A Kaleidoscopic Gaze of India through Julio Barrenechea’s oeuvre

Latin American intellectuals have included India in their imagination since the advent of Modernism, a turn-of-the-century movement in the early 20th century. Nevertheless, the idea of India in Latin American imagination has been primarily mediated through a rather fixed European lens. Within the body of Latin American scholarly encounters, the works of Julio Barrenechea are worth mentioning. They have not been critically examined extensively in academia. The present study is an attempt to reflect upon the works of the author that resulted from his experiences during his sojourn as the Ambassador of Chile in India. He wrote Sol de la India, which was published in 1969 in New Delhi, during his stay in India. Another work titled La India no misteriosa based on his Indian experience was published posthumously in 1982 in Santiago. The first work is a collection of poems while the latter is in prose. Barrenechea has described with grace and sympathy the spiritual greatness of India but at the same time, he engaged critically with the distressing social and economic realities of the nation. In the present study, the researchers analyze the theme of his works encompassing India, which as such incorporate an essentially “Chilean gaze”.

Twice American: Hispanic Writers in the United States

Taking as a starting point the most traditional experience of exile, this paper encourages a debate about the expatriation experience that has affected many Latin American intellectuals residing in and producing their works in the United States of America. Most have decided to write in Spanish in a country that, according to the dominant narrative, is based on a pluralist and tolerant society. But racism and discrimination are still rooted there, and all those who do not ‘belong’ are literally treated as ‘aliens’, especially if they are part of the Latino/Hispano community. This study aims to emphasise the cultural and literary impact that this wave of transnational and extraterritorial writers may have in the future. Moreover, it highlights the use of Spanish language as a political stance in a context which, in a not-so-distant future, will be increasingly influenced by Spanish-speaking people, who are still wrongly considered a minority.

Pensamento/ação freiriano: pistas para uma epistemologia descolonial que cimente uma Ecologia Humana contra-hegemônica

This study aimed to analyze the contributions of the Freirean thinking/action in the construction of a decolonial epistemology that orients a Latin-American Human Ecology of counter-hegemonic inclination. Through a literature review of the Freirean production and the Latin-American intellectuals of the Human Ecology, it was done the interlocution of knowledge and perspectives, resulting to announce Paulo Freire as a classic in the genealogy of decolonial thinking and in the reinforcing of a Human Ecology engaged with social, cognitive and environmental justice, signaling emancipatory processes coming from different fronts of struggle, in such a special historical time of rise of oppressions articulated by capitalism with patriarchy and colonialism.

La Historia del Arte Argentino a la luz de los Estudios Decoloniales.

At the end of the last century, colonial, postcolonial and decolonial studies set in motion a “detachment” from the dominant modes of knowledge acquisition in the social sciences and humanities. In the 1990s, Latin American intellectuals debated the colonial side of modernity and the cultural, theoretical and practical hegemony that the central countries maintained. In the field of art, this resulted in the problematization of the Eurocentric canons present in the artistic system and the lack of independent theoretical and visual thinking. In light of these problems, this article investigates one of the features of coloniality in force in the Histories of the Visual Arts “with capital letters” in Latin America and particularly in Argentina; that is, the neutralization of diversity in the construction of a national art. To this end, we have used the transdisciplinary qualitative methodology, which articulates different areas of knowledge (history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology, art history) from a decolonial interpretive perspective. In the theoretical analysis and historiographical reflection, a decentration is observed in the history of national art promoted by the Institute of Aesthetic Research (Faculty of Arts, National University of Tucumán), which interrupts the disciplinary canon favoring the emergence of the American, in both the folkloric and the ancestral.

Natural Histories of the Anthropocene

Twentieth-century Latin American intellectuals from the provincial interior, often combining in their professional and intellectual lives different forms of expertise ranging from the humanities to medicine and the natural sciences, developed a prescient and idiosyncratic way of reflecting on the extractive frontiers advancing from the region’s political and economic centers. Taking as its sample case the essayistic writings from the 1930s of two authors from the Argentine Northwest—Bernardo Canal Feijóo and Orestes Di Lullo—this chapter argues that, in their attempt to reflect the social and cultural impact of deforestation, soil erosion and drought, these provincial intellectuals came up with a prescient and hybrid mode of writing and thinking, the urgency of which we are only beginning to understand today: a natural history of the Anthropocene. Thus, the chapter also argues for a re-appraisal of Latin American regionalism as an indispensable reference for a political ecology in our time.

Alfonso Reyes, Hispanist Praxis, and the Critique of Transatlantic Reason

Mexican writer and intellectual Alfonso Reyes has historically enjoyed a strong reputation as a Hispanist. He was one of the first Latin American intellectuals to engage Spain in the 20th century, becoming close to figures such as José Ortega y Gasset in the 1920, as well as a privileged reader of Góngora in the Spanish American context. Later on, Reyes was a crucial figure in allowing the Spanish Exile in Mexico to integrate to the tissue of Mexico’s cultural field. The affinities that Reyes had with his Spanish counterparts have obscured the fact that, alongside his Hispanism, he also was a strong critic of the idea of Spain as the center of Spanish-language culture and the false symmetry between Spain and Latin America as equal parts of an equation. Using his highly critical Vísperas de España as a departing point, the proposed paper will argue that Reyes was in fact “Provincializing Spain”, to borrow Dipesh Chakrabarty’s expression, that is challenging the status of Spain as the Transatlantic metropolis and questioning the supposed spiritual unity between Spain and Latin America posed by intellectuals at the time.