TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World

This essay looks at the Zapatista struggle in Southeast Mexico from the perspective of epistemic decolonization. I follow Walter Mignolo’s analysis of Zapatismo as a decolonial “theoretical revolution” and moreover build on it by articulating it in relation to other concepts in the decolonial theoretical toolkit, such as epistemic humility, pluriversality, and knowing how to listen. I conclude with an interpretation of recent events in the Zapatista communities that reinforce what Mariana Mora has called the Zapatista’s “politics of listening,” which also allude to the transformations that continue to make Zapatismo a global beacon of decolonial thinking and doing.

Examined through a transrealista lens, the “sketches” left by the poet traveler in Carlos Humberto Santos's Bocetos de un cuerpo sin forma (Esquisses d’un corps sans forme/Sketches of a shapeless body, 2018) testify to the expanse, depth, and contours of power and marginalization across time and space. Descending to the Mayan underworld of Xibalbá in a journey that recalls that of Dante Alighieri’s pilgrim through Hell in La divina commedia, the poet traveler moves through overlapping layers of time—pre-colonial, colonial, and neocolonial/contemporary—and in-between spaces of human diasporas and other geographies of oppression. Upon the layers of “sketches” created by other artists to represent places of death, fear, and torment on the “cuerpo” of the oppressed, Santos's Bocetos leaves testament to the dynamics of marginalization and power in twenty-first-century Honduras.

This article argues that conviviality (convivencia) is an alternative, performance-based epistemology that is enacted in the music and dance of the son jarocho from southern Veracruz, Mexico. In its traditional settings, son jarocho is played in a participatory musical celebration called a fandango. This article provides an ethnographic perspective of how marginalized musical communities of Veracruz enact an subaltern cosmopolitanism from below through an affective sociality encapsulated in of the fandango that has direct ramifications for how daily life is constructed in the region.

Este ensayo propone una lectura de Conquista de las islas Malucas (1609) del poeta, historiador y eclesiástico Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola (1562-1631) como un gabinete de curiosidades textual lleno de narraciones y objetos maravillosos. El autor emplea sus propias ideas sobre la escritura de la historia para crear una crónica de conquista con la intención de promocionar la labor mesiánica del imperio español. Su obra actualiza los conocimientos de un área del globo sobre la que permanecían los mitos clásicos y medievales sobre Oriente.

El propósito del trabajo es la exploración del alcance de la disidencia del marginal modelo orientalista latinoamericano. Partiendo de un enfoque que compara la naturaleza del discurso producido en y por el céntrico paradigma euroamericano y el periférico hispanoamericano, buscamos revelar la operatividad de la enunciación literaria intersticial e híbrida del último para un alternativo modelo. Para ello, valemos de una aproximación analítica de orden ecléctico a la obra La mano del fuego del autor mexicano Alberto Ruy Sánchez, para manifestar la acción deconstructiva de varios recursos narratológicos que pintan el cuadro de un mundo novelesco además de nómada y transfronterizo es claramente intercultural. Tales recursos establecen desde la condición literaria puentes entre Oriente y Occidente en una utópica gnosis “post-orientalista” latinoamericana.

This paper addresses Ángel Vázquez’s novel La vida perra de Juanita Narboni (1976), a first-person account of several decades in the life of Juanita Narboni Cortés, a middle-class tangerina of mixed Andalusian/Gibraltarian parentage. I argue that despite Juanita’s distance from her Gibraltarian father, Gibraltar represents a kind of specter, physically distant but insistently “present” through her memories and family ties, and through interpersonal, economic, and cultural connections between Tangier and the Rock. I first describe Juanita’s role as a personification and mirror of late-colonial Tangier. I then explain how we can understand the novel as a ghost story of sorts. I also argue here that Juanita’s Gibraltarian father and Gibraltar itself “haunt” the narrative, with a good deal of this haunting being mediated through photographs. Finally, I analyze the novel’s conclusion to show how Juanita’s desperate attempt to locate a photograph of her mother, and her unexpected encounter with a paperweight, an object associated with her father and with Gibraltar, suggests that she must come to terms, at least partially, with the memory of her father—and by extension, with Gibraltar. I contend that despite Juanita’s centering of her narrative on her mother and Andalusia, by attending to her references to her father and to Gibraltar, we open the novel to an alternate reading that helps us recover these “secondary ghosts,” and that complicates Juanita’s resolute self-identification with Andalusia. Similarly, we unmask Juanita’s andalucismo and disavowal of her ties to Gibraltar as a late-colonial fantasy of an erstwhile “Spanish” Tangier that was never entirely Spanish, but is rather a city whose numerous “ghosts,” including the Rock, cannot be extirpated from its literary memory.

Benezra, Karen. Dematerialization: Art and Design in Latin America . University of California Press, 2020. Print. 256 pp.

Interviews with Mexican Women: We Don’t Talk About Feminism Here . Carlos Coria-Sánchez. New York: Routledge, 2019.

Caña Jiménez, María del Carmen, ed. Desafíos, diferencias y deformaciones de la ciudadanía: mutantes y monstruos en la producción cultural latinoamericana reciente. Editorial A Contracorriente, 2020. pp. 225.

Gómez Unamuno, Aurelia. Entre fuego, memoria y violencia de Estado: los textos literarios y testimoniales del movimiento armado en México. A Contracorriente, 2020. 578 pp.

Machuca, Paulina. El vino de cocos en la Nueva España. Historia de una transculturación en el siglo XVII. El Colegio de Michoacán, 2018. 400 pp.

Rueda, Carolina. Ciudad y fantasmagoría: dimensiones de la mirada en el cine urbano de Latinoamérica del siglo XXI. Cuarto propio, 2019. 392pp.

Williams, Gareth. Infrapolitical Passages: Global Turmoil, Narco-Accumulation, and the Post-Sovereign State. Fordham University Press, 2021. 250 pp.

Yen, Huei Lan, Toma y daca: transculturación y presencia de escritores chino-latinoamericanos. Purdue UP, 2016. 180pp.