Cuadernos del Sur Letras

Queralt Estévez, Sheila (coord.) (2023), Lingüistas de hoy. Profesiones para el siglo XXI, Madrid, Editorial Síntesis, 317 páginas

Lorena M. A. de- Matteis — 2025-11-10

Affects, gender and protest in “Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego” by Mariana Enríquez

Carolina Rossini — 2025-11-10

The objective of this work is to analyze the intersection between affects, gender and protest in “The things we lost in the fire” by Mariana Enríquez. To the extent that it is a story that is linked to a specific extra-literary context, it participates in a discursive framework which dialogues with dissenting positions, perspectives of emancipation and political orientations. In the story, affective configurations determine, on the one hand, the way in which a dominant social order is projected and, on the other, an alternative political structure that, in a disruptive and irreverent way, manages to redefine the agreements, criteria and mandates of gender that condition our bodies.

Resistance to coloniality in the periphery of the periphery: the socio-environmental movement in Chubut and Catamarca

Sebastián Sayago — 2025-11-10

The article presents an analysis of the resistance discourse of two Argentine socio-environmental organizations opposed to large-scale open-pit mining, the No a la Mina collective (Chubut) and Asamblea El Algarrobo (Catamarca), belonging to remote provinces in central Argentina. The analysis points out the discursive features opposed to coloniality and capitalism and analyzes a particular discursive representation, that of a legal framework that was approved in June 2024 in order to deepen extractivism: the Large Investment Incentive Regime. The theoretical framework recovers contributions from Decolonial Studies, Political Ecology, Social Psychology and Critical Discourse Studies. The methodology is dialectical and the corpus is made up of posts from the Facebook pages of both groups. The results obtained contribute to reinforcing the decolonial approach of discursive studies in the region.

Héctor Libertella and the medieval tradition in the configuration of Las sagradas escrituras

Diego Hernán Rosain — 2025-11-10

Las sagradas escrituras (1993), by the writer Héctor Libertella (1945–2006), represents the compilation of an exhaustive body of work that had previously been accessible only in scattered and disparate formats. The author succeeded in gathering his entire intellectual production into a single volume, revisiting his hypotheses and bestowing the work with an academic and encyclopedic character. However, the bibliographic tradition anchoring this volume is far removed from that of modern criticism; instead, it appears to align with various traditions from the Middle Ages. Both the structure and content of the book emulate, on one hand, the methods of codex creation associated with the School of Translators of Toledo during the reign of Alfonso X the Wise, and on the other, the practices of alchemists, particularly their conception of the materiality and transmutation of divine creations. This study examines the production conditions of Las sagradas escrituras in relation to medieval modes of production and editing, as well as the textual and structural elements they evoke, to explore how the recovery of ancient practices revitalizes modern approaches to literary theory and criticism.

A captive from the northwest of the province of Buenos Aires, the folds of a voice

Lucía Fayolle — 2025-11-10

On July 15, 2022, the members of the Project “The archive as a reading policy. Theoretical and methodological reformulations in Latin America around Archives of writers and artists (2018-2022)” we visited the Teacher Training Institute No. 129 in Junín (Buenos Aires). In this meeting between educational communities, the oral narrator Zulma Amabile gave voice to the story “Coming Home”, which tells of the return of Luciana López, a captive “rescued” by Mansilla “in the confines of everything created” (Ferrari, 1978: s/p). The way she told the story made us notice that she was carrying other times, bodies, documents and fictions. That is why she invited us, from the first common listening, to discover them and put them in dialogue; to listen to everything she brought with her and to revisit both the literary and pictorial tradition around the captive and the Junín Municipal Historical Art Archive. In this article, we will investigate the folds within that voice to replace the traces of present temporalities and we will use montage as a methodological procedure to display, show and relate the images and textualities that coexist in this voice.

Two Martian´s objects: the phonograph and the glossograph

Ariela Érica Schnirmajer — 2025-11-10

In his Escenas norteamericanas, José Martí gave an account of the new technologies, their possibilities and risks. I will concentrate on his readings of the phonograph and the glossograph. Unlike other technological objects, it is possible to affirm that the phonograph is a Martian object, a fact that is palpable in several areas of his work.

In the “Boletín of El Partido Liberal” of 12 March 1890, the correspondent warns of three phenomena associated with the phonograph. Firstly, he points out that this device makes it possible to hear live music, the accent of a poet, the melody of the piano. In this sense, he states that ‘mystery increases enjoyment’ (1975: 510); this means that the phonograph produces a supplementary pleasure from an absence. Then, the device is associated with the technology of mourning, as it preserves the voices of missing family affections. This is where its spectral feature appears. Finally, the correspondent refers to the old age of new things since, according to some sources; phonography has existed for two hundred years. The three features, joy/fear based on an absent object, forms of the spectral and the configuration of time are three central elements of Marti's style, the drifts of which will be explored.

Colonial scenes in the Latin American archive

María Inés Aldao — 2025-11-10

‘Dígnate saber, dígnate escuchar’: mestizo enunciation and the legitimacy construction in Cristóbal del Castillo’s Historia de la conquista

Ariana Thiele Lara — 2025-11-10

Mestizo enunciation is characterized by oscillation as a distinctive feature: it emerges at the intersection between the enunciators’ desire to recover the traces of an indigenous past prior to colonization, and the desire to position themselves as faithful Catholics and subjects in service to the Crown. What strategies do mestizo chroniclers use to ensure their writings –marked by the longing for a world destroyed by conquest– circulate within a system that is hostile to them? How do those who lack the authority of the historians from the metropolis legitimize their voices?

In the prologue to Cristóbal del Castillo’s Historia de la conquista (ca. 1599), we find an enunciator who, through an appeal to pathos, constructs a relationship of closeness with his readers. Thus, the display of emotion –manifested through the choice of a language, the vindication of primary sources, the emphasis on loss, and Christian self-figuration– serves a strategic function, as it operates as a means of building legitimacy.

From Classical Tradition to Novohispanic Production: The Latin Epigrams in the Allegorical Neptune of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

María Paula Pires — 2025-11-10

The triumphal arches prepared to receive the new viceroys occupied a primordial space in New Spain. In Mexico city, to welcome the Marquises of La Laguna, two were built, and one of those was commissioned to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. The Allegorical Neptune is the arch put into prose, where Sor Juana, with her usual skill, elaborates an ekphrasis of the ephemeral architecture.

In the text, which has been a challenge for literary criticism, because it has more than two hundred quotations in Latin, we find two epigrams written by Sor Juana in Latin, compositions on which we will concentrate. In this paper, we will examine how these epigrams, which seemingly reproduce the classical tradition, function not only as courtly praise but also as vehicles for political intervention. Through our own translation and, by analyzing the production context, the poem’s material conditions, and the Novohispanic reality of the period, we will offer a new reading of the epigrams that places Sor Juana in a privileged position in the development of the relations of subordination and mutual dependence between American literati and the viceregal administration.

The Core of the Empire: Mexico and Seville in Two Epistles of Colonial New Spanish Lyric Poetry

Rocío Belén Hernández — 2025-11-10

The literary representation of Mexico City portrayed in the epistle that Bernardo de Balbuena addresses to Doña Isabel de Tobar y Guzmán, known as Grandeza Mexicana (1604, Mexico), is based on the tradition of European Renaissance Poetry that arrived in New Spain, as evidenced by the poetic anthology Flores de baria poesía (1577, Mexico). A comparative analysis between Grandeza and another piece of colonial New Spanish lyric poetry included in this anthology—“Respuesta de Cetina a Baltasar de León”—, now revealed as a key precursor to Balbuena’s text shows that this poem displays certain inflections of Renaissance forms, of the descriptive model of laudes civitatis, and of the rhetoric of evergetism, which articulate a prominent role for the American space. The joyful and celebratory tone in the first epistle, as opposed to the elegiac tone in the second, delineate the contrast between two major cities of the empire: Mexico City and Seville. This counterpoint illuminates the configuration of an imaginary that asserts Mexico’s preeminence within the Spanish nation and represents Mexico City as the governing center of the empire and of the world in the early colonial period.

The Enlightenment´s practice in newspapers of the Spanish-American colonies (1770-1808)

Mariana Rosetti — 2025-11-10

In this article, we are interested in analyzing the practice of the Spanish American Enlightenment from the perspective of the periodical press during the last decades of the 18th century and the first years of the 19th century. In the prospectuses, introductions, and first issues of scientific and cultural journals from different Spanish American colonies, we observe similar topics and proposals in relation to the awareness of a founding time propitious for Americans to enter Pan-American and transatlantic dialogue with other communities of knowledge, both American and European (especially those from Paris and Madrid). Our corpus will be the Mercurio Volante (1772-1773), a solo project led by physician José Antonio Bartolache in New Spain; the Mercurio Peruano (1791-1794), written by Jacinto Calero y Moreira, supported by the Academic Society of Lovers of the Country in Lima; Primicias de la Cultura de Quito (1792), by Francisco Eugenio de Santa Cruz y Espejo, supported by the Patriotic Society of Friends of the Country in Quito; and the Telégrafo Mercantil by Francisco Antonio Cabello y Mesa (1801-1802), published in Buenos Aires

Toward a Corpopolitics of Excess: A transtextual reading of Memorias and El mundo alucinante, una novela de aventuras

Catalina Sverlij Escámez — 2025-11-10

This paper presents a problematization of the relationship between body and politics, as discernible through the transtextual connections between Memorias de Servando Teresa de Mier (1856) and Reinaldo Arenas' reimagining in El mundo alucinante (1965). It examines the various figurations that define the political corporeality of the turned-character friar, understood in terms of “excess”, from the perspective offered by his trajectory.

Representations of space and the Fuegian inhabitants in a rereading of García Jofré de Loaysa's expedition to the Moluccas Islands

Clara Cameroni — 2025-11-10

Andrés de Urdaneta wrote, in 1536, the report about García Jofré de Loaysa's expedition, of which he was part, being also one of the few survivors of the seven ships that had set sail. This text is about ways of representation of the space and the Fuegian inhabitants through a non-verbal language from the selection of three scenes from Urdaneta’s report. Gestures, movements and sounds will be translated and transcribed onto paper based on certain functional guidelines for an imperial desire. The distances between orality and writing will characterize a way of seeing the unknown that will last over time.

“That Quetzal town”: Legends and colonial scenes in the speeches of José Martí

María Carolina Bergese — 2025-11-10

In the present work, we will analyze José Martí's oratory pieces that had as objective the celebration or homage to different countries and regions of the American Continent (Mexico, Central America, Venezuela, Santo Domingo), in the frame of the Cuban activities in Liceo de Guanabacoa or Sociedad Literaria Hispanoamericana. In these texts, we will trace a series of zones where the enunciator constructs scenes about the contact between cultures, or where he includes indigenous oral legends. We will inquire, then, with what purpose they are presented, according to the different contexts of enunciation, and by means of what rhetorical resources the space and the historical and mythical characters mentioned are constructed. In this way, this will allow us to think about how the colonial archive functioned in Martí's ideology and how it allows him to construct his founding image of “Our America”.

The Conquest of a Race Doomed to Disappear in the Novel En esa época (2001) by Sergio Bizzio

Sofía Masdeu — 2025-11-10

The present work examines Sergio Bizzio's novel En esa época (2001) for its recreation of the final moments of the campaign known as “The Conquest of the Desert” (1878–1885). If, as liberal historiography suggests, the natives who inhabited the region abruptly disappeared at the end of the 19th century and subsequently became extinct, they might as well have been abducted by aliens. That is the premise of Bizzio’s novel. I understand this period of history as an extension of the colonial silence that characterizes the Río de la Plata region. As episodes of political violence embodying an undigested narrative, it is necessary to seek interpretive keys in alternative registers. Bizzio’s novel offers us that possibility.

Tensions among archives, history and literature in Un defeito de cor (2006) by Ana Maria Gonçalves and O som do rugido da onça (2021) by Micheliny Verunschk

Renata Dal Sasso Freitas — 2025-11-10

This essay analyzes, through an intersection between the fields of history and literature, the novels Um defeito de cor (2006) by Ana Maria Gonçalves and O som do rugido da onça (2021) by Micheliny Verunschk, and their relation with the Brazilian historiographical canon. In this sense, I aim to explore the connections of these novels with the demands by subalternized social groups in being subjects and not objects of the Human Sciences, which tensions the places of enunciation that these institutions have conferred on them. Therefore, the popularity of both novels speaks of a process of long historicity but that, in the current political context, has acquired characteristics of disputes over the past in the public debate and in academic institutions.

Editorial team and index

Cuadernos Sur — 2025-11-10