This symposium proposal is situated in the field of literature written by women –including trans women– in Central and South America. More specifically, it focuses on literature in which representations of scenarios we call “spectral spaces” are generated. That is, territories that exist outside the dominant imaginary, capable of showing us frightening aspects that we usually refuse to look at. To this end, it is necessary to consider that “The figure of the spectral and the narrative of haunting constitute a form of narrativized memory [… and] spectrality or haunting emerges as the aesthetic opposed to conditions or discursive modes generated by violence […]” (Ribas-Casasayas 13) in contemporary times.<\/p>\n
“Spectral spaces” can be understood as mechanisms of contestation that reveal the existence of subjects, beings, and modes of marginal and marginalized survival. They are spaces that anticipate somber events of political, economic, sociocultural rupture, or of the established order. Thus, strangeness, helplessness, displacement, uprootedness, and temporal dislocation (Blanco and Peeren 395) are symptoms of spatial alienation, the loss of place, being beside oneself. In the literatures gathered here, these spaces can be read as ones in which the spectral is an absence that presents itself as tangible, marking intersections between the past and the future, life and death, dystopia and utopia, or what used to be and has been lost forever.<\/p>\n
We wish to dedicate this proposal to literatures written by women authors, given the broad aesthetic movement around the “spectral turn,” in which, within the context of Central and South America, women writers have gained prominence for their treatment of narrative structures, points of view, and the expanded acuity and sensitivity with which they tend to engage what we call “spectral spaces.” From Mar\u00eda Luisa Bombal (1910-1980) to living authors such as Fernanda Melchor, Agustina Bazterrica, Elaine Vilar Madruga, and Luciana Sousa, to name a few, we can find how in their texts spectral spaces are, precisely, that which overlaps, superimposes, juxtaposes, or dissolves into the opposites of the rational, the established, the hegemonic. Through extreme situations in which different shades of violence emerge, the spectral takes shape through haunting: in these works, erasures, disappearances, mass graves, deforested woods, drained lagoons, marginalized places, and relegated or denied bodies come together, naming and interweaving a phenomenon that is neither exclusive nor excluding, but a transitional “spectral space” (in between).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","simposio_area":[64],"class_list":["post-10751","simposio","type-simposio","status-publish","hentry","simposio_area-literatura"],"yoast_head":"\n