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Rewriting and Reimagining Traditions

Mester welcomed articles examining how artists and writers reinterpret canons, historical events, and Afro-descendant and Indigenous traditions across Iberian, Latin American, Luso-African, and Latinx contexts. We explored how engaging prior traditions through contemporary frameworks drives new critical and cultural practices.

Cover Caption: Rewriting and Reimagining Traditions

Front Matter

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Articles

  • “El gran secreto del arte”: Aesthetic Considerations in the refundiciones of José Fernández Guerra

    This article examines the influences and interests of the refundidores, who embarked on a project to recast the comedias of Spain's Golden Age according to new aesthetic considerations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. José Fernández Guerra, who published three refundiciones in 1826, included several author prologues with his works that help to explain the specific aesthetic and nationalistic concerns central to the project of the refundición. Focusing on Fernández Guerra’s author prologue and the changes made between his refundición Ir contra el viento and Agustín Moreto’s original seventeenth-century work Yo por vos y vos por otro, this study builds upon earlier analyses of the refundición to demonstrate, with support from the words of the refundidores themselves, the ultimate national-aesthetic philosophy behind this return to the Golden Age comedia at the start of the nineteenth century.

  • Afro-Ascendencia: From Colonial Slavehood to Contemporary Sainthood in Harmonia Rosales, Fabiola Jean-Louis, and Firelei Báez’s Interventions on the Afro-Diasporic Visual Legacy and Beyond

    This article examines the artwork of Harmonia Rosales, Fabiola Jean-Louis, and Firelei Báez to formulate the concept of Afro-ascendencia. Grounded in art history and decolonial theory, the study demonstrates how these contemporary artists engage with canonical techniques to challenge colonial omissions and rectify historical narratives. By addressing themes of race, gender, power, and spirituality, their visual interventions reframe traditional aesthetics and subvert pseudo-normative notions of Western art history. Ultimately, this article posits Afro-ascendencia as a unifying framework for understanding how contemporary Afro-diasporic visual cultures reinterpret the canon, advance intersectional discourses on identity, and recondition collective, historical memory.

  • A Opacidade da Obra e o Desvio da Vida em “Na Ópera de Wifredo Lam” (2023), de Edimilson de Almeida Pereira: por uma Estética da Relação

    O presente artigo analisa o poema “Na Ópera de Wifredo Lam” (2023), publicado na antologia A Morte Também Aprecia o Jazz (2023), de Edmilson de Almeida Pereira, em diálogo com Édouard Glissant e Wifredo Lam. Mais precisamente, objetiva-se explicar como o poema de Pereira, ao percorrer pinturas e traços biográficos de Lam, aborda os conceitos de opacidade e desvio (détour), presentes na obra de Glissant. Nesta análise, as pinturas La Jungla (1943) e Le Sombre Malembo, Dieu du carrefour (1943), de Lam, e o livro Poétique de la Relation (1990), de Glissant, tornam-se centrais. Entende-se que “Na Ópera de Wifredo Lam” (2023), ao abordar a obra e a vida de Lam a partir da citação e da reescritura de determinados conceitos glissantianos, aposta, tal como sugere o próprio Glissant, em uma poética da relação — a qual une, por meio de suas opacidades e desvios, obras e vidas de traços afrodiaspóricos.

  • Archipelagic Rewriting and Postcolonial Reframing of the Epic in Jorge de Lima’s Invenção de Orfeu

    This paper examines how Invenção de Orfeu by Jorge de Lima rewrites the Western canon through postcolonial and archipelagic poetics. Reading Édouard Glissant’s concepts of Opacity and Relation alongside Antonio Cornejo Polar’s notion of Heterogeneity, it argues that Lima’s formal fragmentation and postcolonial reframing of the epic desacralize the Orphic myth, subvert literary traditions, and remap Brazil’s colonial tensions. Taken together, intertextuality, metapoetics, and island imagery enable Lima to challenge imperial cartographies and to allegorize the ambivalent quest for identity within coloniality. In doing so, Invenção de Orfeu unsettles colonial imaginaries and aesthetic epistemes through mythic and literary reinvention.

     

  • Do envio ao resto: matéria e escritura em Drawing Logistics de Luiza Crosman

    O texto analisa a série Drawing Logistics, de Luiza Crosman, à luz de debates contemporâneos sobre materialidade e escritura. As obras articulam colagens diagramáticas que integram linguagem verbal e materiais provenientes de sistemas logísticos, como embalagens, etiquetas e códigos de barras. A leitura mobiliza a noção de matéria vibrante, de Jane Bennett, para sustentar que esses elementos deixam de ser compreendidos como suportes inertes e passam a ser entendidos como actantes inseridos em assemblagens, cuja atuação implica a produção de efeitos e a configuração de temporalidades. Em articulação com a teoria derridiana da escritura e com as ideias de Anne-Marie Christin, o texto destaca a convergência entre escrita e imagem nas práticas contemporâneas, propondo que Drawing Logistics explicita uma política da matéria na qual o sentido surge de relações instáveis entre materiais, signos.

INTERVIEW

  • Entrevista con la escritora ecuatoriana Yuliana Ortiz Ruano

    En esta entrevista, la escritora ecuatoriana Yuliana Ortiz Ruano dialoga sobre su formación, la infancia como espacio político y la escritura como práctica comunitaria. A partir de Fiebre de carnaval (2022), reflexiona sobre la violencia, el cuerpo y el sonido como ejes narrativos, así como sobre la importancia de una mirada afroecuatoriana dentro de la literatura latinoamericana contemporánea.

NOTES ON EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

MESTER VOL. 55 PDF (DIGITAL VERSION)