Gustavo Verdesio

Ethnic Reemergence in Uruguay: The Return of the Charrúa in the Light of Settler Colonialism Studies

Verdesio discusses the shortcomings of a central category in the theoretical repertoire of the decolonial option: “coloniality of power.” By focusing on Uruguay as a case study, a country where the colonial legacies typical of settler colonialism are still alive, Verdesio shows the limited explanatory power of categories like coloniality of power, that were born out of the study of other forms of colonialism. The negative, sometimes passionate reactions the reemergence of the Charrua Indians has elicited from a significant number of social actors (politicians, academics, and the general public) are discussed as a symptomatic phenomenon that may help one understand the deep roots and currency of present-day colonial legacies.

Specters of Conquest: Indigenous Absence in Transatlantic Literature (review)

Own Work,’’ ‘‘Critical Articles,’’ ‘‘Translations of Clara Janés’s Work,’’ ‘‘Translated Poems in Journals and Anthologies (By Language).’’ Equally helpful is Appendix B, which is a bibliography of Janés’s translations organized by languages—‘‘From Arabic,’’ ‘‘From Catalán,’’ ‘‘From Chinese,’’ ‘‘From Czech,’’ etc. Reading Clara Janés, one might conclude that she is a highly original, aesthetically polished poet capable of moments of enticing poetic insight. After reading Fazser-McMahon’s masterful study and rereading Janés, it is likely that one will be bedazzled because Cultural Encounters unveils Janés’s extraordinary brilliance. The study—and herein lies its originality—also convincingly places the poet among authors whose writings tackle the ethical issues of our times. Janés’s poetry, often a hard nut to crack—to use the poet laureate Ted Kooser’s expression for hermetic texts—appears unrelated to typical socially committed poetry, and yet FazserMcMahon enables us to see that the fundamental preoccupation for otherness and the transformation of a self permeable to the other is, in fact, at the core of many contemporary sociopolitical dilemmas.

Verba Volant, Scripta Manent

In 1992, I published an article on Augusto Roa Bastos’s Yo, el Supremo that discussed one of the issues that I was interested in at that time: the centrality of the dichotomy orality versus writing for the history of Latin American discursive production. Today, my interest in that problem has not waned completely; however, but it would be fair to say that it has mutated into something related, but different, to it. Said mutation has its origin in my growing interest in indigenous societies both in Latin and North America.1 For this reason, what you will read in the following pages can be best described as a rewriting of that paper, or, if you prefer, as an updating of it that makes it reflect my changing ideas about the field of Latin American literature and cultural studies.