El Dúo Pimpinela en la transición democrática argentina: una escucha política

En el presente trabajo propongo una escucha en clave política de algunas canciones del Dúo Pimpinela. Estos artistas se hicieron conocidos a principios de la década de los ochenta del siglo pasado con una propuesta innovadora que combinaba los temas y formas musicales de la balada romántica con estructuras dramáticas propias del teatro, para representar escenas basadas en las peleas y rupturas de pareja. Las canciones de pelea, si bien mostraron la capacidad de interpelar masivamente al público, no se han pensado en vinculación con el proceso de transición democrática que se iniciaba en esos años con el debilitamiento de la dictadura, principalmente después de la guerra de Malvinas. Sin embargo, una escucha en clave política se hace posible si se vinculan la crisis de las relaciones entre los géneros, en especial las relaciones matrimoniales, por una parte, con un amplio conjunto de demandas de democratización que caracterizaron el período, por otra. Para fundar esa escucha política, propongo recuperar dos nociones de larga trayectoria en los estudios culturales: la de “inconsciente político”, desenvolvida por Frederic Jameson, y la de “estructura de sentimiento”, propuesta por Raymond Williams.

From Queer Necropolitics to Queer Eschatology: Reza Abdoh’s Unsettling Historiography

The theatrical oeuvre of Reza Abdoh has been lauded for its reinvigoration of the avantgarde, its formal and political daring and its astute commentary about the violence of the HIV virus (Fordyce, Carlson, Mufson, Bell). More recently, Abdoh’s work has been taken up as a commentary on neoliberalism—in part because of its politicization of bricolage and pastiche, recalling the more radical possibilities of theorizations of scholars such as Frederic Jameson (Zimmerman). Others have called out the modes by which Abdoh expanded the possibilities of queerness in the early 1990s. Yet no scholar has commented on Abdoh’s engagement of eschatology as a mode of historiography. That is the purpose of this essay. It is under this rubric, rather than an idea of generic postmodern milieu, that I read the multiple and discordant temporalities in Abdoh’s performances. While drawing on theories of the necropolitical (Mbembe) and gore capitalism (Valencia) in relation to conceptions of queer eschatology and capitalist violence, my inquiry emerges from consideration of the structural and theoretical aspects of the art works (“object’s”) themselves. I consider how Father Was a Peculiar Man (1990), performed in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan, exemplifies the historiographical possibilities of performance through its embodiment of an eschatological vision of the world in which the gender binary is performatively undone.

Frederic Jameson e o problema das alegorias nacionais do terceiro mundo

O presente artigo revisita as elaborações de Fredric Jameson sobre a Literatura do Terceiro Mundo e o debate que se seguiu às suas reflexões. Fazemos um apanhado das alterações e reparos que Jameson fez de seu pensamento ao longo das décadas de críticas e embates. Por fim, apresentamos uma hipótese de leitura das elaborações do Warwick Research Collective (Wreck) como respostas às críticas que Jameson sofreu e também como continuação de suas elaborações. Tanto o crítico estadunidense como o coletivo de pesquisadores representam com seus aportes teóricos uma via de debate para o marxismo na área dos estudos pós-coloniais dentro do campo literário, a partir da Teoria do Sistema-Mundo e da Teoria do Desenvolvimento Desigual e Combinado, contribuindo com a problemática da World-Literature.

The Pressure of Eurochronology and the Romanian Rural Prose

The paper looks at the Romanian relationship between modernism and rural imagination in the Romanian 20th century debates. As in other cases of semi-peripheral or emergent literatures (the general framework builds on contributions from Frederic Jameson, Pascale Casanova and Wai Chee Dimock), the hegemonical pressure of the Eurochronology has put an embargo on rural prose, excluding it from the projects of modernist literature. The study asserts that far from being a collateral symptom of modernity, rural imaginary is essential for understanding its contradictory mechanisms.

Listening to Los Angeles in the Theatre of Anna Deavere Smith and Gabriel Kahane

Postmodern theorists such as Jean Baudrillard, David Harvey, and Frederic Jameson have tended to approach cities through the eye rather than the ear, often citing Los Angeles as a prototypical example of an urban simulacrum. This article takes up two works of theatre that focus on listening to rather than looking at Los Angeles. Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993) and Gabriel Kahane’s The Ambassador (2014) use voice and music, respectively, to sound out neglected histories and experiences overlooked by theorists who apprehend Los Angeles primarily through vision. Through the close reading of dramatic texts, musical scores, and live and recorded performances of these two works, this article troubles the pervasive ocularcentrism in critical interpretations of Los Angeles, using theatre to theorize a more inclusive dramaturgy and geography of the city.

Theses on Translation: An Organon for the Current Moment

The article is a diagnosis of the contemporary condition of translation practice, taking into account its political consequences. For translation, understood as a kind of mediation between cultures, can function as a form of political intervention, undermining the established hierarchies of languages and cultures. However, this can only happen if the translator’s work is precisely conceptualized and the translation itself is based on a hermeneutic model that evaluates the category of interpretation. The article uses, among others, theoretical works by Charles Peirce, Louis Althusser, Pascale Casanova, and Frederic Jameson.

The Emergence of Violence and the Terror of Being Born in Murakami’s Coin Locker Babies

Modern poetics imposed the image of Nietzsche’s split Subject, with the disaggregated self-emerging as dilemmatic subjectivity and its aesthetic culmination in the “dehumanisation of art.” Nietzsche’s philosophy provided postmodern poetics with the Subject as “fiction,” subjected to a complex process of self-multiplication and self-reflection (Ihab Hassan). The loss of the autonomy of the Subject as a “fashionable theme” (Frederic Jameson), combined with its multiplication into simulacra (Jean Baudrillard) and the abolition of reference, allow the Object to storm the places of its absence. The multiplicitous nature under which the image of subjectivity is formed is a possible solution for the issue of the Subject. Another solution would be inflicting violence upon the Subject, replaced by the corporeality of the Object, by the body, to the point of its destruction, or to the ultimate point of abjectness. My essay will use Murakami Ryū’s novel Coin Locker Babies to examine its author’s views on the Object-Subject relation, on the Subject as an Object (corporeality) and on the forms through which the Object inflicts violence upon the Subject.

Italian Futurism and the Explosive ‘Now’

This chapter examines the development and changing artistic and socio-political implications of a particular temporal modality—‘the present as history’—within a variety of Futurist texts. It draws on the work of Frederic Jameson to argue that the Italian Futurists sought to radically disrupt a particular representation of the present in their calls to destroy the past and attempts to endow futurity with the urgency of fully embodied agency. Wittman argues that the Futurists reject a specific, historicist, bourgeois understanding of history and seek to inaugurate a new sense of time, an explosive ‘now’. Comparing early and later texts by Marinetti and other Futurists, and identifying their debts to anarchist thought, the chapter demonstrates that their strategy of breaking into the present can only counter totalitarian appropriations if it remains anchored in embodied practices.

Intertextualidade na poesia brasileira contemporânea

A partir da apresentação de obras de poetas brasileiros contemporâneos com dições poéticas muito diferentes entre si, como Angélica Freitas, Bruna Beber, Guilherme Gontijo Flores, Marcelo Ariel, Marcelo Montenegro, entre outros, pretendemos, no presente trabalho, destacar a questão da intertextualidade como elemento relevante dessas produções. Interessa-nos apontar o quanto esse procedimento tornou-se cada vez mais tangível, desde o Modernismo até o momento presente, forjando isso que chamamos de transitividade da poesia, isto é, a necessidade de estabelecer ligações e diálogos com outros autores e textos. Nossa base teórica incorpora autores que pensaram a teoria do texto, do hipertexto, da pós-modernidade e das produções artísticas contemporâneas, como Roland Barthes, Frederic Jameson, George Landow, Nicolas Bourriaud e Luciana di Leone.

Resemantización de la Imagen de la Santa Muerte en publicaciones de Mina editores: culto, símbolos marianos y feminización

El artículo busca analizar la resemantización visual de las imágenes de la Santa Muerte en las publicaciones sobre temas esotéricos de Mina Editores: Mundo Esotérico y Libro Mágico, a través de las categorías de la posmodernidad y la New Age. Para este propósito se realizó un análisis cualitativo de la imagen de las portadas de las revistas utilizando el método indicial propuesto por Carlo Ginzburg considerando elementos de la historia, la semiótica y la posmodernidad a partir de los estudios de Elsa Malvido y Katya Perdigón, Frederic Jameson y Wouter Hanegraaff. Se observa una resemantización de la imagen de la Santa Muerte en las portadas y contenidos de las Revistas Mundo Esotérico y Libro Mágico. Se incluyen elementos medievales, católicos y prehispánicos, que vinculan a esta figura con una visión positiva, desligada de imágenes maléficas o de magia negra, tendiendo a la feminización de la imagen que traspone el culto de esta santa relacionándolo con la maternidad, en una transmutación de elementos marianos. Como parte de las conclusiones se observa un proceso de resemantización y fagotización en la imagen de la Santa Muerte, la cual se va modificando a través del tiempo pasando de una representación masculinizada y de esqueleto seco, a una más tendiente a la feminización corporal y al culto de las vírgenes.