They evoke the feminine irruption of the 20th century against the intellectual canon

The second half of the 20th century was decisive for the definitive irruption of feminist writers and intellectuals with a critical stance and for destabilizing the Latin American literary critical canon, then fully dominated and legitimized by the masculine.

Although an impetus of Latin American literary identity began to take shape throughout the region from the domestic social and political context, totally different from the Iberian one, that vindictive desire initially excluded women’s literary and intellectual work.

Thus, in the 1980s, Latin American women writers and intellectuals began to create networks of collaboration and identification of literary work with a female perspective. This is the case of the various congresses and colloquia of Latin American writers organized throughout this decade, with which not only the marginalization of the canon towards the text coming from female authors was questioned, but also the precursors were recognized and, therefore, a collective voice that began to unbalance the canonical order of intellectual structures in our countries.

This was the theme that was discussed during the plenary table “Editorial, cinematographic and critical feminist initiatives in Latin America”, which took place this Wednesday at the Tlatelolco University Cultural Center as part of the third day of activities of the XXXIV International Colloquium ” For a Critical Management of Culture. Management as Production”, organized by 17, Institute of Critical Studies, which brings together specialists and those involved in artistic and cultural work, thought, promotion and administration of national and foreign culture.

Participating in this table were Oriele Benavides, a specialist in women’s Latin American literature, doctoral student at Princeton University; Vicente Lecuna, professor and director of the Department of Modern Languages ​​and Literatures at John Jay College-CUNY, and Raúl Rodríguez Freire, translator and editor, as well as professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, moderated by Eleonora Cróquer Pedrón, PhD in Hispanic Literature and director of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Latin America of the Simón Bolívar University.

Feminist articulation to question the canon

Vicente Lecuona offered a context of how the economic link between intellectuals and the State occurred in Latin America. He made a critical reference to the intellectual projects during the 20th century that sought to group exclusively Latin American intellectual work, with a vision that was assumed to be revolutionary, but, nevertheless, that canceled the presence of intellectuals.

He exemplified that “between 1974 and 1995, the feminist theme in Venezuela was not even enunciated, or at least it was not enunciated within the literary scope of the canonizing institutions, even, if you will, conservative ones, which proposed progressive criteria that broadened the way to understand the canon (…) in any case, within that environment, the absence of the debate on the feminine question in the configuration of collections of Latin American classics strikes me”.

For her part, Oriele Benavides provided the counterweight to what was presented by Rodríguez Freire, offering a tour of the different congresses and colloquia of Latin American writers held in Latin America and the United States during the 1980s.

“Feminism stands as a necessary theory in struggles for interpretive power, thus showing solidarity with the processes of destabilization of all hegemony, intercepting the significance and alienation of the subjects and societies that sustain the processes of domination and obedience (… .) a simple idea, and perhaps a bit radical, to think that any controversial interruption of the body archive in relation to sexual difference is a feminist gesture”, she postulated.

In these congresses, detailed Benavides, works were exposed that reviewed and began to build, in a more articulated way, a way to question that canon.

He highlighted the works of pioneering writers in the region, such as the Chileans María Luisa Bombal and Marta Brunet, the Brazilian Clarice Lispector, or poets such as the Chilean Gabriela Mistral and the Puerto Rican Julia de Burgos, among others.

“In various public interventions, Margo Glantz -organizer of the Fourth Inter-American Congress of Women Writers, in 1981-, has recounted the difficulty she encountered when it came to getting publishers for her first literary creations (…) late in In her foray into fiction, she must insist on what she has determined as the strangeness of her own style and how that strangeness cost a lot to enter the publishing world”, she exemplified.

In the audience present was Benjamín Mayer Foulkes, founding director of 17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos, who opined that “for us, the literary institution has an exemplary, paradigmatic character (…) they are devices that we have to take care of, along with thinking about the critical imagination, because there is no imagination without a body, and these institutions somehow give body to the faculties of enunciation”.

Upcoming tables to highlight within the colloquium:

Thursday January 26

• “Urban futures, planetary prospects”.
• Participants: Elena Tudela (Madrid) and Daniel Daou (Mexico City). Moderator: Lorenzo Rocha (Mexico City).
• Auditorium of the Tlatelolco University Cultural Center, 12:00 pm

Friday January 27

• “Disability and dissent: (dis)encounters in cultural management”
• Participants: Sabrina Pachón Torres (Bogotá) and Elian Chali (Córdoba). Moderated by: Beatriz Miranda Galarza and Rodrigo Ponce (Mexico City).
• Auditorium of the Tlatelolco University Cultural Center, 12:00 pm

Saturday January 28

• “What are we talking about when we talk about heritage?”
• Participants: Carlos Hernández Dávila (Mexico City). Moderator: Andrés Gordillo (Mexico City).
• Room 1 of the Tlatelolco University Cultural Center, 9:30 a.m.

Get to know the program of the colloquium in detail:

https://17instituto.org/posgrado/xxxiv-coloquio-internacional-por-una-gestion-critica-de-la-cultura-la-gestion-como-pro-duccion/

ricardo.quiroga@eleconomista.mx