Geographical Directions: Ways of reading and seeing Latin America.

• In Event: The "L" Word: Rethinking the Latin-American Label in the New Millennium.

Abstract

Many Latin American writers and plastic artists who have lived either under violent regimes or during periods of economic, social and political crisis have faced aesthetical challenges or ethical pitfalls associated with experiences of “absence, oppression, and the gap between the disempowered and powerful”. Plastic artists Doris Salcedo (Colombia), the Argentinean street artist Nazza Stencil, or poets such as Margorie Agosín (Chile/USA) and Roger Santibañez (Perú/USA), are among them. Indeed, many [of these artists] are currently working away from their homelands, creating, as it were, a very real Latin America of the imagination beyond the geopolitical confines of the continent.
My presentation explores how their work makes us reflect on our notions of humanity and upon the role citizenship plays in our understanding of such notions, and how it ultimately illuminates ways of reading and seeing Latin America’s political, and socio-economic realities within today’s global-local dynamics. In fact, considering Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s call for a globalectic reading of works of arts — that is, a reading that “should bring into mutual impact and comprehension the local and the global, the here and there, the national and the world”— this study is also an opportunity to discuss if and why we should read Latin American works of art in dialogue with the work of artists with different cultural backgrounds but facing with similar circumstances. Poets such as Lucrécia Paco (Mozambique) and Mukoma Ngugi (Kenya/USA) or plastic artist Wangechi Mutu (Kenya/USA) among others, express experiences that resonate with those of Latin American artists. Can such approach allow us to truly read their work “with the eyes of the world” and “see the world with the eyes of the text”?

Author

• Sarli E Mercado, University of Wisconsin/Madison