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

With the emergence of the Internet and, even before, with the development of the first technological poetics, the question about the avant-garde extends beyond its echoes in traditional analog narrative, forcing us to read the avant-garde not so much in its experimental textual dimension with relation to a specific genre (the contemporary novel), but in its connection with technology, in the operation of erasing borders with the other arts, in the search for movement, in collective writing as a way of undermining the idea of ​​genius individual, in its exploration of chance and in its imposition of new forms of production and consumption of works. Throughout the following pages we will take a tour of the ways in which some works arising from the collectives Aceleraditxs and Broken English recover searches linked to the historical avant-garde and concrete poetry. Thus, if on the one hand digital culture, due to its own characteristics, broadens and facilitates avant-garde procedures, on the other, many particularities of what we call Latin American digital poetry would have been unthinkable without the legacy of the paper experimentations of the avant-garde. and of concretism.

This paper focuses on the Aquí collection by Arca publishing house, especially on those volumes in which Armonía Somers participated both as a writer and as a prologue writer: La mitad del amor contada por seis mujeres (1966), Cien años de raros (1966), and La otra mitad del amor contada por siete hombres (1968). The theoretical contributions of Chartier and Darnton regarding the materiality of texts are considered to provide elements for analyzing Rama's critical and editorial intervention in Somers's canonization through the mentioned titles. Although Armonía Somers's place within Uruguayan literature in the 1960s remained marginal, Rama's editorial work reconfigured the canon by making visible a disruptive aesthetic through various editorial strategies. Likewise, the story Somers chose to integrate La mitad del amor contada por seis mujeres  along with the prologue to La otra mitad del amor contada por siete hombres  deploy strategies that can be read as ways of constructing an authorial figure, a figure she constructed from the moment she published "The Naked Woman" in Clima magazine (1950) under a pseudonym.

Among the colonial archives of Latin America is that of Puerto Rico, a singular case that remains particularly open. This is due to the double colonizing process that the island underwent (Spain and the USA) and which produced a necolonial state. In this regard, this paper proposes to revisit the work of two writers who could be read as archons (Derrida, 1997) of the Puerto Rican archive articulated in literature. I am referring to Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá (1946) and Eduardo Lalo (1964). For this study two specific works will be considered, namely: Puertorriqueños. Álbum de la sagrada familia puertorriqueña a partir de 1898 (1988) and donde (2005), by Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá and Eduardo Lalo, respectively. Both texts include photographs and from this inclusion, I think, the construction of a hybrid archive of colonial history of the Puerto Rican island could also be considered. In order to subsidize these reflections, it will be necessary to review the theoretical premises of authors such as Jacques Derrida, Eduardo Duchesne-Winter, among others.

In 1957 a relatively young Derek Walcott (he was twenty-seven at the time) was commissioned a play aimed at celebrating the Opening of the First Federal Parliament of The West Indies on the 23rd of April 1958. The result was Drums and Colours, a play which stages four hundred years of the complex and troubled history of the Caribbean based, as Walcott himself declared, on “four emblematic images: Columbus in chains, Millais’s painting The Boyhood of Raleigh, the coachman of the Breda family Toussaint L’Ouverture, and the martyrdom of George William Gordon for Jamaican independence’. Drawing attention to these ‘emblematic images’, Walcott reveals that Drums and Colours originated from a visual matrix, invites us to consider the play as an extended verbal rendition of visual prompts, and highlights the importance of interdisciplinarity for his decolonial agenda. Whilst looking at Walcott’s visual prompts, I will be arguing that the work of the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera is another important, if unacknowledged, visual source for Drums and Colours which reveals how the young Walcott’s views and work were deeply inflected by his sense of allegiance to the vast Caribbean sea-region and to the emancipatory agenda of its “little people”.

Contemporary Caribbean poetry addresses the exhaustion of the region’s great historical models of society, namely the Commonwealth in Puerto Rico, the Cuban Revolution and the post-civil war democracy in the Dominican Republic. In revealing the fissures of this crisis, the Hispanic Caribbean poetic production of the new millennium ventures into imagining utopian horizons. The work of Mara Pastor, collected in Deuda natal, reveals such coordinates. Her poetry is characterized by the subject’s gaze on the scenarios of ruin, not to take stock of the disaster in Puerto Rico, but to immerse herself in the experience in a gesture that ultimately reveals the promise of a way out that is as personal as it is political.

Revisión del libro Diccionario del bibliómano por A. Castronuovo.

 Revisión del libro La villa: entre el espectáculo y lo real por R. Cellino.

Revisión del libro Las cartas del Boom por C. Aguirre, G. Martin, J. Munguía y A. Wong Campos (Eds.)

Revisión del libro ¿Para qué sirve leer novelas? Narrativas del presente y capitalismo por A. Laera.

This introduction presents the guiding principle organizing the Dossier, which is devoted to the literature produced in the various Antillean areas (Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanic Caribbean). In line with Glissant’s proposal of conceiving the Caribbean in relation and geopolitically situated, the articles approach the symbolic, intellectual, literary, artistic links established between the diverse islands and our particular locus of discussion: Latin America. The Dossier covers a long time span, from the emancipatory context of Derek Walcott’s work in the English Caribbean, which engages with Diego Rivera’s muralism, through the relationships developed between French Caribbean poetics (Césaire, Tropiques review) and Latin American aesthetics (Wifredo Lam, neobaroque), to the poetry that from the 60s and 70s onwards affiliates with the Revolution –not without ambiguities– (Alberto Szpunberg) and signals the crisis resulting from the end of utopias, proposing however, forms of resistance (Mara Pastor).