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

La producción literaria de Angelina Muñiz-Huberman (mexicana; nacida en Hyères, 1936) contiene múltiples pasajes dedicados a narrar las visiones que experimentan sus personajes. En este estudio se examinan algunos de los episodios visionarios en la obra de Muñiz-Huberman. El propósito es examinar la manera en que la escritora adapta y transforma ciertas convenciones provenientes de las tradiciones mística y apocalíptica, o más ampliamente del discurso revelado, para crear una nueva variante literaria del lenguaje visionario. Aquí se ofrece un análisis textual de las descripciones de visiones en tres novelas de la autora: Morada interior (1972), Dulcinea encantada (1992) y El mercader de Tudela (1998). En los pasajes visionarios de las tres novelas estudiadas, hay una tensión constante entre los elementos que provienen de los grandes textos místicos y apocalípticos de diversas épocas antiguas y del Renacimiento, y otros elementos fácilmente identificables como productos de los tiempos en que se escribieron las novelas. Si la manera de comunicar y describir las visiones sigue las convenciones discursivas establecidas en épocas más tempranas, en cambio, el contenido intelectual de las revelaciones representa el polo moderno de la escritura de Muñiz-Huberman.

El presente artículo analiza El asc o de Horacio Castellanos Moya, “Hechos de un buen ciudadano” de Claudia Hernández y Heterocity de Mauricio Orellana, y los interroga desde su reflexión en torno al problema de la comunidad. A partir de allí, se plantea que la guerra civil salvadoreña (1980-1992) puede ser concebida como una catástrofe, entendiéndola como la destrucción del proyecto de comunidad nacional que comenzó a cimentarse desde el siglo XIX. El ocaso de esta comunidad habría ocurrido precisamente a raíz del enfrentamiento de los proyectos comunitarios que tanto el ejército como el FMLN intentaron imponer. La ruina estaría dada, entonces, por la conciencia de que en nombre de la propia comunidad acontece la destrucción y la catástrofe. Siguiendo esta línea, lo que encontramos en la narrativa salvadoreña de los últimos años es precisamente una literatura que podemos denominar postcatastrófica. Esta, sin embargo, no se encuentra orientada ni al desencanto ni al lamento por el fracaso de los proyectos revolucionarios, sino que, más bien, ve en la crisis de la comunidad tradicional una posibilidad única de pensamiento crítico que permita, finalmente, superar todo binarismo político y poner en entredicho los nuevos mecanismos de dominación que comenzaron a operar con la implementación del neoliberalismo a mediados de los noventa.

Rodolfo Gil Benumeya representa un caso excepcional en el africanismo español: desde su trayectoria intelectual y política procuró articular las ideas de la hispanidad y la arabidad en una propuesta de confluencias intercontinentales que une a España, América Latina y el mundo árabe. En esa línea y a partir de 1920, la relación contemporánea de España con sus excolonias americanas por un lado, y la situación de los emigrantes árabes en América por otro, le sirvió como modelo tanto para analizar el papel de su país en la gestión del entonces Protectorado de Marruecos, como para proyectar una nueva relación ante la eventual independencia del mismo.

This paper explores the resemblance between Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva (1973) and the Book of Psalms. There are two principal claims to be made on the basis of this comparison. First, by oblique reference to the biblical Psalms, Lispector provides us with a crucial tool for understanding her project in Água Viva, namely the attempt to attain the intimacy, faith, and comprehension of herself, others, and existence as the Psalmist has of his God. Second, the intertextual relationship with the Old Testament may be taken as a Judaic trace in Lispector’s work, albeit one that the author employs not to emphasis her difference, but as a means of achieving communion with her readers, whoever they may be.

In contemplation, gazing on his surroundings, José Watanabe’s eye serves as his principal instrument for finding exact words and executing their use with precision. Watanabe searches for the precision of a word through his gaze, but it is paradoxically his gaze through which the precision of a word becomes imprecise and impossible to be attained. This study, first, attempts to show that paradoxical phenomena emerge as a result of the presentation of the apparition of a precise image and its simultaneous disappearance. Then, it explores how and why the simultaneous disappearance of precision can be understood as a way for Watanabe to reveal the unattainableness of the “reality” that he tries to project through precision.  Studying Roland Barthes’s concept of photographic temporality, one can see a certain resonance between Barthes’s understanding of “reality” projected on a photograph and Watanabe’s approach to the representation of “reality” in a poem. Barthes’s concept of photographic temporality exposes the simultaneous co-presence of the existence and death of a subject in a photograph. Applying Barthes’s observation of the co-presence of existence and death in a photograph to the exploration of the simultaneous apparition of both precision and imprecision in Watanabe’s poetry can be useful for looking closely into how he reveals the impossibility of projecting the precision of the “reality” that he endeavors to capture in his poetry.

What does constipation and bleeding ulcers have to do with racialization? How do such ailments mark the makings of a fine writer? In this article, Fetta takes a transdisciplinary approach utilizing literary analysis, social science, and biological studies, to investigate the effects of racialization on the soma--the intelligent, communicative body-- in the Chicano activist/writer Oscar ‘Zeta’ Acosta’s masterwork The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1971). Fetta develops her theory for somatic analysis in her upcoming monograph: Shame Hurts: Pain in Racialization Through a Somatic Lens in Latino Literature, but in this article, Fetta specifically analyzes Oscar’s stomach as interlocutor, an intelligent entity informing Oscar’s perception of self and society. Fetta argues Oscar engages his digestive disorders in somatic protest against Oscar’s marginalization in US society. At the same time, his visceral disarray defines Oscar with the sensibility of a great Western writer

Contemporary Brazilian fiction has been showing the urban space, and the city in particular, as a privileged object of reflection and poetic imagination. This paper explores the representation of urban space/city in female writing. In other words, my goal is to study the role of urban space/city in the transgression of the patriarchal system, specifically regarding the roles traditionally assigned to women. My starting point will be the following two questions. First: can the city and urban experience promote the transgression of the rules of patriarchal society and help female characters to break with the past and gain agency? And, secondly, how are contemporary female writers conveying urban space in their fiction? I intend to employ theoretical concepts that deal with the characterization of the urban space/city, such as metropolis and megalopolis. I’m using the category of space here in a culturalist perspective, which defines space as a representational category intimately intertwined with social and psychological dimensions. Thus understood, space is not an immobile surface but an ongoing sphere where several human trajectories coexist and the social is constructed (Massey 2005). Given the broad range of authors at hand, I’ve decided to limit my reflection to four female writers: Clarice Lispector (1920-1977), Sônia Coutinho (1939-2013), Paloma Vidal (1975-), and Ana Paula Maia (1977-).

The following essay investigates Borges’ cultural-ideological stance as an Argentinean writer opposed to national literature and ideological rhetoric. This position will be elucidated via a comparison with Edward Said’s Orientialism which, following Foucault, argues that literature is subservient to the ideological paradigms of the period. The discussion demonstrates how Borges presents a dialectical orientalism in his work: a philosophical-universal position deviating from the delimited framework of national ideology, hereby establishing an uni-ideological philosophical and transcultural view of the interrelationship between “East” and “West.” In line with Said, the essay examines the literary representation of Islam in Western literature, focusing on the image of Mahomet in Dante's Divine Comedy.

Cuban filmmaker Yaima Pardo creates a participatory digital literacy campaign in her documentary OFF_LINE (2013) and documentary series SWITCH ON (2013-present). Through her work she establishes a multi-directional dialogue on digital literacy. Beyond this call for digital literacy, Pardo herself is part of a contemporary generation of Cuban filmmakers, nuevos realizadores that depend on digital technology to make, distribute and exhibit their works despite their illegal status as the Cuban state does not recognize their independent production companies. Challengingover fivedecades of control, Pardo and her peers are part of a larger national fight to redefine Cuban film.

“Coloniality is not over, it is all over:” Interview with Dr. Walter Mignolo (Nov. 2014. Part I)

Price, Brian L., César A. Salgado and John Pedro Schwartz, eds. TransLatin Joyce. Global Transmissions in Ibero-American Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print. 260 pp.

Aguasaco, Carlos. ¡No contaban con mi astucia! México: Parodia y sujeto en la serie de El Chapulín Colorado. México D.F.: Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, 2014. Print. 257 pp.

García-Caro, Pedro. After the Nation: Postnational Satire in the Works of Carlos Fuentes and Thomas Pynchon. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014. Print. 282 pp.

Osorio, Óscar. La Virgen de los sicarios y la novela del sicario en Colombia. Cali: Secretaría de Cultura Valle del Cauca, 2013. Impreso. 205 pp.

Oropesa Márquez, Salvador A. Literatura y comercio en España: las tiendas (1868- 1952) . Málaga: Universidad de Málaga, 2014. Impreso. 311 pp.