Desbunde y felicidad De la cartonera a Perlongher Cecilia Palmeiro
This project was originally developed as a doctoral thesis at Princeton University. It was published in Spanish as Desbunde y felicidad. De la cartonera a Perlongher and will be soon published in Portuguese in Brazil by State University of Rio de Janeiro Press (EDUERJ) under the same title. This research deals with original political aspects of contemporary literature in Latin America, giving special attention to Argentina and Brazil. By reading the past forty years of disruptive, minor literary trends, I was able to map discontinuous trails of appropriation, smuggling, and misinterpretations between those two cultures in order to offer a panoramic perspective of the present and immediate future of Latin American literature, in the shift from “literary engagement” and militancy to micropolitics and queer/countercultural activism. The literary relations between Argentina and Brazil that became visible in the context of Mercosur and its cultural policies (such as the utopic goal of a Spanish and Portuguese bilingualism in both countries) have been secret but actively working for the past forty years in underground literature and alternative activism. This transit was enabled by the work of poet, anthropologist, and activist Néstor Perlongher (born in Argentina in 1949 and deceased in Sao Paulo en 1992). My research departs, on one hand, from the deep transformations in Latin American literature that affect its very core by questioning the status of the literary in terms of what Josefina Ludmer calls “postautonomy.” On the other hand, my inquiry starts as an intervention on the debates of the social function of intellectuals, by rethinking our role within and the prerogatives inherent to these debates.
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