Showing papers in "Hispanic Review in 2009"

A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Scenes from the Latin American Sixties (review)

Abstract: SORENSEN, diana. A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Scenes from the Latin American Sixties. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2007. 312 pp.It is good to have this new book by Diana Sorensen, one of the most distinguished figures in the field of Latin American literary criticism in the US academy. That is because it attempts a kind of vindication of the sixties at a moment when, with the dramatic re-emergence of the Latin American left (and the recent crisis of what has been for a generation a hegemonic neoliberalism), such a gesture is particularly timely. Sorenson's verdict on the sixties is generous but not uncritical:Utopian and uncompromising, the era's desire for a future to end all futures was caught in the double bind of apocalypse and invention. But its spectacular expectations have left the energy of excessive desire, libidinal creativity, and liberating energies. . . . [T]he decade's ongoing momentum keeps it before us as nostalgia or - more auspiciously - as hope. (211)Thinking about the sixties in both Latin America and North America has been dominated for many years by what I would venture to call a paradigm of disillusion. According to this paradigm, the illusion of the revolutionary transformation of self and society that was the inspiration for the sixties was a kind of romantic adolescence. It was a generous and brave adolescence, but also one prone to egotism, excess, and moral and political miscalculation. By contrast, the middle age of the generation of the sixties corresponds to a new reality principle: the collapse of communism and the rise of neoliberal economic models under US auspices in the eighties and nineties. A biographical narrative of personal maturation is mapped onto a narrative of transition between different historical eras, with a resulting sense of the inevitability of the present.The most influential expression of this paradigm was perhaps Jorge Castaneda's 1993 book Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left after the Cold War, but its elements are present in dozens of memoirs, novels, testtmonios, films, and histories from and about the sixties in Latin America. Sorensen offers a different, more sympathetic way of assessing both the achievements and the limitations of this decade. There are some problems with her approach I will take up subsequently, but this desire to move beyond the paradigm of disillusion in the representation of the sixties is the book's chief virtue.A Turbulent Decade Remembered is in a way mistitled: it is not so much the decade of the Latin American sixties as such that is remembered, but the main cultural phenomenon associated with the period - Boom narrative. Chapter one deconstructs skillfully, in a psychoanalytically inflected mode, the aporias of militancy, utopia, and authority in Che Guevara's testtmonio-like Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria, ranging in the process from reflections on the Cuban revolution itself, to the relation of Casa de las Americas and the Boom, to Walter Salles's 2004 film version of The Motorcycle Diaries.Chapter two takes up the question of the significance of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre in modern Mexican culture by considering the contrasting approaches to that event of Octavio Paz (in his postscript to El laberinto de la soledad, published in English as Critique of the Pyramid) and Elena Poniatowska (in La noche de Tlatelolco). Sorensen herself leans toward Poniatowska's testimonial collage of popular voices as opposed to Paz's "privileged gaze" (62). But, perhaps because of her own sympathy with psychoanalytic critique (a psychoanalytically inflected feminism could be said to be her own critical ideology), she does not register sufficiently, in my opinion, the Orientalist character of Paz's critique of the massacre, which he famously saw as a compulsive repetition of what he called "la terrible dominacion azteca." I do not mean to oversimplify a complex debate, but this seems to me a classic case of what we called in the sixties "blaming the victim. …

La encrucijada de la memoria: la memoria colectiva de la Guerra Civil Española en la novela contemporánea (review)

Abstract: LUENGO, ANA. La encrucijada de la memoria: la memoria colectiva de la Guerra Civil Espanola en la novela contemporanea. Berlin: Tranvia-Verlag Walter Frey, 2004. 287 pp.Centering on the invention and transmission of the politics of memory in 1990s Spain, Ana Luengo's La encrucijada de la memoria analyzes six contemporary novels that explore the theme of the Spanish Civil War: Antonio Munoz Molina's El jinete polaco (1990), Felix de Azua's Cambio de bandera (1991), Rosa Montero's La hija del Canibal (1998), Dulce Chacon's Cielos de barro (2000), Rafael Chirbes's La caida de Madrid (2000), and Javier Cercas 's Soldados de Salamina (2001). The book is divided in two parts. The first part consists of three chapters ("Teorias y dimensiones de la memoria," "Apropiacion de la memoria colectiva en la novela," and "La memoria colectiva de la Guerra Civil Espanola") that outline the author's theoretical approach. The second part dedicates each of its six chapters to analysis of the novels.Drawing on Pierre Nora's notion of lieux de memoire - the dependence of memory on concrete sites - Luengo regards these novels as "memory places" and their authors as bearers of collective memory, responsible for the transmission of historical knowledge (homo agens). Luengo demonstrates various means by which these novels appropriate the collective dimension of memory in order to reconstruct the fictionalized past of the Spanish Civil War. Her reading highlights the interface between individual memory and socially constructed, internalized collective memory. The novels are also analyzed within the context of the heightened scholarly attention to collective memory in literary, media, and cultural forms of 1990s Spain.The strength of Luengo's book lies in her original choice of authors from diverse literary and political backgrounds, ranging from the leftist thinkers of the 1960s to journalists and philosophers of the post-Franco transition period, all of whom have achieved market success with their writings on the Spanish Civil War. Luengo further outlines five criteria used for selecting the six novels included in the study. (1) All the authors were born after the Spanish Civil War, from Azua, born in 1944, to Cercas, in 1962. This choice emphasizes the transmission of collective memory rather than subjective memory, (auto)biographies, testimonial novel, or memoirs. (2) The novels are representative of a wide variety of geographical settings, some of which foreground the experience of exile: El jinete polaco in Andalusia; Cambio de bandera in the Basque country; La hija del Canibal in Barcelona, Madrid, and Latin America; Cielos de barro in Extremadura; La caida de Madrid in Madrid; and Soldados de Salamina in northern Catalonia and France. (3) The works exemplify different genres: "Bildungsroman, novelas de memoria, policiacas, de supuesta investigacion periodistica" (103). (4) The characters have diverse ideological tendencies on a diagetic level; they include anarchists, communists, Falangists, monarchists, and Basque nationalists. (5) All the novels are bestsellers, highly acclaimed by readers and the publishing industry, and they have been re-edited in Spain and translated into various other languages.Another merit of La encrucijada de la memoria is the author's expert analysis of the historical and political contexts of the novels. Luengo shows that, while the previous generation of writers (in the Franco period) had often turned to the Spanish Civil War and Francoist repression as a novelistic subject, the more recent engagement with Spanish history is a phenomenon stemming from the pacto de olvido forged during the Transition of the mid-1970s. Contemporary novels that recuperate Spanish Civil War themes are inseparable from the Spanish Transition, which silenced traumas of the past in the name of nonviolent social change and political consensus. The 1990s boom of the historical novel and the creation, recreation, and recuperation of the collective memory thus responds to nearly two decades of silence. …

On Shaky Ground: Hydraulics, State Formation, and Colonialism in Sixteenth-Century Mexico

Abstract: [L]a historia del origen y fundamento, de como empezo y principio la gran ciudad de Mexico Tenochtitlan, que esta adentro del agua . . . nunca se perdera ni olvidara lo que hicieran, lo que asentaran en sus escritos y pinturas, su fama y el renombre y recuerdo que de ellos hay, en los tiempos venideros, jamas se perdera ni olvidara; siempre lo guardaremos nosotros, los que somos hijos, nietos, hermanos menores, biznietos, tataranietos, descendientes, sangre y color suyos.-Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc, Cronica MexicayotlDue to what has been considered the Mexicas' sacred obligation to replicate Aztlan, their place of origin, or because of a military strategy to isolate and protect themselves from their enemies, the Mexicas founded Tenochtitlan in 1325 on a small island in the basin of Mexico. The Mexicas then gradually enlarged this original islet by artificial means of construction upon the water.1 Although water technologies in the lake region were already well developed by the time of their arrival, Tenochtitlan's power and political organization enabled the Mexicas to further develop these technologies into a complex system for water control.2 This system was comprised of a series of mechanisms that protected the city from flooding, made land available for agriculture, and enabled movement onto and off of the islet. The system involved the rerouting of rivers, dikes with floodgates to control water flowing into and out of the city, aqueducts, canals, causeways connecting the island to neighboring regions, and manmade plots of land chinampas) built on the water for growing crops, and devices for keeping saltwater separate from fresh water to ensure sufficient amounts for human consumption.3 Bernal Diaz del Castillo conveyed the admiration such an ordered complexity could evoke when describing how, from a distance, he first gazed upon a city half on water and half on land and wondered if such a view was the product of a dream or chivalric literature.4It could be said that the first substantive transformation of this territory occurred during the war of conquest. The city was completely leveled and its hydraulic system seriously compromised after Hernan Cortes, recognizing its importance for the Mexicas' defense, ordered ten thousand indigenous allies to destroy it (Palerm 233). In this article, I will examine the political implications of the initial founding of an aquatic Tenochtitlan in this territory's second moment of transformation, when the emerging Spanish empire attempts to transition from a state of pure violence to the establishment of hegemony with the reconstruction of the new Mexico City, which would serve as the seat of the colonial state. I will study the representation of this founding in Mexico en 1554, by Francisco Cervantes de Salazar (henceforth cited simply as Cervantes), which firmly links the city to Spanish domination. What interests me in this text is how the circumstances of the city's location - the water of the lakes (a historical or mythical contingency) - and the technologies designed to manage it played a significant role in the colonial state's attainment of legitimacy. In other words, I am interested in the relationship between a specific geography, the knowledge needed to administer it, and colonial policies. Even if the lake water where Tenochtitlan was built was an accident of nature, a mere geographic fact, this accident had important repercussions for the relationship between the Spanish state and the inhabitants of the central region it attempted to rule.In my reading, Cervantes's triumphalist text exalting the new political state is paradoxically a prelude to catastrophe. The work was written a few months before a severe flood in Mexico City exposed the colonial state's lack of the knowledge needed to manage the water and, consequently, abruptly halted its consolidation of power. This important problem of engineering and urbanization also involved a political exercise in which knowledge was strongly associated with the construction of hegemony. …

Governor Sancho and the politics of insularity

Abstract: Governor Sancho's rule on the insula Barataria in Part II of Don Quijote has been read as evidence of Cervantes's endorsement of a more or less concrete political vision in response to the perception of Spanish decline. By focusing on Sancho's actions on the insula , however, scholars have overlooked the politics of the insula itself. This essay takes the Barataria episode as a point of departure for an analysis of the transatlantic politics of insularity in early modern Spain. In this context, insularity is necessarily a colonial matter. Filled with references to the practices of colonialism and specifically to the Americas, Barataria speaks to the legitimacy of possession and the spatial dimensions of governance. By reading Cervantes next to political theorists like Francisco de Vitoria, this essay suggests that the modernity of Barataria's politics lies in its insular ambiguity, a reimagining of the spatiality of colonial relations.

The Hellenic Origins of Unamuno's Skepticism and Niebla's Skeptical Parody of Cartesianism

Abstract: Even though skepticism figures prominently in many of Miguel de Unamuno's novels and essays, it has drawn scant attention from critics, who tend to refer to it cursorily or against the backdrop of Unamuno's religious beliefs.1 One critic who has devoted some attention to the topic, Adolfo Carpio, makes insightful references to skepticism in his rigorous treatment of Unamuno's subjectivist philosophy. Like Carpio, I argue that skepticism plays a fundamental role in Unamuno's thought and agree with Carpio's assessment that "el pensamiento de Unamuno desemboca en la skepsis," and that "esta skepsis no se entendera adecuadamente si con ella se confunde cualquier forma de escepticismo al uso" (145). What Carpio contends, more precisely, is that Unamuno's uncertainty encompasses all aspects of his existence and bears no resemblance to the intellectual doubt associated with rationalist philosophers like Rene Descartes. The present study goes a step further, however, and argues that Unamuno's thought in many ways grows out of Hellenic skepticism and that this tradition can especially illuminate aspects of Unamuno's novelistic production. In what follows, I examine the direct and indirect references to skepticism in several of Unamuno's essays in order to establish a conceptual framework from which to interpret Nieblas parody of the cogito, which, I argue, emerges from Unamuno's contempt for Descartes's radical distortion of skepticism's goals. If on one level Niebla challenges the cogito, then on another it upholds the skeptical principles that Unamuno values and that validate his vitalist world view, which subscribes to the notion of life as a process of becoming and the individual as the sum of her emotional and rational faculties at any given moment in time.Most of what is known of Greek skepticism today derives from three extant historical accounts written during the Roman era and recovered during the Renaissance: Diogenes Laertius's The Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Cicero's Academica, and Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Schmitt 226-28). Read widely in scholastic circles, these three works left a lasting impact on the European intellectual climate and had an especially profound effect on Michel de Montaigne, who, for inspiration, carved phrases and short passages from Sextus into the rafters of his study as he wrote his most celebrated skeptical essay, "An Apology for Raymond Sebond" (Popkin 47).* What remains of Unamuno's personal library (as catalogued by Mario Valdes and Maria Elena de Valdes in An Unamuno Source Book) contains none of the primary sources, but does hold a copy of Montaigne's Essays with Unamuno's markings and notes. A footnote found in En torno al casticismo (77) refers readers to Montaigne's "Apology" and thus confirms that Unamuno had, at the very least, secondary contact with the skeptical tradition prior to writing the majority of his major essays and novels. As a professor of Greek philology who, as Nelson Orringer maintains, "daily communed with the Hellenic world while writing major works of philosophy, literary criticism, and literature" (331), there should be little doubt that Unamuno had significant contact with the skeptical tradition, as in fact the many references to it found in Del sentimiento tragico de la vida and other essays corroborate. Since many of the books to which Unamuno refers throughout his writings cannot be found in his personal library, part of which was lost when Unamuno went into exile in 1924 (Valdes and Valdes xi), we are left only with Unamuno's papers and published writings to measure the impact of Hellenic skepticism on his thought.Skepticism developed along two axes in the Hellenic world, one theoretical and the other practical, which Jose Ferrater Mora describes in his authoritative Diccionario de filosofia:Desde el punto de vista teorico, el escepticismo es una doctrina del conocimiento segun la cual no hay ningun saber firme, ni puede encontrarse nunca ninguna opinion absolutamente segura. …

Imagen, materia, cine: Bergson, Deleuze y Cinelandia de Ramón Gómez de la Serna

Abstract: Este ensayo explora el papel significativo desempenado por el cine en la novela Cinelandia de Ramon Gomez de la Serna. Se invoca la filosofia de Henri Bergson y Gilles Deleuze para explicar el rechazo ramoniano de un mundo de estructuras estaticas en favor de una conceptualizacion de la imagen como movimiento. En dialogo tanto con el surrealismo como con el noventayochismo, la tecnica cinematografica tiene una importancia fundamental en la novela, que a la vez apoya la idea de restaurar el movimiento en el pensamiento mismo.

Consensus and Debate in Salazar's Portugal: Visual and Literary Negotiations of the National Text, 1933-1948 (review)

Abstract: SAPEGA, ellen. Consensus and Debate in Salazar's Portugal: Visual and Literary Negotiations of the National Text, 1933-1948. University Park: Penn- sylvania State UP, 2008. 184 pp.The Portuguese Estado Novo (1933-1974), an authoritarian regime headed from its inception to 1968 by the charismatic prime minister Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, strove to create a homogeneous conception of nationality grounded on economic corporatism, colonial domination, conservative social values, and close ties between the government and the Catholic Church. In order to shape the Portu- guese nation into a community of supporters, the state developed a well-oiled propaganda machine, which appropriated images and heroes from the country's long history to justify the present and to "convert the disbelievers," in the apt expression of Luis Reis Torgal. Salazarist propaganda forged collective memories of a glorious national past that necessarily culminated in the Estado Novo. This teleologica! narrative, according to which the figure of Salazar often acquired mes- sianic undertones, was conveyed through a variety of state-sponsored means, including theater performances, films, exhibitions, political celebrations, popular festivities, architecture, and sculpture. Ellen Sapega's well- researched book Consen- sus and Debate in Salazar's Portugal analyzes some of the ways in which the artists and intellectuals working for the regime deployed tradition and collective memory so as to generate a consensual adherence to the the government's policies. Yet, as she points out, the discerning eye can often glimpse alternative discourses to the official ideology in the fissures of propaganda. These contending views on the national project are all the more explicit in nonpropagandistic artworks. In spite of widespread censorship, several authors and artists deviated from the official narrative of national grandeur and presented other, often bleaker interpretations of the country's present. Sapega skillfully illustrates the nuances that characterized the Portuguese artistic and literary panorama in the first fifteen years of the Estado Novo, and her study is indispensable reading for all students and scholars working on this topic.One of the strengths of Sapega's book is the fact that she touches upon a variety of literary and artistic practices. While there have been numerous works that focus on one or another aspect of artistic production under the Estado Novo, it is less common to find scholarly analyses that attempt to encompass different perspec- tives under a unifying guiding thread. Undergirding Sapega's work is the assump- tion that, in the first years of the existence of the Estado Novo, there was a sometimes explicit but often subterraneous debate among the various sectors of the country's intellectual milieu about the definition of portugalidade (Portuguese- ness). The author begins by delineating the government's version of what it means to be Portuguese through the description of some of the projects undertaken by the Secretariat of Propaganda, later rebaptized the National Secretariat for Infor- mation, Popular Culture, and Tourism. One of these was a competition that took place in 1938 to identify the most Portuguese village in Portugal. The winner would be the village that most closely approximated an idealized notion of historical purity in terms of its architecture, traditions, arts, festivities, dress, and so on. The goal of the government was to reactivate the country's connection to its historical origins, while, at the same time, emphasizing that age-old rural traditions and hierarchichal social structures could be emulated by present-day society. Rich landowners and poor peasants supposedly lived in harmony in rural Portugal, and the patriarchal rules that bound them should serve as a model for structuring the relations between the Portuguese and their leaders.Another event organized by the Secretariat of Propaganda as a means to create a cohesive, nationalistic interpretation of the country's past was the Exhibition of the Portuguese World that took place in 1940 as a part of the celebrations to mark both Portugal's eight hundredth birthday as an independent nation and the commemoration of the country's independence from Castillian rule in 1640. …

Nuevas versiones de lo femenino en La Fiesta del Chivo, El paraíso en la otra esquina y Travesuras de la Niña Mala

Abstract: This article argues that most of the female characters in the early novels of the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa conform either to the category of a sex object, or a “sexy mother figure.” Beginning in the late 1980s, however, the construction of images of femaleness and maleness in Vargas Llosa’s novels becomes more complex. The article assesses in detail the construction of the strong female protagonists of the novels La Fiesta del Chivo (2000), El paraiso en la otra esquina (2003) and Travesuras de la Nina Mala (2006). It contends that Vargas Llosa at first finds it necessary to desexualize his female protagonists in order to enable them to act in the public sphere. This desexualization is partly overcome in the second of the three novels and disappears in the third. The article evaluates how these developments are related to the construction of maleness in Vargas Llosa’s later novels.

The Dueña Dolorida: Policing Gender, Desire, and Entertainment

Abstract: The image of a bearded lady in the Duena Dolorida plot in the second part of Don Quijote reveals certain strategies for policing gender behavior that impact traditional notions of desire for the characters who participate in and/or observe the episode as well as for the readers of Cervantes’s novel. This article questions what the figure of the cross-dressed, bearded Condesa Trifaldi and the enchanted Dulcinea (played by the transvestite page) mean for the spectators in the palace as well as for readers. To help understand the significance of the gender-bending plot, this essay examines visual representations of the episode in illustrations and film: Covarrubias’s Emblemas morales , a children’s book version of the Duena Dolorida illustrated by Antonio Albarran, Arturo Marin as Trifaldi in Rafael Gil’s 1947 film Don Quijote de la Mancha , and Juan Diego Botto as the enchanted Dulcinea in Manuel Gutierrez Aragon’s 2002 film El caballero don Quijote .

Rules of Gender, Reserve, and Resolution in Pardo Bazán's Insolación

Abstract: This article explores social and literary conventions, and their violations, in Emilia Pardo Bazan’s 1889 Insolacion. The essay argues that the controversy incited by the novel’s publication was inextricably linked to gender issues and Pardo Bazan’s status as a female author (and authority). I question commonly held views on the novel’s deployment of marriage as a resolution, arguing that it does not in fact tie up loose ends, but rather reworks the conventional narrative strategy. I also propose that the novel selectively makes use of an idealized (feminine) rhetoric of reserve in order to make, and conceal, a social critique.

Maravillosas supercherías: género sexual y nacionalismo en los "Apuntes autobiográficos" de Pardo Bazán y Trafalgar de Galdós

Abstract: Este articulo contrasta la construccion y sexualizacion de sujetos nacionales en dos textos del siglo XIX peninsular aparentemente inconexos, la novela historica Trafalgar (1873) de Benito Perez Galdos y los "Apuntes autobiograficos" (1886) de Emilia Pardo Bazan. Se afirma que los Episodios Nacionales (especificamente Trafalgar ) pueden ser rastreados como una narrativa maestra adoptada y subvertida por Pardo en sus esfuerzos por encontrar un lugar para la mujer escritora en una cultura nacional concebida como exclusivamente masculina por el realismo, proyecto literario al cual ella misma se afilia. En sus "Apuntes", el caracter ilusorio del genero sexual y la nacion le permiten crearse un espacio como sujeto y miembro activo de la cultura nacional. Estas renegociaciones de las estructuras de genero de la nacion, tal como habian sido formuladas en Trafalgar , llevaron a Pardo Bazan a una lucha continua e incluso a ser alienada en su tiempo, pero en ultimo termino le permitieron alcanzar el lugar prominente que hoy ocupa en lo que es conocido como "literatura espanola".

El tacto invisible. Relectura erótica del soneto VIII de Garcilaso: del eros fantástico a la fantasía erótica

Abstract: La critica ha asumido por lo general que el petrarquismo y el neoplatonismo caracteristicos de la poesia amorosa del seiscientos espanol, canonicamente representada por Garcilaso de la Vega, impiden una interpretacion ampliamente erotica de la obra de este. En el presente articulo intento demostrar que desde esa necesidad paradigmatica de la obra garcilasiana, no obstante, el poeta plantea la posibilidad de un contacto erotico mediante el sentido de la vista, proceso en el que la fantasia juega un papel clave en la busqueda constante del encuentro amoroso. Un analisis detallado del soneto VIII (“De aquella vista pura y excelente”), inspirado en el topico del enamoramiento por la vista y con apoyo en la teoria fisiologica que lo sustenta en la epoca, ofrece las claves para el inicio de esta relectura sobre la practica erotica en la obra de Garcilaso de la Vega.

El discurso africanista del Renacimiento en La primera parte de la descripción general de África de Luis del Mármol Carvajal

Abstract: Luis del Marmol Carvajal dirige la Primera parte de la descripcion general de Africa a Felipe II en 1573, con la esperanza de que la informacion que contiene la obra sobre las realidades geograficas y etnograficas del continente sea util en caso de que surja un interes imperialista por parte de la Corona. El autor, que sufriera cautiverio en el norte de Africa, toma como principal fuente para su obra la Descripcion de Africa de Leon el Africano. Menos dedicado que Leon a presentar las similitudes entre la cultura europea y la norteafricana, Marmol Carvajal construye un discurso centrado en los intereses comerciales de los espanoles en Africa. De ese modo, es responsable de la difusion en la epoca de datos importantes sobre bienes de consumo altamente valorados en los mercados europeos, asi como de la representacion de un “otro” africano definido por su potencial para ser asimilado al pueblo cristiano colonizador.

Graffiti and the Poetics of Politics in Rosas's Argentina (1829-1852)

Abstract: In the Andean province of San Juan, Argentina, there is a stone monument that reads On ne tue point les idees. It is a durable simulacrum of the defiant, hasty scrawl that Domingo Faustino Sarmiento recalls in the "Advertencia" that opens Civilizacion y barbarie, vida de Facundo Quiroga y aspecto fisico, costumbres y habitos de la Republica Argentina (1845). In a larger sense, the lapidary inscription is an emblem of the equally longstanding tendency to monumentalize Sarmiento and his fellow letrados of the so-called Generation of 1837 as the originators of a national literature and the architects of a mod- ern nation-state. The commemoration of these authors and their works pro- motes the received idea that Argentine nation-building, in the context of Spanish America, was an exceptional process. At the core of this myth of exceptionality is the belief that "el progreso argentino es la encamacion en el cuerpo de la nacion de lo que comenzo por ser un proyecto formulado en los escritos de algunos argentinos cuya unica arma era su superior clarividencia" (Halperin Donghi 8). Concretely, it identifies the resistance to the dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas (1829-1852) as the crucible of modern nationhood.1 In this context, the opening of Facundo serves as the point of departure for an entire intellectual tradition; it becomes an origin that "makes possible a field of knowledge whose function is to recover it" (Foucault 143).On ne tue point les idees demarcates, thus, a nationalist discourse whose boundaries remain relatively stable and impermeable. Such a reading reinforces the basic thesis of Facundo that Spanish-American society is starkly divided between two incompatible modes of existence, between civilization and barbarism. In Ricardo Piglia's words, this opposition "se cristaliza en el contraste entre quienes pueden y quienes no pueden leer esa frase (que es una cita) escrita en otro idioma" ("Notas sobre Facundo" 15). The binary logic collapses, however, as soon as it becomes apparent that the phrase is a paraphrase or misquotation, which Sarmiento erroneously attributes to Hippolyte Fortoul. Drawing on Paul Groussac and Paul Verdvoye, Piglia argues that the saying does not serve as a shibboleth, but rather articulates the "double bond" of Argentine literature: "on the one hand, its relation to political discourse; on the other, its relation to foreign forms and genres of an already autonomous fiction" ("Sarmiento the Writer" 131). Sarmiento's ersatz erudition makes it impossible to fetishize the meaning of the quote; ideas may be untouchable, but they cannot transcend their utterance. The generative force of on ne tue point les idees resides in its dislocation, in a narrative that depicts it as hurriedly etched in charcoal beneath the crest of the nation. Though the gesture epitomizes the desire to constitute an independent literary field, it also reveals a conflictive relationship with the public discourse of Rosas's Argentine Confederation, a body of writing that literary and cultural studies have traditionally ignored. In other words, while the scrawl that opens Facundo puts into relief the fissures that divided the political field, the histrionic act also reveals the common discursive space that made these oppositions mutually intelligible.This intervention proposes to reconsider the function of writing in the struggle for national organization in mid- nineteenth-century Argentina by rereading the opening of Facundo not as a misquotation, but as graffiti. It thus situates Sarmiento's inscription in a specific sociopolitical context during which visuality and public performance were central to the expansion of a populist hegemony centered on the figure of the caudillo. Emphasizing the centrality of gesture in this celebrated anecdote reveals the points of contention as well as the affinities that the foundational works of the Generation of 1837 shared with cultural practices employed by supporters of the Rosas regime. …

La vida inquieta de Manuel Reina

Abstract: The critics usually consider Manuel Reina (1856-1905) a transitional author between nineteenth-century poetry and Spanish modernism. A thorough analysis of his most important work La vida inquieta (1894), published two years before Ruben Dario’s Prosas profanas , reveals, however, an innovation in aesthetics that makes him a significant forerunner. Reina contributes to turn-of-the-century Spanish poetry a renovation of the sensibility in terms of “art for art's sake,” the quest for ideal beauty, and an image of the poet as the hero for such an ideal. But the newly proclaimed faith in beauty also conveys consciousness of an emerging crisis arising from the very heart of modernity that Reina expressed through the emblematic title of his book: vida inquieta or spiritual uneasiness, doubts, spleen and complex states of mind.

La montura aciaga del arcipreste Juan Ruiz

Abstract: This article proposes a new semantic implication for the Archpriest Juan Ruiz´s mule when he enters the Guadarrama mountains. The aim of this study is to examine the nature of this animal figure within the context of the demonic elements that surround the pilgrimage, the four serranas, and the fictitious character of the Archpriest. This interpretation uncovers the illicit relations that clerics had with their concubines, who, according to their sociocultural significance and descriptions of them in Medieval sermons and folklore, entered into the realm of the diabolical after their death. This new reading not only reflects the sharp and lively hermeneutics of the Libro de buen amor , but it also proposes a reconsideration of the physical and moral person of the Archpriest. Consequently, the Archpriest´s historical figure, parts of his geographical journey, and the loss of his mule can be approached and dissected beyond a mere historical analysis.

The Spirit of Martí in the Land of Coaybay

Abstract: [U]no de los dilemas irresolubles del futuro de Cuba es, pressamente, la extranjeria de su pasado.- Rafael Rojas, Tumbas sin sosiegoJose Marti's ubiquity in Cuban literature, culture, and the entire spectrum of politics challenges us to parse and contextualize his myriad appropriations, when it doesn't thwart productive engagement with his thought altogether.' Recently scholarship on Marti has even specialized to include studies devoted to the various political ends to which he has been marshaled.2 But how do these recuperations of Marti dialogue with Marti's literary and philosophical preoccupations, such as nation, temporality, poetics? This essay tracks how Republican era (1902-1958) afterlives of Marti - repeated literary references to both his bones and spirit - serve as a barometer for shifting concerns. Early in the century, the spirit or remains of Marti crowd a stage on which authors reproduce a quite Martian messianic discourse of jeopardized sovereignty. But these themes morph, during what is sometimes called the "pseudo-Republic," into depictions of economic dependence and consumption as the Spanish colony becomes a US neocolony.Common to both phases is an engagement with Marti's philosophy, particularly of time and of nation. Specifically, post-1902 literature continues Marti's attempt to imagine a temporality outside of the transfer of empire, implied in both Spanish and US imperial teleologies, and highlighted in the moment of transition between the two. Ultimately, however, Marti's ecstatic utopia - ecstatic in the etymological sense Heidegger recuperated of "outside place and time" - freezes into an obsessive, vicious circling around his ruins.The ruminative tone of Republican literature has deep roots. Rafael Rojas's magisterial study of intellectuals' engagement with the Cuban Revolution, Tumbas sin sosiego: revolucion, disidencia y exilio del intelectual cubano, makes a convincing case for the importance of nineteenth-century myths and aborted emancipatory projects to the course that the 1959 Revolution would take. Rojas claims nineteenth-century frustrations of the Republic paved the way for two foundational myths of Cuban political culture: that of the "Revolucion Inconclusa" and that of the "Regreso del Mesias" (52). The two concepts mystify history, Rojas contends, insofar as they dissolve the distinct aims of at least four different struggles - 1868, 1895, 1933, 1959 - into a single one with its own teleology (66-67). In fact, one could extend the "sensacion de cementerio" traced so exhaustively by Rojas well beyond the twentieth century on which he focuses and deep into the nineteenth. The sense of foreclosed possibilities which characterize a significant portion of twentiethcentury Cuban letters and political thought might, then, be seen as a repetition, albeit with a difference, of a nineteenth-century melancholic nationalism partially produced by the ideological double-bind of a slave-holding elite unable to press for national independence so long as it was linked to the abolition of slavery.But such a genealogy is the subject for a longer study. In what follows I examine a more delimited prevalence of ghosts and relics in Republican letters. Analyzing works by authors Bonifacio Byrne and Jose Antonio Ramos in which Marti appears as a specter, an immaterial being rebuking the neocolonial state, I argue that Marti haunts Republican literature for discrete but interrelated and cumulative reasons: (1) Marti's prophetic measures have been stymied in neocolonial Cuba; (2) despite Marti's efforts to write into existence a new kind of nation and temporality, the nation as such is necessarily haunted by what it excludes; and (3) Marti's status as specter - a material form of the immaterial - inversely mirrors a widespread, cultural nationalism that, as critic Emma Alvarez-Tabio Albo has suggested, compensates a Cuba whose sovereignty and territory were "dematerializing" before foreign capital (146). …

Criminality and Subjectivity in Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez

Abstract: Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora's Infortunios de Alonso Ramirez (1690) has long occupied a difficult place in the tradition of Spanish American writing. A text whose generic categorization is suspect,1 it collapses the distinction between discovery and self-discovery at a time when Spanish Imperial prospects had initiated their slow decline into decadence. Despite these varying critical categorizations, there is no debate as to its historical and cultural importance; as perhaps the most literary text that Siguenza writes, it plays a quintessentially liminal role within the history of Spanish American letters and, more specifically, the development of a distinctly Mexican literary culture. Similarly, it helps to mark a transition from the historiographical tradition in Spanish America towards an intellectual culture that consciously, and self-consciously, tries to articulate an autochthonous literary voice.By and large, scholars have focused on one of three primary areas of inquiry in writing about Infortunios. Research in the early years of colonial Latin American literature as a field showed a heightened interest in generic categorization. As genre studies and structuralist approaches to literary culture waned, newer generations of scholars have shifted their attention to questions of subjectivity, and specifically cultural identity, as a way to understand the importance of Infortunios in particular and Sigiienza's oeuvre more broadly. More recently, scholars have grown increasingly interested in the complexity of Creole identity and how Infortunios's double authorship might affect the construction of Sigiienza's authorial, and Alonso's more ambiguous, criollismo. Each of these traditions hinges on questions of identity, at times textual, other times cultural, and connects its textual conclusions with questions about authorial identity.Over the following pages, I look at the two traditions with which Infortunios has been most closely associated, the picaresque and the relacion, and argue that Sigiienza's text engages in a broader reflection on the relationship between criminality and modernity, pushing past questions of regional and Iberian versus New World identities. By untangling the core issues in the central debates and connecting them to a close reading of the text, I show how Sigiienza links identity and subjectivity with a growing concern for the way a nascent global2 commercial culture is developing by the late seventeenth century, and how an early modern capitalist economy is essential for understanding the way he negotiates the vicissitudes of Alonso's self-perception. For Sigiienza, the crucible in which these contradictions are laid bare is the field of the law as a master discourse that delimits subjects, geographies, and knowledge in the seventeenth century. The law stands as an aporia in Infortunios, a constantly shifting point of reference that defines the protagonist's narrative trajectory. It is in reading Sigiienza's version of Alonso's story through the screen of the law that I aim to recalibrate the discussion away from a model that reads Alonso's identity as metonymie for various kinds of marginalization. Instead, I argue that Siguenza considers Alonso's identity within the context of pre-industrial capitalist culture, interrogating the foundations of subjectivity in the early modern period in its commercial and legal dimension.Alonso's nascent atollo consciousness and the role of national identities are essential to understanding Siguenza's view of Alonso's character development throughout the text. A clear distinction must be made, however, between Alonso's troubling subjectivity and Siguenza's own discourse. Whereas Siguenza's class identity and intellectual affiliations place him squarely within the trajectory of early criollismo., the construction of Alonso's subjectivity operates in a more ambivalent manner, one that is deeply marked by Siguenza's rearticulation of Alonso's story. …

La Inquisición portuguesa en sesión: arte, poder y resistencia en O Judeu, de Jom Tob Azulay

Abstract: Este articulo analiza el modo en que O Judeu , de Jom Tob Azulay (1996), refleja las transacciones politicas e ideologicas entre la monarquia y la Inquisicion portuguesas del siglo XVIII vinculadas al proceso judicial seguido al comediografo de origen brasileno Antonio Jose da Silva (1705-1739), acusado por el Santo Oficio de judaismo. La pelicula narra su desenlace tragico siguiendo los lineamientos esteticos del "cine de calidad". La doble faceta del dramaturgo como sujeto de la historia y sujeto de la ficcion esta en el centro de la discusion que proponemos en este trabajo. Por un lado, Antonio Jose es el punto focal de un conjunto de arbitrariedades institucionales con el objeto de legitimar a la Inquisicion como aparato politico y represivo. Por otro, el trasfondo ideologico de su representacion filmica vuelve a poner en debate las complejas relaciones entre arte y poder en una sociedad autoritaria.

Gerardo Diego's Heterocronismo and the Avant-Garde: Imagen and Manual de espumas

Abstract: "La defensa que en tu carta me haces de tu heterocronismo no llega a convencerme," protests Spanish poet Juan Larrea in a letter of June 22, 1919, to his intimate friend and collaborator Gerardo Diego (1896-1987), in a demonstration of intense frustration with Diego's apparent inability to jettison the past and fully commit himself to the avant-garde poetics of Creacionismo (93) .' At the time of Larrea's letter to Diego, both maintained close ties with the Chilean Vicente Huidobro, self-styled inventor and leader of the Creacionismo movement. Larrea (1895-1980), an iconoclastic author rather like Diego, began his career as an avant-garde poet and fervent supporter of Huidobro, although he later permanently abandoned poetry for prose in 1932. The neologism heterocronismo refers to Diego's propensity for mixing poetic styles from different periods in literary history - a tendency that would have been an anathema to the "advance-wing" of the avant-garde. The skepticism that Larrea shows regarding Diego's heterocronismo (literally meaning "multi-time-ism") implies that for him, time and temporal multiplicity are in and of themselves deeply suspect. Larrea's further comments in his June 1919 letter demonstrate just this position: "Lo que a ti te sucede, me parece, es que aun no ves la manera de desfogar tu emocion en moldes nuevos, y por eso lo haces en los antiguos. Pero se puede, creeme que se puede. Intentalo si no. Y espero cosas muy hermosas" (94). The aesthetic range circumscribed by Larrea would limit Diego's heterodox aesthetic to the absolutely new; Larrea's posturing is in keeping with the general spirit of rebellion that characterizes avant-garde movements, as well as the particularity of the first Spanish avant-garde's bid to be taken seriously around the world.Recollection and temporal multiplicity govern the shape of Diego's literary career as well as the structure of the early avant-garde poetry volumes, Imagen (1922) and Manual de espumas (1924). Diego cycles between the experimental and the traditional even during his initial "avant-garde" period. His volume Soria: galena de estampas y efusiones, released in 1923 between the publication of Imagen and Manual de espumas, is marked by fidelity to the conventions of the modern lyric and landscape poetry. Diego's "estampas y efusiones" play with the Spanish fin-de-siecle tradition of locating collective culture in the landscape, in the manner of Antonio Machado's Campos de Castilla (1912, 1917).2 The neoclassicism of Versos humanos (1925), reflected in the volume's affirmation that "es grato renovar el aula / polvorienta de la retorica," does not preclude a swing back to an avant-garde sensibility in 1932, with the appearance of Poemas adrede and Fabula de Equis y Zeda ("Poesia de circunstancia," Versos humanos 11-12/127).3 The different strains heard in the music of Diego's work have the effect of Marcel's madeleine in Proust's ? la Recherche du temps perdu - to take the reader back and forth in time. This constant movement of prolepsis weaves a fabric of time and memory unusual for the avant-garde.Similar to pictorial Cubism, the architectonic abstraction that typifies Huidobro's early work restricts the temporal multiplicity of Diego's approach, which augments the expression of emotion and subjectivity in the poetic text. The imperative to create anew like a "pequeno Dios" and dispense with "literary" mimesis was an integral part of Huidobro's avant-garde rebellion against conventional poetics (B espejo de agua [1916]) - as exemplified by the volumes Adan (1916), and Tour Eiffel, Hallali, Ecuatorial, and Poemas articos (1918) (Arenas 22; Huidobro 255).-* The Huidobro of the 1910s and 1920s draws upon Cubist innovations and, just as in Cubism, his poetry volumes, painted poems, and collages of this period create parallels between the multileveled architecture of the representational space and the workings of perception. Although the architectonics of Cubism and Creacionismo can be considered in this sense performative - with all of performativity's associations with subjectivity, movement, and change over time - an aspect of tautology remains present in the doubling between images or image and text. …