REGIONAL SEMINAR IN THE WEST

UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL, FRIDAY 22 AND SATURDAY 23 FEBRUARY 2008

Abstracts

Sarah Bowskill (Swansea) From Romance to Adultery - What is at stake when we reinterpret Angeles Mastretta's Arráncame la vida?

Abstract: This paper proposes a new interpretation of Angeles Mastretta's Arráncame la vida (1985) as a novel of female adultery. Arráncame la vida has been excluded from the canon because it has been interpreted as a popular romance about the private sphere whereas canonical novels are usually interpreted as being about the public sphere. I reinterpret Arráncame la vida as a novel of female adultery in order to highlight the ways in which the novel comments on the political situations of the 1930s, when it is set, and the 1980s, when it was written. Thus, I show how adopting alternative reading strategies can help us to incorporate marginalised authors into the canon.

Claudio Canaparo (Exeter) ‘The Location of Knowledge. Science and Empire’

Abstract: The paper will explore the relation between space and knowledge. More specifically it will explore the relation between the foundation of a particular space ¾in terms of territory¾ and the development of the notion of knowledge. Following the specific nature and elements of the Western/European notion of knowledge ¾and its historiographical dimension¾ the paper will analyse what consequences this entanglement between knowledge and space has in Latin America as how we conceive it today. In particular, we will track down the concept of science from the Western/European point of view and how it works within peripheral areas such as Latin America. More specifically, we will look into how this same concept of science generates many determinations towards what is conceived as local knowledge within Latin America nowadays.This paper is part of a long-term research into what we call geo-epistemology, that is, an approach which tries to explore the conceptual and epistemic assumptions that exist when authors, critics and analysts talk about Latin America (i) as an “area study”, (ii) as a geographical unity or (iii) as a historical entity.

Lara Coleman (Bristol) ‘Along the highway to anywhere’: dynamics of power and resistance in the Coca-Cola boycott campaign’

Abstract: Contemporary Latin America is often hailed as a hotbed of social movement resistance to neoliberalism, with potential to ferment revolutionary change or, at the very least, to generate more democratic forms of global governance.   In this paper I suggest that such accounts tend to underestimate the forms of power that produce neoliberal order and explore how this resistance to neoliberalism is itself governed by neoliberal strategies of power, by means of an extended case study of the international boycott campaign against Coca-Cola, launched by the Colombian food-workers’ union in response to violence against workers at Coke bottling plants.  I look at how, alongside the use of coercive strategies to repress resistance, power has operated to produce resisting subjects through the discursive practices of the campaign itself and how certain political rationalities, themselves partly constitutive of neoliberal order, have informed activist subjectivities.  I also consider the exercise of power towards these campaigns in the form of interventions designed to curtail resistance or steer the campaigns in specific directions, focusing on the rationalities that constitute the interventions and how they form part of a discursive field in which the exercise of power may be invisible because it is seen as ‘rational’.  I draw together my analysis with a discussion of what the prospects may be for ‘anti-globalisation’ movements to bring about radical social change.

Mark Dinneen (Southampton) ‘Twentieth century socialism in Venezuela: The Chavez government's policies for the media, education and the arts’

Abstract: Speaking in July 2007, Hugo Chávez declared that for the first time his government had a coherent, integrated cultural policy: 'In the first years we got it wrong?? Then, as the process matured, we managed to form a team in order to join together organisations that were dispersed, without goals or objectives, with no clear sense of direction. Now we have a cultural project'* Through an examination of initiatives taken by the government in the areas of education, the arts and the mass media, this paper discusses the salient characteristics of that emerging project, how it relates to the long term goal of 'Socialism of the Twenty-First Century' in Venezuela, and the key debates, and conflicts, it is now generating. Not surprisingly, these cultural policies have become a major battle ground between chavistas and antichavistas. If on the one hand they constitute bold steps towards radical cultural change, they also, it will be suggested, highlight some of the contradictions and limitations within Chávez's Bolivarian Revolution.

Liz Dore (Southampton) ‘Cuban Oral Histories and Racial Identities’

In 1966, Fidel Castro announced that racial discrimination and racism no longer existed in Cuba. Racism was reproduced by capitalism and had been eliminated along with capitalist social relations, he said. While scholars outside Cuba debate whether race based discrimination and racism continue to exist in Cuba, it remains a taboo subject on the island.

From 2004 to the present, I have directed a large oral history project in Cuba. The Cuban- British research team carried out life history interviews with one hundred Cuban men and women across the island from different walks of life, racial and sexual identities, generations, religious beliefs and political perspectives. This presentation analyses a selection of those narratives to reveal the ways ‘ordinary’ Cubans described racial identities and racism, or their absence, in their everyday experiences of living the revolution.    

Mary Green (Swansea) ‘Nelly Richard and the Category of the “Feminine”’

Abstract: The contemporary Chilean cultural critic, Nelly Richard, is originally French but has lived in Chile since 1970. She has forged an internationally recognized position as one of the major cutting edge theorists in Latin America, whose analysis of the category of gender as inscribed in Chilean culture during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) and the Transition to Democracy (1990-) informs all of her work. This paper will consider how Richard draws on the notion of the feminine as the site of marginality and dispersion, and the extent to which her work deploys the feminine as a means to probe and subvert dominant discursive practices.

Lloyd Hughes Davies (Swansea) 'History and Hysteria in Laura Restrepo’s Delirio’

This text centres on various forms of madness, ranging from the literal and individual, notably that of the young protagonist, Agustina, to the metaphorical and national, relating to Colombia herself. Highlighting Restrepo’s gender-inflected treatment of the theme, this paper will explore the role of the Lacanian symbolic, the burden of the past, the emergence of the psychic crypt and the intricate fabric of style and structure. Some parallels and contrasts will be drawn with Fernando del Paso’s portrait of Carlota in Noticias del imperio (1987).

Jane Lavery (Southampton) ‘Breaking Boundaries in Cuerpo náufrago: Ana Clavel’s Multimedia Narratives of Transgender/genre, Sex and Urinals’

Abstract: Mexican writer Ana Clavel revels in breaking boundaries, both physical and metaphorical. Whilst no academic articles have been published on Cuerpo náufrago (2005)to date, its reception has been overwhelmingly positive. From its inception, the novel was not conceived of as merely a written text but rather formed the basis of a wider ‘multimedia project,’ embracing an array of hybrid forms including the audiovisual, internet-enabled technology as well as other media such as art installation, video-performance and photographic exhibition. In today’s world dominated by the audiovisual and (cyber)technology, Cuerpo náufrago truly takes literature and all its possibilities into the 21^st Century. By incorporating an array of media and genres, Cuerpo náufrago gives way to a new type of transgenred writing, which resists rigid boundaries maintained between different genres such as technology and culture, art and literature. The novel’s hybrid construction and reliance on an array of textual/visual/ technological genres and media open up the text to various levels of interpretation, both encouraging a form of hypertextual thinking and the reader’s active participation. Furthermore, such intermingling ofgenres and multimedia problematizes the traditional boundaries maintained between high culture and mass culture by engaging readers in non-traditional modes of consumption of text and literature. The novel’s engagement with multimedia and with a variety of cultural paradigms, in particular those of high culture and mass culture, simultaneously creates a site of celebration and conflict. Such postmodern ambivalence is also played out in the text’s representation of the self, the body and desire in the context of broader concerns relating to (trans)gender construction and sexual politics. Calvel’s novel is the first Mexican queer novel where transgender represents a direct defiance of contemporary demarcations of gender and sexuality, thus undermining restrictive social taboos and prohibitions. Finally, The text’s unique and transgenred construction which extends beyond the textual boundaries itself encourages myriad theoretical approaches and interpretations: the analysis of Cuerpo náufrago will draw on a wide range of theoretical perspectives, from Judith Butler’s Feminist and Queer theory of (trans)gender construction and performance to Marcel’s Duchamp’s urinal ‘ready-made’ Conceptual Art aesthetics and from Walter Benjamin’s notions of ‘aura’ in the age of mechanical reproduction to Jameson’s postmodern ‘pastiche’. All of these approaches will serve to enrich my interpretation of both Clavel’s novel and her multimedia project.

Antonio Márcio da Silva (Bristol) ‘Troubling the femme fatale gender in Brazilian film Madame Satã (2002)’

Abstract: Gay characters in the leading roles do not figure prominently in Brazilian Cinema history. The films in which they appear tend to stereotype homosexuality, with characters that are generally simplistic or marginalized and excluded from Brazil's predominantly paternalistic and conservative society. Drawing on questions such as whether gender or sexuality is the most important factor in the construction of personal identity and how those identities are performed, I intend to analyze the film production "Madame Satã". Through the figure of Madame Satã, I intend to discuss the construction of the concept of femme fatale as well as her sexuality and read Madame Satã as a femme fatale, in order to challenge the identity construction based on the biological male/female pair. In order to do that, this paper will draw on Butler's (1990) discussion of gender which asserts that 'there is no gender identity behind the expression of gender; (…) identity is performatively constituted by the very "expressions" that are said to be its results (25)'. Being gay is shown to present a danger or threat to society; I will, therefore, be discussing how the film relates homosexuality to criminality as well as how sexuality in it can be related to those portrayed in femme fatale films. I intend to identify the common points that link them together, which usually tend to show both the male gay characters and the femme fatale as a threat to social gender construction rules. I will also consider how race and social class relates to the gay character and how that pushes him to a subaltern position within the society. In engaging in the proposed analysis, this paper intends to show how social thought reflects on gay performativity, considering gender as what we do, instead of what we are.

Melisa Moore (Exeter) ‘Detractors and Devotees: Modernity, ‘Mestizaje’ and the Rise of a New Intellectual Hegemony in 1920s Peru’

Abstract: The years 1919-1930 mark a decisive period of Peruvian modernity, which saw the culmination of a process of reconstruction, initiated after the country’s defeat in the War of the Pacific (1879-1883), and the consolidation of an intellectual and cultural tradition. But the seminal years of the ‘oncenio’, or eleven-year presidency of the businessman turned politician, Augusto B. Leguía, were also fraught with conflict generated by longstanding divisions and new rivalries. The continuity of colonial-style relations of rule by a Positivist oligarchy, coupled with changes brought by modernization, heightened discontent amongst emergent social sectors. A postwar generation of intellectuals and artists, led by José Carlos Mariátegui and galvanized by leftwing ideology, sought representation in the fields of politics and the arts, and participation in the process of reconstruction. New political and poetic conceptions raised their awareness of the growing ‘mestizaje’, or ‘cultural heterogeneity’ (Cornejo Polar), and fractured sense of nationhood in Peru, and the need for a new project of nation-formation, centred on a shared cultural system in which different groups could recognize themselves. But they also gave rise to divergent political and artistic practices and projects. The contestation and construction of an ‘intellectual field’ (Bourdieu), and a ‘common’ intellectual and cultural consciousness, or ‘hegemony’ (Gramsci), left an important legacy for future intellectuals and artists. Though cut short by a military coup in 1930, the myriad connections fostered between political and poetic conceptions and practices, national and local contexts, and pre- and post- colonial eras, opened many conceptual and textual pathways for them to follow. These would shape a heterogeneous intellectual and cultural tradition, and revive calls for a cultural project of reconstruction in future years. This paper brings together several strands of my recent research on this pivotal yet turbulent period of Peruvian intellectual and cultural history. It examines some of the tensions operating within and between the socioeconomic and symbolic processes and practices, and political and poetic conceptions, which consolidated a multifaceted intellectual and cultural tradition at this time. More importantly, it considers the extent to which these conflicts fuelled -and may yet further- attempts to construct a new paradigm for pondering the contradictory and competing realities and representations of an all too uneven Peruvian modernity.

Marina Prieto-Carron (Birkbeck/UoB) ‘Central American Women Workers, Social Reproduction and Organising Strategies’

Abstract: This paper provides an ethnographic account of women workers organising in Central America in their own spaces and how these organisations respond to the reproductive needs and interests of women workers. They take seriously issues such as gender, ethnicity and class, which are not considered exclusive categories but inseparable ones.  In this way, social reproduction is the central focus of their work. These organisations go beyond the workplace to reach the women workers in all aspects of their lives, in their homes and communities.  In this paper, I argue that the process of how these women workers become politically conscious and acquire leadership skills based on their productive and reproductive social roles is relevant for other movements and in particular for other workers, in different geographical and political contexts.  This argument will be illustrated by analysing the strategies of the women's organisation `Working and Unemployed Women's Movement Maria Elena Cuadra' (MEC) in Nicaragua. The links between their advocacy work and the long-term sustained holistic training - self-esteem, domestic violence, negotiation techniques, and economic literacy - will be examined. This advocacy and training provides women workers with knowledge on issues beyond traditional labour rights and into the social reproductive sphere and their place in the gendered global political economy.

Andrew Redden (Bristol) "Angelic Death in the Early Modern Hispanic World "’

While hunting angels recently in Chile (as part of a Leverhulme funded project on Angels and Demons in the Hispanic World) a friend of mine mentioned that there was a folk-tradition that centred on the island of Chiloe in which children who died young (in the age of innocence) would be dressed in white and surrounded by flowers and candles as the family held a velorio del angelito – a vigil of the little angel. In this vigil, the family would ask the angel (the dead child or innocent) to intercede for them before God. This practice was immortalised in the song called El rín del angelito by Violetta Parra. I was able to find secondary sources that, through oral testimonies and photographic evidence, affirmed the practice took place in the late-nineteenth-century, but nothing (initially) that suggested it was an earlier tradition. I began looking in the colonial parish books of the dead across the Americas, and indeed found lists of newly born babies and young children described as angelitos. In Oaxaca, Mexico (Antequera – New Spain) there was even a record of an entirely different bell-tone for the burial of these “little angels” called el toque del angelito. Prior to beginning this archival research I had known that Angels in the Hispanic world were often considered to be present at the hour of death to struggle with demons for the soul of the dying individual. Yet, what I hadn’t initially realised was the extent to which Angels and the living interacted in the beliefs, rituals, and practices surrounding sickness and death in the Early Modern Hispanic world. In fact, what soon became apparent was the prominence of angelic beings in accounts of individuals in the liminal state between life and death.

Drawing on my preliminary findings, this paper will investigate the place of angels in sickness and death in the Early Modern Hispanic world. It will also explore the role that angels played in the merging of meaning between the Baroque cult of the dead, which was so prominent in the Hispanic Mediterranean (especially Naples and Sicily) and the corresponding indigenous cults of the Americas.

Heidi V Scott (Aberystwyth) ‘Paradise in the New World: a seventeenth-century Spanish vision of the tropics’

Abstract: Drawing on a recent but expanding literature on ‘tropicality’, this paper examines the ways in which the American (above all South American) tropics were portrayed by a Spanish-born jurist named Antonio de León Pinelo.In seeking to prove that the Earthly Paradise was once situated at the heart of Amazonia, León Pinelo placed the New World tropics within the context of a global-scale comparative tropical geography.Entitled Paraíso en el Nuevo Mundo, his mid-seventeenth century treatise provides a fascinating insight into the complexities of early Iberian perceptions and experiences of the tropics. Although the purpose of León Pinelo’s treatise would suggest that his vision of the warm, wet tropics is overwhelmingly ‘paradisiacal’, close scrutiny of his text also reveals evidence of a ‘pestilential’ discourse. In examining these complexities, I hope to demonstrate that early Iberian expressions of tropicality deserve closer critical scrutiny.

Joseph Smith (Exeter) ‘Diplomatic Relations between the United States and Brazil’

Abstract: This paper discusses the theme of convergence and divergence in diplomatic relations between Brazil and the United States.  The Brazilian/US diplomatic relationship has been generally friendly and cooperative in contrast to the often antagonistic relationship that has existed between the United States and most of the Spanish-American countries.  Diplomatic interests have converged on occasions in which the United States has notably taken a policy initiative resulting in a close diplomatic interest in hemispheric affairs.  Such occasions have been the recognition of Latin American independence, the emergence of Pan-Americanism at the end of the 19th century, policy initiatives taken by Theodore Roosevelt and Elihu Root, the decision to join World War I, the threat of fascism during the 1930s and involvement in World War II, and measures to combat the Communist threat in the Americas.  However, there have been areas of disagreement between Brazil and the United States.  Divergence has been evident when perceived threats to national interests and racial slights have aroused Brazilian sensitivities, especially on contemporary issues such as human rights, trade, debt, and the environment. 

Sonja Wolf (Aberystwyth) ‘Contesting Mano Dura: human rights advocacy in El Salvador ‘

Abstract: Ever since the rise of the Mano Dura gang policy in El Salvador, domestic civil society groups have strongly argued against this overwhelmingly suppressive approach towards street gangs. While the responses of non-governmental organisations have varied, ranging from the development of prevention and rehabilitation initiatives to the articulation of a human rights critique, it is perhaps the NGOs taking the latter stance that have faced most resistance to their work. Based on ethnographic research in one such NGO, the paper will discuss a number of strategies employed to defend the human rights of gang members and seek to explain why these strategies have achieved only limited results.