An important focus of research for Global South specialists is analyzing the strategies and mechanisms through which artists draw on Global North cultural movements and genres. Intellectuals from the southern region, such as Latin America and the Middle East, noted the cultural and social potential of cultural products circulating from economically dominant countries in relation to notions of modernity and globalization. As scholars such as Edward Said, Mabel Moraña, and Julio Ramos have shown, literature played an important role in the modern era, from colonial times to the end of the 19th century, in establishing these dialogues and struggles through translations and the adoption of literary genres and public images. However, in the contemporary era, it is evident that writers are not only aware of the trends of their time, such as media trends, but also of Global North trends from the past. This panel explores three cases in which Global South writers have drawn on literary figures, genres, and European literature of the modern era. From three different countries, the panel studies how these Global North-originated elements are used strategically as mechanisms for emancipation, in line with the MLA 2027 theme.

Each 15-minute paper follows a different cultural mechanism drawn from the modern era. The first presentation by Dr. Antunez De Mayolo Kou explores counterculture in the Andean literary field during the long sixties, studying the mechanism of lifestyle. Besides referencing rock music and psychedelia, he suggests that the impact of counterculture in Bolivia can be traced in young artists' fascination in later years with the movement's unproductive lifestyle modeled on the 19th-century Poète maudit (cursed poet). The characteristics associated with these writers included self-displacement, recreational substance use, bohemianism, and youthfulness, on which the youth articulated countercultural ideals. The paper focuses on the Bolivian writer Jaime Sáenz (1921-1986), whose poet followers gave him a cult status. By studying written testimonies and written interviews with his followers, the study analyzes how young writers, such as Blanca Wiethüchter and the late Guillermo Bedregal Garcia, worked to exalt Sáenz as an example for countercultural youth by reinforcing the cursed-poet aesthetic.

Focusing on Chile, Dr. Lozano Guzmán’s paper analyzes the novel El tarambana by Yosa Vidal in relation to the mechanism of literary genre. In his reading, the novel mobilizes the picaresque genre of the Spanish Golden Age in a singular way, reworking it as a literary form that produces a counter-narrative of marginality—both economic (through peripheral labor) and gendered (through ambiguous identity). Vidal’s novel centers on a transgender character, Graciel Concha, who performs a non-heteronormative masculinity. In doing so, the protagonist both interrogates the patriarchal order consolidated under the dictatorship and, in keeping with key features of the picaresque, deploys transgression to foreground individualism and to justify actions aimed at social mobility, thereby functioning as an allegory of the Chilean crisis. In this vein, Vidal employs the narrator’s baroque language alongside the protagonist’s gender ambiguity to offer a renewed reading of the dictatorship’s memory and to illuminate the formation of peripheral labor as a legacy of Chile’s neoliberal “laboratory.”

The third presentation, by Ph.D. candidate Mazahreh, is about reverse mimicry – the apparent but not actual copying of nineteenth-century British fiction by contemporary Arab novelists. In this paper, she specifically compares Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) to Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2018), analyzing the mechanism of translation. She argues that this example of contemporary Arabic fiction should be read not as an adaptation but as an intentionally unfaithful, political translation of its British antecedent. Saadawi’s Frankenstein is not meant to pay homage but rather to revitalize Shelley’s text by inserting it into a political landscape it would not otherwise enter. What she calls fictuality (fiction infiltrating fact) is a “third world aesthetic” that can be found in such political translations. It deliberately confuses and complicates the interplay between fiction and fact in an Arab setting, motivated by its dissatisfaction with how this relationship is handled in the mimicked text.

The study of these three mechanisms—lifestyle, literary genre, and translation—would provide scope for reflecting on how contemporary literature draws on the Global North's past. The panel looks forward to initiating an academic conversation on Global South strategies for representing the present.