Lucero

Lina Mascareñas, personaje central de la de la última novela de Emilia Pardo Bazán, Dulce Dueño escrita en 1911, excluida de la crítica por muchos años, recupera su protagonismo al ser analizada bajo la perspectiva de género. Dulce Dueño pasa de ser considerada una obra mística y de conversión no convincente, a ser una novela con temas actuales al encontrarse en ella características concluyentes de empoderamiento femenino. El objetivo de este ensayo es profundizar en la búsqueda de independencia, igualdad y empoderamiento mental, sexual, corporal y espiritual que atraviesa la protagonista de Dulce Dueño. Para tal efecto consideraré la posición de varios artículos y textos donde se analiza al personaje de Lina y su paulatina transformación ante la crítica desde la reaparición de Dulce Dueño en la crítica del siglo XX, no con la idea de negar o desestimar los estudios revisados, sino tomar de ellos los conceptos que ayuden a fortalecer mis observaciones.

This paper aims to analyze the influence of Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago on the musical, literary, and cinematic works of the Brazilian musicians Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, the Martinican writer Edouard Glissant, and the Chilean director Raúl Ruiz.

Though a filiation between de Andrade’s Manifesto and the Tropicália movement has been drawn by several authors such as Dunn, Sovik, Harvey, Moehn, and the tropicalists themselves, approaching the work of Glissant and Ruiz through the legacy of cultural anthropophagy is less common. This paper argues however that analyzing the continuity between the postcolonial tone of de Andrade’s manifesto and the center-periphery dynamic present in the Tropicália movement, Glissant and Ruiz’s works can help shed new light on Veloso and Gil’s first album Tropicália: ou panis et circencis (1968), Glissant’s Poétique de la relation, and Ruiz’s Poétique du cinema. When de Andrade uses his Manifesto to defend the authenticity and validity of Brazilian culture, I argue that Veloso, Gil, Glissant and Ruiz, through the invention of the concepts of tropicalismo, créolisation and image d’image respectively re-appropriate de Andrade’s notion of anthropophagy to extend it beyond the limits of the nation and adapt it to the world at large. Taking the Manifesto as a starting point, and building on these notions of tropicalismo, créolisation, and image d’image, this paper suggests a reading of the quest for totality as a metaphor for these authors’ quest for a world as a whole; that is, a world that overcomes the center-periphery dynamic.

For Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, writing was an act of self-interrogation and of becoming for her characters as well as for herself. This article explores two of Lispector’s novels, A Paixão Segundo G.H. (1964) and Água Viva (1973), in relation to posthuman theory, in particular Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman (2013). Braidotti's work complements that of Lispector, for it asks where the posthuman condition places humanity today; what new forms of subjectivity it supports; and whether the posthuman engenders its own form of inhumanity. Indeed, analyzing these books through a posthumanist lens enables exploration of various questions surrounding identity and human nature. This article consequently examines key concepts in both Lispector’s and Braidotti’s writing such as the individual questioning what it means to be human; the conflict between the individual and society, specifically in relation to concepts of time and the animal; and the broader challenge of navigating narrative subjectivity when writing. Ultimately, through analyzing Lispector’s relationship with words in conjunction with posthuman philosophies, this article seeks to further illuminate the vision of human nature that Lispector sought to communicate via her writing.

In 2019, co-directors Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho released Bacurau, a Brazilian film that centers on its namesake: a small, diverse community in the Northeast of Brazil under siege by escalating acts of white supremacist abuse and violence. The sertão—a vast, dry and sparsely populated landscape in the Northeast of Brazil—is notorious for its underdevelopment and intense, devastating droughts. The region is situated at the historical intersection of colonialism and racial violence. White settlement, the slave trade and the theft of indigenous land have transformed the unsubdued sertão into a landscape of resistance. Historically, Black people have liberated themselves from port cities and populous colonial settlements; and fled into the sertão where indigenous people had not been uprooted, and where they established quilombos, or Black autonomous communities of resistance. Bacurau explores these complex cultural dynamics and communities through a cast of intergenerational Black, indigenous, white, foreign and queer characters settled within a narrative that mixes Western (or faroeste), science-fiction and action thriller elements. While flawed, Bacurau provides a unique and nuanced insight into the dynamics of race and resistance that are unique to the sertão, and explores the ways that marginalized people can utilize community and violence as tools of resistance and liberation in the face of overwhelming force.