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Lucero

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About

Lucero is the literary and critical journal edited, produced and published by the graduate students of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Berkeley. This journal is currently undergoing a transition to a digital format and will continue to be dedicated to Iberian, Latin American, US Latino and Luso-Brazilian Studies. Since its first issue in 1990, it has promoted a multicultural and multilingual dialogue in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. The journal’s prestige has assured its place in the Modern Language Association (MLA) Index of publications. From 1990 to the present, Lucero has invited graduate students and scholars to participate in an interdisciplinary dialogue in which every volume focuses on a specific concern related to our disciplines.

Performance and resistance

The theme of the 2019-20 issue of Lucero arises from our desire to expand on what constitutes performativity by exploring practices of collective resistance that transcend disciplinary and geographic boundaries. With this impetus in mind, we invited submissions on the theme of performance and resistance.

Articles

Dos bastidores ao palco—a trajetória da mulher no teatro de Júlia Lopes de Almeida e Guiomar Torresão

A recent effort by literary critics to highlight 19th century women playwrights’ work has brought fourth plays by the Portuguese Guiomar Torresão (1844-1898) and Brazilian Júlia Lopes de Almeida (1862-1934), several of which had never been published before. This work analyzes A herança (1908) and Vai raiar o sol (2016) by Lopes de Almeida and O fraco da baronesa (2005) by Torresão in order to understand how ambiguity is used to persuade readers/spectators to support women’s cause for equality. In the case of Lopes de Almeida, who had been neglected by 20th century critics for her lack of support for equality, we find strong female protagonists that are not afraid to challenge their roles in order to find happiness. Torresão’s comedy, on the other hand, brings forward the hypocrisy of upper-class liberals that claimed to support women’s right for equality. All three plays were clearly written with the reader — men — in mind since women counted on their support to entice change.

Mujer sin Edén: Fusiones del feminismo y guerra/posguerra

Este ensayo es un análisis literario de la colección de poesía Mujer sin Edén (1947) escrito por Carmen Conde (1907-1996). Publicada durante la dictadura del Franciso Franco y un creciente feminismo en España, analiza los técnicos literarios que maneja Conde para protestar la represión sociopolítica en su país y ofrecer una lectura feminista a través del palimpsesto bíblico. Como base teórico, investigo cómo esta obra responde a la teoría del genocentrismo, la cual propone que las escritoras españolas del siglo XX presentaban a la mujer como un ser marginada y autodeterminista. A la vez, comparo la representación feminista en Mujer sin Edén con imágenes feministas presentes en tres novelas de Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851-1921). Arguyo que mientras Pardo Bazán retrata una mujer feminista en transición, Conde va un paso adelante al presentar voces poéticas que hacen el papel de la mujer que reconoce tanto su diferencia como su igualdad a los hombres. A lo largo del ensayo, reflexiono sobre la fusión de esta actitud feminista de Conde con su simbólica protesta de la guerra y la represión política por poderes patriarcales que reprimen principalmente a las mujeres por sus capacidades de crear y pensar.

El archivo encarnado en Lost Children Archive (2019)

Este trabajo analiza la última novela de la escritora mexicana Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive (2019), desde los estudios de performance. Específicamente, se utilizan los conceptos de archivo y repertorio que plantea Diana Taylor. Se propone que, en el texto se crea un archivo encarnado que guarda y transmite el acto performático, no por medio de soportes materiales, sino a través del cuerpo vivo. Esto se observa en las recreaciones y juegos que hacen los personajes Memphis y Swift Feather, en la ficción abismal que se crea por medio de la novela ficticia Elegies for Lost Children y en los ecos que permean el texto.

Movements and Stillness: Rosana Paulino’s Tecelãs and Experimentations of The Flesh

This paper focuses on Rosana Paulino’s installation Tecelãs, meaning weavers, from 2003, which features several ceramic nests and insect-women wrapped in thread. Tecelãs speaks to the experience of black women in Brazil and visually represents how in order to survive the precarity of black life, “woman pulls from within herself the threads with which she makes her cocoon - where she remakes, dies, and is born again.” The analysis of the paper flows between Paulino’s installation, performance studies and black studies, theories of the flesh, confinement, and diverse black feminist freedom movements. The main argument of this paper is to say that for black women and girls, literal and figurative spaces of confinement—such as living in the periphery or the marked black body—are also spaces of performative experimentations towards freedom. Following Harvey Young, Harriet Jacobs, Sarah Jane Cervenak, and Alexander Weheliye, I elaborate on their ideas of stillness, “movements in confinement,” mental and physical wandering, and experimentations of the flesh in order to take seriously their call for thinking alternative modes of freedom movements and rethink what counts as performances of the body. I argue that the construction of cocoons by Paulino’s weavers, and their actions of weaving and reconfiguring the body, metaphorically mirrors the spaces of enclosure that restrict the movements of the body, while also allowing for transformation and freedom planning.

Interrupting Movements in Barcelona

With an attention to walking, this article explores a politics of movement and recognition that emerged between tourists and anti-tourism activism in Barcelona in 2017. Of focus is the political performance of a walking artist who interrupted tourist entitlements and imaginaries, performing what anthropologist Audra Simpson calls refusal (2016 328). Upon wandering the periphery of a Catalan festival that was celebrating local myths and legends, this artist-activist, named Jordi, contested the commodification of Catalan culture and incited anxiety among tourists taking in the display. In relation to other scenes of protest, these enactments of collective refusal shifted the rhythm of relation in the moment of encounter, entangling tourists in the wider socio-political context.

Siendo qhari: (Re)creando la masculinidad andina a través de la danza

Este artículo estudia el proceso de construcción de identidades de género en los andes a través de la danza. Además, analiza cómo nociones étnicas influyen en el desarrollo de identidades de género en la región. En particular, el ensayo estudia la coreografía del Qhapaq Qolla, una comparsa de varones que participa anualmente en la Festividad de la Virgen del Carmen, una de las celebraciones más importantes de la región Cusco en el Perú. El estudio se realiza a través de un marco analítico basado en conceptos Quechuas. El artículo argumenta que, a través de la danza, los miembros del Qhapaq Qolla exploran estereotipos acerca de la masculinidad andina para subvertirlos, desarrollando a través de este proceso una identidad de género fuertemente influenciada por la herencia de sus tradiciones Quechua. La masculinidad que construyen los danzantes está conformada por roles y energías masculinas, femeninas, humanas y no humanas, las cuales están en constante negociación.