Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

In the present article we propose to perform an analysis of various rewrites that from Latin America have been made from the text Antigone by Sophocles, taking as corpus of analysis: Antigone Velez (1951-Argentina) by Leopoldo Marechal, Furious Antigone  (1986-Argentina) by Griselda Gambaro, The passion according to Antígona Pérez (1968-Puerto Rico) by Luis Rafael Sánchez, Antigone (1999- Peru) by José Watanabe, Antigonon. An epic contingent (2013-Cuba) by Rogelio Orizondo and Antigones. Court of women (2014-Colombia) by Carlos Satizabal. We start from the assumption that these dramas do this rewriting as a way of rethinking the national past and present and, especially, as a way of not forgetting the often traumatic experiences that these territories have experienced.

This article presents a study about violence in the novel Bioy (2012), by Diego Trelles Paz, by means of two axes: time and narrative voices. Both structure a narration characterised by its narrative multiplicity, correlated with the complexity of the violence that the text explores, emerged from Peru at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century. The aim is to elucidate the coordinates of the violence in the text through the two mentioned axes.

This paper presents the analysis of the novel Boarding Home (1987) and the short stories collection Trilogía sucia de La Habana (1998), respectively written by the Cuban writers Guillermo Rosales and Pedro Juan Gutiérrez. These works share an essential characteristic: their authors, who narrate using the first person, became outsiders after a dramatic succession of events. Consequently, they build their discourse from an inner reality forged by all kind of material lack, as well as the exclusion from the models ruling the social order. Taking this as a starting point, the paper studies the often-similar attitudes and careers of both characters in order to establish those features the figure of the intellectual could assume in eccentric domains. Such objective will be achieved by means of different kinds of theoretical support, mainly: the pariah intelligentsia by Max Weber, the infrapolitics concept by James C. Scott and the ideas on lumpen by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

This article analyzes the theoretical and ideological interests of the first philosophical essays in Argentina from an intellectual-history perspective. Saúl Taborda (1885-1943), Homero Guglielmini (1903-1968) and Carlos Astrada (1894-1971) had similar theoretical and political trajectories. From the 1920s, when they were in charge of incipient philosophical and avant-garde magazines, they were influenced by the writings of Nietzsche and Sorel. Later, they were interested in German romanticism and Heidegger's work, in the moment when Astrada and Guglielmini became two of the most important intellectuals of Juan Domingo Perón's government. While the so-called historical revisionism has received a remarkable attention, we only have a few works on this philosophical revisionism in Argentina. It is necessary, thus, to differentiate these early revisionist writings from their counterparts dedicated to history. The philosophers did not react to the continuous waves of immigration but rather to liberal political innovations taken as "foreign ideas". They focused especially on the figure of the gaucho and proposed a non-Catholic reading of Hispanicism. In a nutshell, they argued against individualism and forth theoretical tools to think a collective subject. Therefore, this work describes a theoretical trajectory that is well known at the European level, ranging from vitalist and aestheticist irrationalism to nationalist and strongly anti-individualist organisationalist positions.

The thirty years between the 1972 publication of Rosario Ferré’s short story “La muñeca menor” and Pedro Cabiya’s 2003 novella “Relato del piloto que dijo adiós con la mano” span the cultural, political, and economic “shift” from a “regulatory state” to a neoliberal global order that, per Rebekah Sheldon’s analysis, has articulated and contextualized similar contrasting takes on biological and material reproduction. Focusing on their transformed imaginary of “monstrous” reproduction, I explore in this paper how the texts’ Gothic and SF modalizations refract local conditions as well as critical elements of that shift, full of increasingly urgent and extreme consequences in Puerto Rico, and even farther afield.

One of the pillars of the history of Latin American documentary filmmaking is undoubtedly the Chilean director Patricio Guzmán. During more than five decades of film production, he has given an account of Chile's political history, specifically dealing with the meaning of the Chilean dictatorship for the country's past, present and future, as well as its relevance in the Latin American context. His films undoubtedly represent one of the most relevant testimonies to the continent's history in the 20th century, with hundreds of hours of footage of the high points in the violent transition process between the Allende and Pinochet governments. His film proposal will take a radical turn in his last two productions: Nostalgia de la Luz ([2010] 2011) and El Botón de Nácar (2015), which are part of a trilogy - the latter film is currently in production. Its aesthetic proposal is revolutionary in the sense that it resignifies the relationship between memory and history by establishing a connection between nature, cosmology and historical memory. In this trilogy he deals separately in each film with the desert, the sea and the mountain, leading the viewer to a reflection that, through poetic language and a meditative tone, proposes a new look at history and memory. In this essay I analyze three elements that define his film El Botón de Nacar and that open the possibilities for a new type of theoretical reflection on the documentary genre: the relationship between nature, narration and history, history understood as genealogical memory and the new type of visual aesthetic that the director is proposing, which I call "poetry of beauty". 

The goal of this research is to analyze the different critical dimensions of the writing of Roberto Fernández Retamar. We are guided by the hypothesis that in the anti-colonial texts of the Cuban poet, one intuits a heterogeneous and non-essentialist reading of the Latin-American culture, which is embedded with the elaboration of a metaphoric concept of Caliban, able to disorganize the cultural dichotomies of the colonial modernity. In the first part, we verified how the particularity of “Caliban” consists in his capacity of resisting any cultural derivation and unilateral writing, being related with what Jacques Derrida defines as différence. Secondly, we reflect on the humanism developed by Fernández Retamar with the well-known trope: the anticolonial humanism conceived from a relationship of aggressiveness between the “own” and the “other”. Finally, we analyzed the impact of the notion “posoccidentalismo” suggested by the Cuban in his criticism of the Latin-American post colonialism. We agree with Caliban; a symbol is not an authority of the absolute. On the contrary, it is a tool that wants to undo scriptural and epistemic modes offered by the western culture, and that takes form, within the work of Fernández Retamar, in an anticolonial and post western humanism, which is still budding.

The Colombian writer Manuel Mejía Vallejo published between 1973 and 1987 a series of urban novels about the image of his city: Medellín. This paper analyzes the narration of urban space around three central motifs: progress, uprooting and nostalgia. It also studies how the novelist narrates the symbolic erased of the citizen and the devastation of the traditional city due to the expansion of the streets and the uncontrolled demolition of the neighborhoods. For the characters of these novels, memory is the only way to maintain their identity within the logic of a modern city.

Juan Villoro, consecrated in Latin American Literature as a fiction narrator and prominent author in the Children's Literature publishing market, has developed in parallel a remarkable chronological production that has received little critical attention. The reading of these chronicles in conjunction with interviews given by the author allowed us to notice a self-representation as a chronicler versed in the art of listening. Theme that is the excuse to review part of his production with the focus on his ear attentive to the expressions and manifestations of mass culture. It is interesting to approach chronic listening, a characteristic aspect of its aesthetics, from analyzing the priority place of the voice of the soccer announcer Ángel Fernández, the links with the Mexican counterculture and the construction of a myth of origin that draws on mass culture.

Falsa calma is a denunciation of the dystopia in which the Patagonian utopia of hydrocarbons of the mid-twentieth century became. The same oil camps that populated Patagonia in such a short time under the slogan of development, today succumb to the lack of opportunities. Half-done villages, abandoned by the State, whose inhabitants barely survive in an adverse environment. But it is no longer about the hostility of the "wild" nature, which the narratives of the 19th century portrayed: it is the decadence of civilization itself that corrupts the foundations of society.