Against the Authoritarian Orator and His Pater familias: Deviant Literarity and Orphaned Speech in El padre mío by Diamela Eltit and Lotty Rosenfeld

Published in the last year of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte’s military dictatorship saw its end, My Father (El padre mío) constitutes an interprofessional, collaborative work between Chile National Literature Prize winner Diamela Eltit and visual artist Lotty Rosenfeld, composed of unaltered transcriptions of three monologues (dis)articulated by a schizophrenic vagrant who referred to himself as My Father. By re-enacting the vagrant’s irrational utterances in a truthful but parodic manner, Eltit and Rosenfeld “orphaned” these spoken words into a work of written literature that mocked the authoritarian voice of the dictator who had imposed himself as the Grand Orator of the Nation and the Father of Chile. The main objective of the present work, which is principally based on the conceptualization of Mute Speech by Jacques Rancière, is to examine the political dimension of Eltit and Rosenfeld’s aesthetic endeavor: through an exploration of the possibilities of political emancipation that the vagrant’s fatherless monologues fostered in My Father, our study demonstrates that what neoliberal civil society presupposes as objectionable animalistic noises may be capable of intervening in what Rancière refers to as the “distribution of sensible” and its consolidated aesthetics of hierarchy, thus subverting the fable of pater familias and pater patriae concocted by Pinochet’s right-wing military regime.

The Latin American Publishing Circuit in the 21st Century: Following the Trajectory of César Aira

This essay poses a question about the identity of Latin American literature in the 21st century. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Latin America Boom received recognition both locally and internationally, becoming the dominant means of defining Latin American literature up to the present. This essay explores new ways to understand this notion of Latin America in the literary scene. The case of the Argentine writer César Aira is relevant for analyzing alternative publishing circuits that connect various points of the region. These publishing houses foster a defiant way of establishing the value of literature.

To Open the Mouth, to Show the Tongue: Anthropophagic Gestures in Brazilian Art

This essay seeks to articulate a detailed reading through two anatomical selections – the mouth and tongue—in Brazilian art from the end of the 1960s. The reading is part of a shift in the matrix of Oswald de Andrade’s “Anthropophagic Manifesto,” originally published in the Revista de Antropofagia in 1928, whose interpretations spread in Brazil during the second half of the 20th century. This study mobilises elements of the manifesto and its resonance in the works of artists such as Anna Maria Maiolino, Lygia Pape, Paulo Bruscky, and Lenora de Barros.

Writing by Ear, the Aural Novel, and Echopoetics: A Listening Vocabulary for Literary Analysis

Given the robust plurivocality that has characterized literature in Brazil since its colonial inception, and the eminently (and explicitly) receptive stance that many of its modern authors have adopted, I have structured my argument to follow two intersecting paths. Firstly, Clarice Lispector’s notion of “writing by ear” serves as a foundation for a renewed history of Brazilian literature, framed as a history of active listening. Secondly, the hope is to offer a Luso-Afro- Amerindian-Brazilian contribution to Latin American criticism, turning the semantic range of terms related to edges, margins, and borders into a more explicit semiotics of corporeality and performativity revolving around the ears and sound, echoes and silence, more generally.

Paul Groussac’s Void: The French Writer and the Argentine Tradition

The French-Argentine Paul Groussac embodied a wide range of writerly functions and cultural-political positions within the Argentine cultural field between the 1880s and the 1920s: writer, playwright, chronicler, traveler, literary, art, and music critic, historian, educator, editor, and director of the National Library during 44 years. This essay considers his place in the history of Argentine literature looking at two of the many ways in which he inscribed himself in it. The first takes up the production and reproduction of the ontological privilege of French identity as a form of legitimization for his public—and often polemic—interventions, through which he sought to establish scholarly-disciplinary practices, protocols, and conventions that would articulate an entire critical field around his own authority. The second proposes to think his alternatively weak and strong inscriptions in the literary tradition through his own narrative production: his fiction and dramaturgy, travelogues, and biographical sketches. In other words, this essay situates Groussac in an Argentine literary tradition (conceived as an organic and institutionally sanctioned textual corpus) he believed to have founded and established, a selfrepresentation that led Borges to say that Groussac saw himself as “a missionary of Voltaire among the mulattage.”

Reconstructing the Memory of the Wounded Social Body: A Philosophical-Theological Reflection from the Search for Missing Persons in Mexico

This essay analyzes the phenomenon of clandestine graves of missing persons in Mexico as a social, political, and philosophical problem, where theological clues are established. With the contributions of decolonial thought this reflection seeks to think the absence and, within it, to think the emergence of an alternative world promoted by the just people of history with the resistances they create to live the present with dignity and hope.

Planet Earth Strikes Back: Landscapes of Toxicity in Latin American Fiction

This essay discusses how contemporary Latin American literature (Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia) employs the discourse of toxicity—condensed in the metaphor of bio-engineering and mutation—to process and interrogate what Jason Moore has called the “Capitolecene.” Moore proposes to understand the “accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power, and the co-production of nature in dialectical unity.” This essay considers how the co-production of nature, impelled by greed (a recurring allegory of capitalism) goes terribly wrong by generating toxic biomes. As such, these texts function as ecocritical allegories of the Capitolecene (specifically in its iteration as biocapitalism) and its human and environmental consequences.

Morning Conferences: From Dialogue to the Sacrificial Rite and the Formation of Scapegoats

In order to achieve the objectives of transparency and accountability, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has offered a press conference every morning since he took office. This situation seemed to be a transcendental change in the field of democratic dynamics and political communication in Mexico; however, not merely a means of communication, these conferences have instead become a method of government. Using postulates of Mimetic Theory, this essay analyzes AMLO’s conferences, showing how this daily practice has become propaganda for the regime.

The Psychosis of Power: A Lacanian Reading of Augusto Roa Bastos’s I, the Supreme

In the mid-seventies, Paraguay was two decades into what would ultimately be the second longest dictatorship in its history, second only to the reign of its “founding father,” Doctor José Rodríguez Gaspar de Francia. The regime of Alfredo Stroessner justified its existence and articulated its continued role in Paraguayan politics on a genealogy of national identity that had its supposed roots in the Francia government, Francia’s political ideology and, in fact, in the historical person of Francia himself. In this essay I show how the great Paraguayan writer Augusto Roa Bastos’s 1974 novel, I, the Supreme, takes aim at the “kernel of the real” in the Stroessner regime’s political genealogy, using fiction to make evident its anamorphic manipulation of national and nationalist identity. By taking at its word the regime’s historical discourse, I, the Supreme reveals the psychotic logic animating its version of political power.

Opportunities and Challenges: Internationalized Higher Education in the Pandemic and Post-Pandemic Age

The COVID-19 pandemic has created an unprecedented crisis all over the world, while it also marks the coming of a new era of opportunities and challenges, especially for higher education. Universities should be more inclusive and innovative in communication and cooperation, promoting opportunities for collaborations in all aspects and reshaping international education.