos through which "we learn to work cooperatively" and "generate genuine work" (4). The theorization of the project is more fully developed on Eloisa Cartonera's website, which describes the editorial as an "artistic, social, and community project" that "seeks to invent its own aesthetic, regardless of the origins of each participant, attempting to inspire a process of collective learning." It "publishes unedited marginal and avant-garde works" from all over Latin America, pays five times the market price for the cardboard that it uses, and claims that the process of physical elaboration allows the participants (who are the cardboard-collectors themselves, referenced in the editorial's name) to "stop being cartoneros while they work on the project." The page for orders advertises the texts as "handand brush-made" and proudly announces that "no 2 covers are the same!" In these aspects, the editorial attempts to produce works that graphically maintain the physical traces of their elaboration, symbolically incorporating the social divisions incarnate in cardboard both as a potential material support for literature (and other cultural endeavors) and as refuse that can be collected and sold for a relatively dismal price. …

La "conversación discreta" de Dámaso de Frías y los estudios sobre el arte de conversar

Abstract: Pretendo analizar desde la perspectiva de los estudios recientes sobre el arte de conversar el Diálogo de la discreción de Damasio de Frı́as. Según reza el explicit del único manuscrito conservado en la Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid (ms. 1172): ‘‘Acabóse este diálogo en Valladolid, a siete de agosto de 1579, y començóse a primero de junio del dicho año’’. El diálogo permaneció manuscrito desde su composición hasta el siglo XX, cuando lo publica Justo Garcı́a Soriano, aunque se trata de una edición no exenta de defectos, por lo que serı́a necesario revisar el texto. Aunque la crı́tica actual se ha sentido interesada por la significación de las ideas lingüı́sticas de Damasio de Frı́as y por sus intervenciones en varias polémicas literarias del momento, no se ha prestado suficiente atención a la importancia que adquiere el concepto de ‘‘conversación discreta’’ en su obra. De hecho, el Diálogo de la discreción está dedicado casi por entero a proponer un modelo ideal sobre el arte de conversar. Se trata, por tanto, de un documento de inapreciable valor para reflexionar acerca de las ideas sobre la conversación que se difunden en la España renacentista.

La musa y el melopeo: Los diálogos transatlánticos entre Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz y Pietro Cerone

Abstract: Al leer los tratados musicales de los siglos XVI y XVII nos encontramos a menudo con un lenguaje poético rico en metáforas, sı́miles, hipérboles y cuanta figura retórica los tratadistas encontraron para tratar de hacer más tangible lo muchas veces intangible de la materia que tratan. De la misma manera, los poetas del mismo perı́odo acuden a la imaginerı́a musical, la mayorı́a de las veces para enriquecer su lenguaje metafórico, y otras no tantas para formular nociones estéticas más abstractas que expliquen su poética. Es como si se hubiera establecido una activa colaboración entre tratadistas y poetas, los unos tomando de los otros el arte que mejor maneja. En una época en la que los lı́mites del estudio de la crı́tica literaria se están expandiendo a terrenos antes poco o nada explorados, se podrı́a plantear la justificación del estudio del elemento literario de los tratados musicales, ası́ como del elemento musical en la poesı́a. A esta última empresa es a la que me dedico en este estudio. En este trabajo examino uno de los diálogos transatlánticos y transartı́sticos más sobresalientes entre teórico musical y poeta que nos heredara el siglo XVII. Me refiero a la asociación entre el teórico musical italiano Pietro Cerone (1566–1625) y la poeta mexicana Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648/51?– 1695). La reputación de Cerone resta totalmente en su extenso tratado El melopeo y maestro: Tractado de musica theorica y pratica: en que se pone por extenso, lo que uno para hazerse perfecto Musico ha menester saber (Nápoles, 1613), el cual circuló ampliamente en España y en las Américas durante el

Poetry and Film: El sol del membrillo and Los amantes del círculo polar

Abstract: In the running commentary for the DVD edition of The Godfather trilogy, Francis Ford Coppola states his predilection for some scenes that are, in his view, particularly memorable. In part two of the series, the "Murder of Fanucci" scene is a case in point. The loosening of a light bulb and a towel-wrapped gun that bursts into flames after the shooting draw the following remarks:We are always trying to figure out how to make these violent scenes memorable or interesting or just . . . you know, if you give it a detail that is just a little different, that it somehow makes what it's really about, which is somebody murdering somebody, just a little more . . . poetic, I guess, memorable in some way.The use of the adjective "poetic" to describe a scene in a movie is nothing new. Actually, entire films are routinely dubbed "poetic" or "lyric" in an attempt to recognize certain moments in their narrative that could be equivalent to what Francis Ford Coppola identifies in his film. Especially noteworthy in Coppola's commentary, however, is the word "poetic" in connection with such a scene. Notwithstanding its violent nature or its clearly narrative-oriented editing, poetry can still be invoked as the concept that truly characterizes this sequence of images. Underlying Coppola's notion of what would make a scene poetic one may distinguish: a) an appeal to the category of the memorable, hence a tacit invocation of memory as an enhancing poetic factor in the realm of the visual; b) an explicit acknowledgement of the special value of details in such a medium; and c) the presupposition that, whatever poetry is, it will make the abstract concrete. For some, these would hardly constitute definite traits of the lyric genre. In Coppola's view, they account for the poetic element in a cinematic murder. In filmmakers' reflections on their craft, scholarly articles, journalistic film criticism and reviewing, and publicity campaigns, the assumptions on which the different uses of the label poetic film may rest are manifold, yet one might say that they activate the same set of expectations. To state that a film is lyric or poetic seems to promise a cinematic experience that will somehow differ from our ordinary experience of movies as storytelling. Such a statement also seems to assume that poetry creates a stir in the film's flow, that it hints at the road not taken for cinema as artistic production, that-if only for a fleeting moment-the medium of the moving picture is exonerated from being simply entertainment, just plot-oriented fiction or the mere photographic projection of reality. To state that a film is poetic ultimately suggests that we may in fact know what both the lyric and cinema really are. It is, after all, a matter of essences.Through a deeper yet more self-questioning engagement with the "essence" of both the lyric and film, this essay poses the set of questions that naturally follows from that continuous, casual pairing up of literary genre and audiovisual medium. What does it really mean to say that a film is lyric or poetici What types of images should one expect to see that could make the film diverge from normal cinematic experience? And, even more telling, what conception-or preconception or misconception-of poetry warrants that label? These pages will provide, if not answers, a further degree of self-awareness in the perception of lyricism in the art of the moving picture.While I begin by citing a number of casual, to some extent uncritical, assertions on the relations between poetry and film, it is not my intention here to dismiss them as theoretically naive. Their ubiquity is in itself eloquent. One can dismiss their recurrence as trivial usages of an overrated adjective or, quite the contrary, one can try to ascertain what that recurrence means. In other words, even if the term poetic is employed for lack of a better word, we might do well to scrutinize that lack and the dependence on that particular word to fill it. …

Excesos de memoria: el testimonio de la guerra civil española y su articulación fílmica

Abstract: Debatir sobre la memoria de la Guerra Civil espa?ola y del franquismo se ha convertido, sin duda, en uno de los asuntos m?s frecuentes del escenario cultural y medi?tico espa?ol de nuestros d?as. A poco que nos interesemos por el tema, nos asaltan ingentes cantidades de producciones culturales y medi?ticas que desbordan la capacidad de percepci?n de cualquier investiga dor que pretenda abarcar, aunque sea m?nimamente, su proyecci?n en la esfera p?blica. Algunos motivos para este inter?s tienen una raz?n coyuntu ral concreta. En el momento actual, ciertas iniciativas emprendidas por el gobierno socialista de Jos? Luis Rodr?guez Zapatero, y sobre todo la puesta en marcha de la conocida popularmente como Ley de la memoria hist?rica, todav?a en fase de negociaci?n parlamentaria durante la redacci?n de este art?culo, han reabierto debates que, en ocasiones, han derivado en agrias disputas editoriales de los medios de comunicaci?n convencionales. La pre tensi?n de esta ley, central en el programa del actual gobierno, es la de reha bilitar a las v?ctimas de la contienda y de la represi?n franquista. Pero, quiz? debido a su difusa concepci?n, el proyecto de ley ha tenido la previsible contestaci?n de sectores de la izquierda que lo encuentran demasiado tibio,

Shared Dreams and Red Cockroaches: Cuba and Digital Culture

Abstract: Antique trumpets warming up. Castanets. Yuleidys. Udelvis. "Hacer patas," i.e., "leave a trace." Who will just sit and chat balanced on the edge of evanescence. Those long trails of graphic footprints left on vellum. No running water. There is no on and off, only degrees of change. No place for pedestrians: walking is simply a dance in and out of traffic. "Boca" as in "bocadillos." Un contestador. "Guarnicion a su eleccion." With the money from my rent, they bought a sink! You can see it in an oscillograph.-Loss Pequeno Glazier, Territorio libre.Digital culture in Cuba is a sphere of overlapping zones of expression and experiences. These zones form a complex structure made up of individuals, commerce, and the state. The resulting geography reveals the movement of capital, the power of stakeholders, and spaces of intimacy. It is a map of interrelated consciousness. As such, Cuban digital culture depends on local histories and characteristics and responds to transnational exchanges and relays. While living within infrastructures of power and technology, people use digital technology to "sense the world," build creative social experiences that reshape the virtual contours, and produce new infrastructures. What are these digital Cuban environments? Where can they be found? What do they tell us about ways of living and learning that develop despite controls on information and activity? How do new networks of culture help people adapt to changes triggered by globalization? What new forms of knowing, language, and art arise out of this complex web of elements? The following essay answers these questions, finding clues inside public spaces (hotels, government buildings), "underground" spaces (black market), and in the hardware or the architectural core of computer networks.Spaces of appropriation and tensions left over from the Cold War are good places to begin a survey of digital Cuba. Until 2001, the Soviet Union and, later, the Russians had the largest radar base in the Western hemisphere, located in the Cuban locality of Lourdes. At first glance the site appeared to be a normal residential neighborhood of five-story block apartment buildings characteristic of the anonymous Socialist high-rises built during the post-1959 period. However, an enormous parabolic antennae and a military zone designation signaled that this was no typical communal housing sector. Rather, it was the Lourdes Radar Base, where Russians "listened to telephone conversations, intercepted faxes, and followed United States military movements, communicated with their atomic submarines in this part of the world and with their embassies throughout America" (Carlos). They also shared the information with Cuban Intelligence agents. Established in 1964, two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the base became a strategic location for both the Soviets and the Cubans. Data gathered about the Americans brought Cuba a measure of national security.Thirty-nine years later, in October 2001, and under the specter of September 11, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the closure of the Lourdes Base, which by then was set to bring in 200 million dollars in "rent" to Cuba. The money was never paid, and President Putin, under pressure by the Bush administration, and to the dismay of Russian generals, scheduled the immediate dismantling of the base. Reminiscent of past transformations of spaces and their uses (like Ciudad Libertad, a major educational center that had previously been the Columbia Military Base in Marianao and the symbol of military rule under Batista), the forty-five square mile secret compound was transformed by 2002 into UCI, the twenty-first-century high tech University of Information Sciences, where 6,000 students now live while they study to become part of the worldwide informatics labor force. Investing heavily in the education of software programmers and engineers, Cuba has transformed the Cold War "listening post" and its military and strategic purpose into a classroom for future civil information experts. …

"De Muchas Y Muy Bárbaras Naciones Con Quien Conversé Y Viví": Alvar Núñez Cabeza De Vaca's Naufragios as a War Tactics Manual

Abstract: In the Prohemio to Naufragios, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca offers the Crown a personal account of the failed expedition to Florida led by Panfilo de Narvaez in 1527. After the expedition ended in shipwreck, the author and three other survivors1 traveled for nearly ten years from the Florida peninsula, across the Sierra Madre, to present-day Mexico City. Their curious experience came to occupy an entire book of Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo's Historia general y natural de las Indias. Oviedo, the Crown's official chronicler, used Naufragios only partially and drew the bulk of his account from the Joint Report (Relacion Conjunta) that three of the survivors sent to Santo Domingo's Real Audiencia. The report was dispatched to the Emperor and is now lost. While the two sources tell largely the same story, Oviedo explicitly relegates the material he obtained form Naufragios to a list of curiosities tucked away in the last chapter of the book. From this, we can conclude at least that Cabeza de Vaca provides additional and slightly different information. Cabeza de Vaca's text, however, is not only different because of the information it contains, but also because of the intent that guides the organization and presentation of this information. As the Prohemio evidences, this text is an attempt to relocate the story of Alvar Nunez from the annals of failure to a space that will allow it to engage a discourse of triumph.Perhaps no protestation in the Prohemio is as telling of the impulse to resonate with the history of Spanish Reconquista as the reference to Cabeza de Vaca's own name and ancestry and his attempt to link his ancestors' service to his own.[. . .] bien pense que mis obras y servicios fueran tan claros y manifiestos como fueron los de mis antepassados, y que no tuviera yo necesidad de hablar para ser contado entre los que con entera fe y gran cuidado administran y tratan los cargos de Vuestra Magestad, y les haze merced. (16, 18)2[. . .] No me quedo lugar para hazer mas servicio deste que es traer a Vuestra Magestad relacion de [. . .] las diversas costumbres de muchas y muy barbaras naciones con quien converse y vivi, y todas las otras particularidades que pude alcancar y conoscer, que de ello en alguna manera Vuestra Magestad sera servido. (16, 18, my emphasis)Implied in the expressed wish to be identified with his antepassados is the idea that, in order to forge a historically relevant link with his ancestors, the past must be reenacted-a past of service that led to a military triumph. Despite a moment of mediocritas mea,3 Alvar Nunez insists that at least part of Naufragios is useful "en alguna manera." Given the impossibility of articulating a connection to the Reconquista imaginary and to Cabeza de Vaca's lineage with the vocabulary of triumph, Naufragios does not shirk away from the language of failure. Instead, the narrative disrupts the oppositional structure of triumph and failure and re-inscribes itself into the arc of Spanish history by reinventing a failed enterprise, making it part of a tradition of preparation for conquest,4 rather than conquest itself.Cabeza de Vaca's Prohemio asserts that Naufragios is not a description of what the voyage yielded but the material manifestation of the expedition itself: the text becomes the prize of the expedition. Lucia Invernizzi explores the shift away from the indefensible failure of Alvar Nunez's enterprise and toward "los lugares donde los servicios se evidencian, esto es, a la actividad verbal de Alvar Nunez" (101). But Alvar Nunez goes further: his text posits itself as a surrogate in the present for conquests of the future and thus establishes a link with a familial tradition of contributions to Spanish expansion. Rather than taking a part for the whole, the text uses the knowledge acquired in a failed expedition as the cipher of a future success. This is an odd metonymy, in which potential stands for fulfillment. Thus, Naufragios lays claim to a place in the process of preparation for conquest. …

Ser y vivir como poeta en Cuba: Casal, Lezama y la tradición

Abstract: El destino de un poeta est? ligado a la suerte de ciertas palabras. La poes?a de Juli?n del Casal, y tambi?n su recepci?n cr?tica, est? vinculada a conceptos como lo artificial, la frialdad, el exotismo, la anomal?a, la enfermedad, el (homo) erotismo. El peculiar lugar que Casal ocupa en la tradici?n literaria cubana est? condicionado por la diferente entonaci?n (afectiva y conceptual) que han tenido estos vocablos en los ?ltimos 120 a?os. Roland Barthes, en uno de sus m?s bellos ensayos, define a Voltaire como el ?ltimo escritor feliz. Voltaire tuvo, seg?n Barthes, el privilegio de defender una serie de palabras: libertad, tolerancia, esp?ritu cr?tico e ilustraci?n que eran odiadas y despreciadas por sus enemigos. El escritor moderno se en frenta a la paradoja de tener que defender y hacer suyas palabras que tambi?n son respetadas por sus contrincantes. Casal, si se acepta la definici?n de Bart hes, tambi?n ser?a un escritor feliz, las palabras que ya se han mencionado (frialdad, artificial, exotismo, anomal?a, enfermedad e incluso erotismo) ca rec?an de tradici?n literaria y prestigio en la Cuba finisecular. Eran malas palabras, vocablos malditos, por dos causas diferentes: a) se consideraban valores extra?os y nocivos para la construcci?n de una cultura nacional (los intelectuales cubanos de la ?poca trataban de contrarrestar la independencia econ?mica y pol?tica de Espa?a con una independencia cultural); b) se toma ban como importaciones, pr?stamos del movimiento decadentista europeo. La tradici?n cr?tica sobre la obra de Casal se estructura a partir de dos figuras antag?nicas: la pol?mica y el consenso. La obra de Casal, como pocas en la tradici?n literaria cubana, gener? mucha controversia entre sus con

La intimidad mediada : apuntes a partir de un libro de Antonio José Ponte

Abstract: ?De qu? manera los cambios de los ?ltimos a?os en las tecnolog?as que permiten la producci?n y la circulaci?n de im?genes, textos y sonidos ha impactado o debiera impactar en nuestro campo, es decir, en los estudios hispanos? Creo que no hay una respuesta simple a esta pregunta: por un lado, el impacto de las nuevas tecnolog?as en nuestro trabajo de todos los d?as es tan grande, que no sabr?a por donde empezar; por otro lado, es pro bablemente demasiado pronto para medir sus efectos a largo plazo en las pr?cticas art?sticas que son nuestros objetos primarios de estudio. Sin duda, aquellos de nosotros que, desde la plataforma cambiante del hispanismo, estemos interesados en seguir la evoluci?n de las artes del lenguaje, ten dremos pronto que encontrar maneras de tratar con objetos muy diferentes a aquellos a los que estamos acostumbrados, con proyectos encabalgados, que tienen algunas de sus partes en el espacio virtual y otras en el espacio f?sico. Los objetos con los que tenemos que estar preparados para encontrar nos ser?n crecientemente entidades complejas cuyas fronteras, las regiones que las comunican y las dividen del vasto mundo, ser?n enormemente tran sitadas. El acad?mico que estudie objetos est?ticamente ambiciosos asocia dos, de una manera o de otra, a los nuevos medios, tendr? que revisar la validez de algunas de las categor?as con las que todav?a conduce su trabajo m?s cotidiano y sus proyectos m?s excepcionales: tendr? que, por ejemplo, relativizar la importancia de la noci?n de obra, si una obra es una composi ci?n esencialmente concluida y m?s o menos cerrada sobre s?; tendr? que considerar la posibilidad de que los agentes que act?an en su campo adopten

Poesia morisca (o de cómo el español se convirtió en lengua literaria del islam)

Abstract: Victimas de la persecucion religiosa y forzados a convertirse al cristianismo, los moriscos (ultimos musulmanes espanoles) continuaron practicando el islam en secreto al tiempo que se dieron a la tarea de compilar su cultura en una literatura clandestina conocida como literatura aljamiada, compuesta en su mayor parte por textos escritos en romance hispanico pero transliterados con el alfabeto arabe. A raiz de la expulsion de 1609 un gran numero de ellos emigro a Tunez y a otras zonas del norte de Africa donde se asentaron y desarrollaron comunidades que se distinguieron por su matizada espanolidad. Corria el ano 1715 cuando Joseph Morgan, consul britanico en Tunez, escucho, de seguro con oidos asombrados, poesia espanola recitada de memoria por los residentes del pueblo de Testur (Viguera Molins 10; Ticknor 422). Se trataria tal vez de las zambras y leilas que sus antepasados, los moriscos, celebraron un siglo atras en Espana a riesgo de su propia vida ya que les habian sido prohibidas (Fuente Cornejo, Poesia 93–99). Pero los ver-

Nation and Identity in Crisis and Beyond: Mempo Giardinelli's Santo Oficio De la Memoria

Abstract: Argentine writer Mempo Giardinelli (1947-) is a major figure of the Spanish American Post-Boom, although he rejects the label in favor of Ltteratura de las Democracias Recuperadas. As the latter term suggests, Giardinelli highlights the experience of the 1970s-80s-repression, exile, and return-as an inescapable factor in the literary production of his generation. In common with many of his contemporaries, Giardinelli's work is also shaped by an awareness of everyday social and political realities. He admits, "Siempre vivi metido de lleno en la realidad contrastante y paradojal de la Argentina. No puedo, no se vivir al margen de los compromisos que me impone la tierra donde naci, a la que amo irracionalmente y en la que adoro vivir protestando" (Roffe 273). In Santo oficio de la memoria (1991), this multifaceted context is combined with a detailed reading of Argentine history, culture, and literature to produce a complex work that stands apart from the (albeit deceptive) simplicity of GiardineUi's other narrative fiction. Santo oficio is undoubtedly the most ambitious work of Giardinelli's impressive and varied oeuvre-, it was awarded the prestigious Romulo Gallegos prize in 1993 and, according to the author, is "mi mejor trabajo hasta ahora" (Roffe 261). Although Santo oficio reflects the author's determination to stretch the boundaries of fiction writing, the novel also contributes to the vibrant trend within contemporary Spanish American literature that consciously rewrites the past from unusual perspectives, in order better to understand the present.Santo oficio surveys some one hundred years of Argentine history beginning in the 1880s. The work examines and tries to make sense of the past in the aftermath of the military dictatorship known as the Proceso (1976-82). In particular, it questions the basis for national life and identity in the era of restored democracy. Following in the footsteps of various other Latin American writers, Giardinelli interweaves the historical narrative of the nation with the story of one family: the Domeniconelles, Italian immigrants who arrived in Argentina in 1885. By the early 1980s, and the time of the book's implicit composition, four generations of the family are gathered on the quayside at Buenos Aires awaiting the arrival of Pedro, whose return from nine years of exile in Mexico has been facilitated by the recent restoration of democracy after the Proceso. Pedro's return provides the focal point for the narrative. It forces the family members to review their past and, with it, the vicissitudes of the nation's history. As the novel's title suggests, memory is paramount, and the narrative bears witness to the pain and confusion of ordinary Argentines facing their national past.In reading Santo ofido, the reader is confronted with memories of a history marked by unresolved tragedies. Each of the characters struggles with memories that refuse to lie quiet, as well as with a past that threatens to strangle the present and cast a shadow over the future. It is evident that the novel addresses the politics of memory and forgetfulness in a newly-democratized Argentina forced to come to terms with the violence and repression of the recent past. For one critic, the novel thus connects with "a group of artists and writers who circumvented the military regime and who now fin its aftermath] refuse to let those years disappear into oblivion. Giardinelli, in contrast to the 'politics of amnesia,' resurrects the past and invites his readers to remember a painful history that they may well prefer to forget" (O'Connell 503). In order to elucidate the treatment of nation and identity in the novel, I shall explore three main aspects: the representative function of the Domeniconclle family; the shifting senses of Argentine national identity between the 1880s and 1980s; and the novel's stance toward the future. A propos this third aspect, it is instructive to take into account that, in discussing Santo oficio, Giardinelli himself highlights the bond between reading and writing his nation's past and imagining its future. …