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

This article analyzes and compares the use of files on human rights violations during the Chilean dictatorship (1973-1990) in the construction of the story of the book-reportage A la sombra de los cuervos by Javier Rebolledo (2016) and the documentary Las cruces of Teresa Arredondo and Carlos Vásquez Méndez (2019). Both works deal with the case known as “La masacre de Laja y San Rosendo” in which, in October 1973, nineteen workers from the rural area were murdered by the police, with the complicity of the private company, the collaboration of civilians and the subsequent omission and negligence of justice. The analysis focuses on the archive-operations that both cultural productions carry out with the aim of building a true and coherent account of the events. The review of both the different types of archives, its origin, materiality, exhaustiveness in use and in general its narrative function in each of the works, gives an account of the type of operation this device performs in the different stories of the present about a past in constant dispute and marked by omissions and the absence of truth and justice.

This article analyzes the documentary film La Libertad del diablo (Mexico, 2017), by Everardo González, based on theories of image, affect and public space. In La libertad del diablo, the director interviews victims and perpetrators of the government’s war against drug trafficking throughout the Mexican territory but favoring the landscapes of the northern border of Mexico, specifically the Chihuahua desert. Each interviewee appears wearing a mask that only reveals eyes and lips while recounting the kidnapping and disappearance of a loved one or their participation in the disappearance, execution, or torture of people. We propose that this film device uses the masks that hide the faces, showing how violence disaffiliates and generates a space for the disappearance of the social and human bond. However, at the same time, these masks, by revealing eyes-looks and lips-words, can make an ethical call to create a testimony and a public witness of suffering and horror. Thus, this documentary has the potential to become an image since a moving triad is generated between what is shown, the public witness who exercises a gaze and the shared meanings that it generates. In this way, documentaries like this participate in anti-necropolitical movements.

This article attempts a comparative study between two contemporary novels whose plots are set in the context of the Spanish Civil War, but from a zombie re-reading: Noche de difuntos del 38, by Manuel Martín, and 1936Z. La Guerra Civil zombi, by Javier Cosnava. To do this, the symbolic value of the character of the zombie in contemporary narrative is previously analyzed, stressing in particular its semantic polyvalence, especially regarding its effectiveness as a metaphor of societies in crisis. In addition, connections among war, power and zombie universe are also studied, in order to assess the specific importance of biopolitics as a tool of the power with which an anonymous member of a group can be controlled by means of management of life and death. Finally, conclusions show that, even both novels agree in developing a merciless criticism to the instrumentalization of soldiers —seen as real monsters— in war contexts, narrative strategies or the characterization of the zombie are totally different from one novel to another, according to aspects like the humanization of the living dead, his origin or his membership to one of the factions in conflict, for instance.  

his text introduces an aproach to “Caperucita se come al lobo”, by Pilar Quintana (Colombia, 1972), and “El sueño secreto de Cenicienta”, by Ena Lucía Portela (Cuba, 1972), from the idea that both stories —seen as cultural artifacts with a clear gender awareness— function as revisionist writings of the classic tales, that empower and politicize female characters which traditionally have been deprived of their own voice or which have been characterized by their submission. While, with a parodic and satiric tone, they resignify and question certain elements-symbols related to gender identity constructions, their stereotypes, and patriarchal violence, to articulate their own revindications and critics.

In this article we analyse the thirty-four forewords written by Isaac Rosa between 2008-2021. Neglected until now, this production accompanies an unusual variety of texts. The first part of this article focuses on the authorship of the books establishing a typology and chronology of these texts. In the second part, we try to give to this fragmented corpus a sense of the whole, by revealing a dense fabric of critical writing and uncovering a new facet of Rosa’s work. In line with the author’s narrative production, the corpus can be articulated around two thematic axes: on the one hand, historical memory and, on the other hand, economy and neoliberalism. Both axes are usually subsumed under the label ‘literature and politics’. However, we think that, considering the emphasis the writer-turned-critic puts on historical sequences and enunciative frameworks, this paradigm should be updated to speak of ‘literature and democracy’.  

In this article, a historical experience of political translation in Latin America that took place during the break of the colonial ties is interwoven with current translation practices, adopting the perspective of Translation Studies, Latin American Studies, and the sociological approach to translation. On the one hand, history allows us to recognize the tradition of counterhegemonic translation in our region. On the other, a contemporary case study, the resistance to fracking in the Argentine Patagonia, allows us to see counterhegemonic translation at play in the context of socio-environmental struggles against technologies from the Global North.

Miguel de Carrión is perhaps the most important narrator of Cuba’s early Republic, a period during which the island is torn between traditions that resulted for centuries of Colonial rule and the the search for an identity in the context of the modern world. His two best known novels, Las honradas (1917) and Las impuras (1919), have been related with some frequency to Flaubert and naturalism. However, so far no one has noticed that Carrión’s fully Flaubertian novel is La esfinge, written at the end of the 1920s and published only in 1961, several decades after its author’s death. In it, the female protagonist, Amada, who is patterned after Emma Bovary, represents a kind of “disappointed romanticism”, as Vargas Llosa has already observed, through which Carrión, in view of the enormous difficulties of the Republic in building a modern nation, conveys a desire to return to the ideals of the nineteenth century independentist movements.

Reseñas críticas de las siguientes publicaciones: Angelou, Maya (2019). Mamá y yo y mamá. Navarra: Editorial Txalaparta. Polo, Paloma (2019). El Barro de la Revolución. Madrid: CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo. Larraz, Fernando, Mengual, Josep, Sopena, Mireia (Eds.) (2020). Pliegos alzados. La historia de la edición a debate. Asturias: Ediciones TREA Sanrune, Carlos (2020). Breve historia de la literatura gay y lésbica en español. Madrid: Amistades Particulares. Santamaría Colmenero, Sara (2020). La querella de los novelistas. La lucha por la memoria en la literatura española (1990-2010). Valencia: Universitat de València. Ocaña, Javier (2021). De Blancanieves a Kurosawa: La aventura de ver cine con los hijos. Barcelona: Península. Zygmunt, Karolina (2021) Viajar y escribir en la era del turismo de masas. Relatos de viajes contemporáneos por la Ruta de la Seda. Madrid: Centro Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.

Before a documentary film becomes representation —something about reality— it is an event that happens in reality. It is a creative and social process that intervenes in the place and historical time where it takes place. This article builds from the artistic research I developed for the film project Encierro, a documentary recreation of a mining strike in my hometown of Almadén (Ciudad Real) in 1984. It explores the capacity of fieldwork, artistic methodologies, and documentary filming to intervene directly in reality and go beyond documentation, representation, and signification processes. Encierro is based on a local historical event, in which 11 miners locked down as a protest 650 meters underground in the mercury mines of Almadén for 11 days. This project proposes a similar underground lockdown of 11 people and 11 days 35 years later, now when the mine of Almadén is closed for production and we suffer the ruinous effects of the lack of restructuring plans. Ultimately, this reenactment raises the question of whether the recreation of a strike can also be considered as such, even though in post-industrial Almadén there is no more mining, no more production to close, and this “strike” does not come from a labor action, but from artistic practice.

This paper investigates the artistic-activist proposal of the Argentine filmmaker Albertina Carri in Las hijas del fuego (2018), which won the award for Best Film in the Argentine Competition at the twentieth edition of the Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival -BAFICI. Las hijas del fuego is an original feminist pornographic road movie where a new regime of authorship and emancipatory creativity is proposed. This project is part of Albertina Carri’s long career and can be seen as a manifesto of enjoyment, a way of making films from a situated knowledge and with pleasure.