1. This session, Republican Radical Poethics in Exile, explores how Spanish Republican poets—many of whom were forced into exile following the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the rise of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship—developed radical poetic forms to navigate and resist repression. These writers, targeted for their political affiliations, intellectual work, or sexualities, sought refuge across Latin America, Europe, and the Caribbean. Rather than treating exile as loss or cultural nostalgia, this panel investigates how poetic form became a site of political and ethical innovation—a radical poethics—through which these displaced voices reimagined embodiment, subjectivity, and collectivity beyond state-sanctioned norms.

2. The rationale for this session is both historical and urgent. While the Spanish Civil War has been widely studied for its international political impact, the poetic legacy of its Republican exiles remains undertheorized, especially in light of ongoing global crises of displacement and authoritarianism. The panel asks how poetry—under the weight of censorship, displacement, and ideological silencing—becomes a space for formal rupture, affective resistance, and imaginative world-making. Drawing from developments in literary theory, queer studies, and transnational cultural history, it argues that Spanish Republican exile poetry constitutes not a marginal tradition but a key site of 20th-century aesthetic experimentation and ethical thought. Through readings of poetic language, visual media, and typographic disruption, the panel interrogates how poetic form resists erasure, heteronormativity, and colonial authority.

3. This panel responds to the lack of attention to the poetic processes developed in the margins by reframing exile not as aftermath but as method—a poethical condition from which new solidarities, subjectivities, and aesthetic forms emerge. It builds on and expands critical conversations in exile studies, affect theory, and poethics, drawing from thinkers such as Joan Retallack, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and Gloria Anzaldúa, while grounding the discussion in the historical specificity of Iberian and Latin American cultural politics.

4. The session will feature three 15-minute presentations so there is enough time for introductions, transitions, pauses, etc. At least 15 minutes will be reserved at the end for unstructured discussion, encouraging audience engagement with the conceptual and historical stakes raised. The session is designed to foster interdisciplinary dialogue across Hispanic studies, comparative literature, visual culture, queer theory, and postcolonial studies.

5. The first presentation, by Robert A. Myak, examines the mystical poethics of Juan Ramón Jiménez’s Dios deseado y deseante (1964), written in exile in Puerto Rico. Drawing on Lacanian and Heideggerian frameworks, Myak shows how Jiménez reimagines poetic form as a signifying vessel—embracing semantic indeterminacy while rejecting Francoist-aligned religious institutionalism. His poetry becomes a space of spiritual resistance and epistemological openness. The second presentation, by Claudia Grego March, focuses on the 1962 visual-poetic volume España canta a Cuba, which united Republican exiles and Cuban revolutionaries in a shared anti-imperialist aesthetic. Through poems and prints by Alberti, Celaya, Saura, and Arroyo, she shows how the figure of the pueblo becomes a transnational revolutionary subject—a poetic and visual construct through which Spanish and Cuban struggles merge into a decolonial imaginary. Lastly, Francisco Cantero Soriano analyzes the poethics of excess in Agustín Gómez Arcos’s inner exile, reading his use of parentheses, dashes, and typographic spillages through Derridean différance. Writing from within Francoist Spain, Gómez Arcos enacts a queer, dislocative poetics where form becomes resistance, rupture, and bodily expression. His work reframes exile as not only geographic but deeply intimate, formal, and subversive.

Together, these three papers argue that Spanish Republican exile was not just a historical rupture but a poethical provocation—reshaping the terms of poetic practice, aesthetic form, and critical resistance. From mysticism to revolutionary solidarity, from typographic fragmentation to anti-imperialist aesthetics, the panel positions exile as a generative space of poetic invention, one that resonates with contemporary struggles against repression and displacement.

6. This panel brings together a diverse group of scholars across career stages (two doctoral candidates and a PhD) and disciplinary backgrounds (literary studies, poetics, visual culture, queer theory). The participants represent a transatlantic scholarly network, with academic training and research experience across Spain, France, and the United States. Their distinct methodologies—close reading, deconstruction, visual analysis, and transnational historiography—bridge fields such as Iberian studies, Latin American cultural history, and gender and sexuality studies, enriching the panel’s exploration of poethics in exile.