Southern Cone Studies

Fernando Blanco, Alfonso de Toro, Claudia Gatzmeier y Wolf Bongers han co-editado un número especial de la Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana, Chasqui, aparecido en 2013.  El volumen está dedicado al tema de la memoria en Latinoamérica y sus relaciones con los medios, cultura popular, esfera pública e intimidad e incluye trabajos de Daniel Link, Celina Manzoni, Hugo Vezetti, Arturo Fontaine, Roberto Hozven, entre otros colaboradores.

Av. Independencia: Literatura, música e ideas de Chile disidente (Cuarto Propio, 2013) ha sido publicado por Rubí Carreño.

María Inés Cisterna ha publicado Exilio en el espacio literario argentino de la posdictadura (2013). El texto propone una relectura crítica de la relación entre los conceptos de nacionalismo y exilio durante el período inmediatamente posterior a la dictadura argentina (1976-1983) conocido también como la posdictadura. A partir de un análisis de los debates ideológicos del campo intelectual de los años 80 en el Río de la Plata, la autora postula que la literatura de exilio más que una escritura particular de dicha época, forma parte de una tradición literaria mucho más amplia y compleja que merece ser revisada.

Erin Graff Zivin has published Figurative Inquisitions. Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic (Northwestern, 2014). This text approaches the question of torture from a literary vantage point. This book investigates the uncanny presence of the Inquisition and marranismo (crypto-Judaism) in modern literature, theater, and film from Mexico, Brazil, and Portugal. Through a critique of fictional scenes of interrogation, it underscores the vital role of the literary in deconstructing the relation between torture and truth. Figurative Inquisitions traces the contours of a relationship among aesthetics, ethics, and politics in an account of the "Inquisitional logic" that continues to haunt contemporary political forms.

Gisela Heffes has published Políticas de la destrucción / Poéticas de la preservación. Apuntes para una lectura (eco)crítica del medio ambiente en América Latina. This study analyzes Latin American literary, cinematic, performative and aesthetic representations through the scope of three distinctive environmental tropes: "destruction," "sustainability" and "preservation." While informed by current concerns that originated in recent debates within American and English ecocriticism, my book shows how this critical apparatus cannot accurately operate vis-à-vis the specificity of Latin American literary and cultural productions. Grounded in an interdisciplinary approach towards the exploitation of both natural and human resources, this project focuses on new attempts to formulate and analyze how Latin American representations are imbued with a rhetoric of waste and disposal in relationship to both the conservation and destruction of nature.

An edition and translation with notes and afterword of Motivos: The Life of Saint Francis has been published by Elizabeth Horan. It collects into one bilingual critical edition the prose texts that Gabriela Mistral devoted to the life of Saint Francis of Assisi. Using the form of "motivos" that she adapted from the work of Darío and Amado Nervo, Mistral explored the elements of the saint's life that most interested her, from his encounters with outcast lepers and the "wolf of Gubbio" to his artist's immersion in the natural world. The texts for the volume have been determined after a careful search of multiple editions and archives; this is the first complete volume of the "Motivos" to appear in English or Spanish. In a detailed biographical afterword to the text, Horan, who is a leading biographer of the Nobel Laureate (1945) draws from years of multiarchival study to relate Mistral's involvement in Franciscanism to her work in post-Revolutionary Mexico. The notes and text reveal various suppressed aspects of Mistral's close relationships with "los Contemporáneos" as well as Diego Rivera and Roberto Montenegro, and to her involvement with the Mexican Diplomatic Service during her travels and residence in France and Italy.  This volume reveals many previously unknown or suppressed aspects of the poet's life, work, and associates, much changing what we thought we knew about Gabriela Mistral.

Brendan Lanctot has published Beyond Civilization and Barbarism Culture and Politics in Postrevolutionary Argentina (2013). The text examines how various cultural forms promoted competing political projects in Argentina during the decades following independence from Spain. Against the grain of the durable script of civilization versus barbarism, this project examines an extensive corpus to demonstrate how adversaries of the period used similar rhetorical strategies, appealed to the same basic political ideals of republican government, and were preoccupied with defining and interpellating the pueblo, or people. In other words, their collective struggle was fundamentally modern and waged on a mutually intelligible discursive terrain.

Tatiana Navallo has published Miradas hacia los margenes. Dinamicas de la cultura impresa en el Rio de la Plata (1801 - 1807) (Penelope Academic Press, 2014).

Ana Ros has published The Post-dictatorship Generation in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay: Collective Memory and Cultural Production (Palgrave Macmillan), which explores how young adults in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay make sense of the 1970s socialist projects and the ensuing years of repression in their activism, film, and literature. How do they deal with the stories of their parents, be their parents persecuted activists, shocked bystanders, or perpetrators? How do they combine a critical appraisal of the dramatically interrupted projects of social change with their strong condemnation of state terror in a context marked by polarization, impunity, and the need for a collective project? They engage in a rich intergenerational dialogue in order to 'own' the past and become actors of the present.

Acaba de salir el libro de Magda Sepúlveda Eriz, Ciudad Quiltra (Santiago: Cuarto propio, 2013), que recorre 40 años de poesía chilena y está dividido en tres capítulos. "Paseos peatonales y baldíos" recorre la poesía escrita durante la dictadura, desde Raúl Zurita hasta Tomás Harris, incluyendo toda la renovación que significó la emergencia de la poesía escrita por mujeres, tales como los textos de  Elvira Hernández  y Carmen Berenguer. El capítulo "Hospederías y poblaciones" hace un recorrido por la poesía escrita durante la Transición, poniendo atención a la promoción de los náufragos. El último capítulo, "Mapurbes y discotecas" aborda la poesía de origen mapuche y la poesía escrita por aquellos que comienzan a publicar en el 2000.

Mariano Siskind has published Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America (Northwestern UP, 2014). 

Ryszard Stemplowski has published two edited volumes: Europe – Latin America: Looking at Each Other?(PISM), featuring contributions from Karl Buck, Antoni Dudek, Carlos Escudé,  Lawrence A. Graham, Leszek Jesień, Alan Knight, Hieronim Kubiak, Jacek Kurczewski, Colin M. Lewis, Ericka López Godoy, Aleksander Posern-Zieliński, Luiz Carlos Ribeiro, Peter H. Smith, Patricio Valdivieso, Beata Wojna, and Lubomir W. Zyblikiewicz; and On the State of Latin American States. Approaching the Bicentenary (The Andrzej  Frycz Modrzewski Kraków University), featuring contributions from Carlos Escudé, Lawrence S. Graham, Colin M. Lewis, Tadeusz  Paleczny, Horst Pietschmann, Aleksander Posern-Zieliński, Ryszard Stemplowski, and Patricio Valdivieso.

Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott ha publicado Soberanías en suspenso. Imaginación y violencia en América Latina (2013), que consta de seis capítulos. En ellos se revisa la euforia del Bicentenario y el nuevo constitucionalismo regional a la luz de la formulación benjaminiana relativa a la violencia del derecho. Luego, se atiende a  la inherente complicidad entre los teóricos de la modernidad tardía latinoamericana y los teóricos de la transición pactada chilena, ejemplo de un proceso neoliberal de globalización "exitoso". Luego se retoma la polémica chilena sobre las artes visuales y la neo-vanguardia y se piensa el estado actual del arte y de la imaginación en la época del nihilismo neoliberal. Así, los capítulos 4 y 5 retoman la problemática relación entre historia y poesía a partir del golpe de Estado de 1973 como momento de desarticulación entre los nombres y la comunidad. Finalmente, el libro concluye con un análisis del cine de Raúl Ruiz y su barroco espectral como una política de la imagen que se resiste a su conversión en espectáculo.