Experimental Aesthetics as Experimental Life: Alterity and Form in 20th and 21st Century Southern Cone Literature

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

For the queer Brazilian poet Roberto Piva, “there is no experimental poetry without experimental life.” Taking a cue from Piva’s critique of the relationship between literary form and subjectivity, this panel theorizes alterity in the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers from the Southern Cone who navigate racial, sexual, and other categories of difference through aesthetic innovation. If Latin American avant-gardes have hinged on the relationship between national and cosmopolitan identity, the vectors of identity formation continue to haunt literary framings of the modern, foregrounding power relations that are both internal to the nation-state and inseparable from global logics. By discussing writers such as Mário de Andrade, Juan José Saer, Conceição Evaristo, and Adão Ventura, panelists will analyze the ways in which narrative, poetic, and sonic forms scramble the coordinates of periphery and center, troubling dominant understandings of aesthetic innovation along with the privileged status of the vanguardist (white, cisheterosexual) male writer. Among topics explored will be the relationship between the literary, popular culture, and polyrhythmic form in Andrade’s writings on Afro-Brazilian music; the role of desire and notions of origin, writing, and diasporic and national identity in Saer’s El entenado; and Evaristo’s spiritual-aesthetic concept of escrevivência as a lens for reading racial and gender formations in Ventura’s A cor da pele.

Sub Track

• Culture, Power, and Political Subjectivities

Session Organizer

• Lucas A de Lima, University of Pennsylvania

Chair

• Lucas A de Lima, University of Pennsylvania

Discussant

• Rodrigo Lopes de Barros, Boston University

Individual Presentations

• The "Escrevivência" of Adão Ventura’s "A cor da pele" - Lucas A de Lima, University of Pennsylvania

• Repeticiones rítmicas y disonancias culturales: lo popular y formas de la diferencia en Mário de Andrade - Renata Pontes

• El entenado, de Juan José Saer: ficciones, fugas y naufragios - Lina M Ruiz-Guzman

• Jugar para entender lo global. Videojuego y cultura audiovisual en "El juego de los mundos", de César Aira - Andrés García-Londoño