Poetics of Possibility: Risk and Emancipation in Latin American Poetry

Barja Cuyutupa, Ethel; Barja Cuyutupa, Ethel

This session will explore twentieth- and twenty-first-century Peruvian and Cuban poetry that inquires into how poetry has reframed expectations for emancipated futures in Latin America. We map the routes of poetry that branch from the rich history of Latin American poetry engaged with social transformation and its anticolonial tradition, examining how, from a primarily class-struggle focus after the mid-twentieth century, the scholarly conversation has turned towards poetry's intersectional concerns and the legibility of historical trauma through poetry. Focusing on the poetics of possibility in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century, we aim to develop theoretical and critical tools to explore distinctive orientations of poetry studies in conversation with historical memory, anti-patriarchy, and black aesthetics.

This session was inspired by the need to revisit Latin American emancipatory poetics. Throughout the sixties and seventies, the Cuban revolution, global liberation movements, and the struggle for civil rights in the U.S. greatly influenced Latin American poetry, promoting engaged poetry that favored revolutionary ideals (Gilman, Sorensen). This portion of the worldwide “resistance literature” (Harlow) urged a metaliterary reflection on the mattering of poetry in times of despair. The political action of poets materialized in a language that more clearly expressed their urgency for change. This session will evaluate the detachment from an early emancipatory poetics focused on class struggle in Peru and Cuba, exploring nuances and dissent that attend to historicity, gender, and race.

In Peru during the 1960s and 1970s, there was an emphasis on poetry as an extension of reality, through the so-called conversational poetry, also aimed to reflect on Peruvian history and transformative politics (e.g., Antonio Cisneros, Juan Ramírez Ruiz, Tulio Mora). Twenty-first-century Peruvian documentary poetics has yet to be explored in its historical connections to that tradition and the challenges posed by a dispute over memory, due to the toll of the Peruvian Internal Armed Conflict (1980-2000). Second, amid the merging of reality and poetry, the Peruvian poetry located gender at the center of the conversation, establishing a distinct approach to liberation. Specifically, the intersection of poetry and feminism has remained a rich site of inquiry for challenging patriarchal expectations. Third, in Cuba during the 1960s and 1970s, revolutionary rhetoric discouraged a focus on race and gender as cultural spaces for thinking about liberation, given its emphasis on the class struggle (Chancy, Luis). However, a racial and feminist reckoning gradually emerged. Poets celebrated the Afro-diasporic legacy as a long-looming history of resistance (e.g., Nancy Morejón). A work is underway to elucidate how poetry by black individuals reshaped revolutionary ideals and went beyond racialized expectations.

This panel responds to efforts in the poetry and poetics field to trace conversations on historical memory, gender, and race. We believe that examining the continuities and ruptures in the risks taken by twentieth- and twenty-first-century emancipatory poetry is crucial to understanding contemporary poetry's response to its historical moment. The poets discussed in this session demonstrate the versatility of Latin American poetry in conveying emancipatory aims beyond a focus on class struggle and capitalize on marginal perspectives to build an aesthetic critical discourse.

This session proposes three 15-minute presentations, followed by 15 minutes of discussion. First, Villacorta’s paper, “Archive, Document, and Memory: Documentary Poetics in 21st-Century Peruvian Poetry,” builds upon the scholarship by Sarah Ehlers and Niki Herd on documentary poetics and how poetic projects incorporate historical materials to narrate historical events (2022). His presentation will focus on Sisma. Poema Documental (2022) by Paul Guillén, Political Constitution of Peru (2021) by Santiago Vera, and Persona (2017) by José Carlos Agüero. It explores how they engage with historical memory and the contemporary Peruvian crisis. Second, Del Águila’s paper “From Abjection to Emancipation: Reimagining the Female Body in Peruvian Women Poets of the 1980s” analyzes the corporeal imagery articulated by Carmen Ollé, Mariela Dreyfus, and Rocío Silvia Santisteban, identifying a rupture in the boundaries of sexual difference as theorized by Teresa de Lauretis. These texts expose the transformation of the female body abjection (Julia Kristeva) into resistance, agency, and emancipation. Finally, Ethel Barja’s paper “The Lyric Hour: Emancipation and Black Time in Soleida Ríos’ Poetry” focuses on the Cuban context. It analyzes how Ríos's poetry goes beyond historical reparation to affirm black aliveness (Kevin Quashie) and black time (Daphne Lamothe). The presentation traces the duality of historical struggle and lyric emancipation in A wa nilé (2017) and Bocaciega (2024), arguing that Río’s work not only memorializes the Cuban afro-diasporic historical archive of liberation but also embraces a verbal liberation in the joy of worldmaking.

378 Poetics of Possibility: Risk and Emancipation in Latin American Poetry: Calls for Papers