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This paper reflects, first, on the Eurocentric condition of the theories of secularization and their disregard of the incidence of the conquest, colonialism and slavery on the rise of Modernity. By looking at some key definitions of the Caribbean anti-colonialist essay (C. L. R. James, Depestre, Fanon) which point at the “whiteness” inherent in the modern philosophy of history that justified the coexistence of slavery with the emancipation of man, we then posit the “racialization” of Progress as one of the most evident modulations of the paradoxical dynamics secularization/sacralization which characterizes Modernity. Lastly, we observe that while the Afro-Caribbean anti-colonialist essay has recourse to a Marxist body of thought which enables it to deconstruct Western myths (Progress, Race, the “universal” ideals of the French Revolution), beliefs return, however, in literary form through Negritude’s imaginary of emancipation and the political (secularized, resacralized) experience of the African diaspora as revolutionary subject.

This paper aims its attention at the book Reyita, sencillamente. Testimonio de una negra cubana nonagenaria, written by Cuban author Daisy Rubiera Castillo, a literary testimony that takes the Afrodescendant woman as a downtrodden social subject. Owing to the acceptance the text received from the critique and for highlighting its worth from the academic and intellectual standpoint, this approach advances an analysis of the questions the book deals with, which make it a sample of the Afrofeminine literature in Cuba, such as history, culture, memory and roots, discrimination and identity. To do so, the theoretical and methodological tools of the literary gender and race studies are used along with the criteria of specialists formerly interested in this piece. Besides that, this study also approaches the book’s aesthetic side, namely its genre classification as a literary testimony.

The term “Afro-Colombian literature” refers to a concept under construction for which each author contributes their particular vision. In this paper, we promote a dialogue with three authors who share the place of enunciation of the black woman: María Teresa Ramírez (1944) in La noche de mi piel, María Elcina Valencia (1963) in Pentagrama de pasión, and Nena Cantillo (1981) in Aquella noche con Winnie the Pooh. We choose three axes: body, orality and identity. Regarding the body, in the three books the woman is associated with nature, although it varies greatly in the relationship with the male body. Orality is very present in the three works, although in different ways: connection with ancestral songs, with the sounds of nature and with the colloquial speech of the city, respectively. In terms of identity, we find great differences between Ramírez's pan-Africanist vision, Valencia's ecosophy and Cantillo's radical openness. In the conclusions, we discuss the variety of approaches, the possible causes and the richness that they contribute to the concept of “Afro-Colombianity”.

This paper realizes an analysis of the autobiographical writing of Mario Levrero (1940-2004), through of spatiality and from theoretical perspective of Karl Schögel. We regard than: Apuntes bonaerenses, Diario de una canalla, El discurso vacío, La novela luminosa and Burdeos 1972 constitute an autobiographical and literary cartography of The Rio de la Plata and transatlantic cities inside of the Levrerian work. Namely, insofar than the Uruguayan cities Montevideo and Colonia del Sacramento; the Argentinian Buenos Aires and in the other side of Atlantic, Paris and Bourdeaux, become the axes about which rotate narrations wrote in first person of the singular. The incorporation of this geographical correlate will allow us to authenticate the autobiographical dimension in these texts to watch microhistorical processes (individual, subjective, endogenous) and macrohistorical (collectives, objectives, exogenous) inside this narrative corpus. In addition, will allow us rethink the existing relationship between this narrative arc and fiction of the Uruguayan author.

The methods in which crime developed during la Violence in Colombia reached unprecedented levels of cruelty in the country. Shortly after the Conservative Party came to power in 1946, broad sectors of it sought to expand their diminished political bases through the physical and moral destruction of liberalism. In Valle del Cauca, some conservative leaders constituted and financed gangs of murderers who, in association with policemen and detectives, undertook conservative homogenization campaigns through both selective assassinations and massacres commited in various places. Many of these assassins committed their crimes with extreme levels of sadism and inhumanity, executing opprobrious practices on the victims. Thus, the atrocity became a fundamental characteristic of said violence and a matter of special relevance for the literature that dealt with this phenomenon. In this paper I will examine the types of murderers, the methods of crime and the literary treatment of cruelty in three novels from Valle del Cauca that ficitionalize the criminal campaign of the Conservative Party in Valle del Cauca: Viento seco (1953), Cóndores no entierran todos los días (1972) y Noche de pájaros (1984).

This paper is an exploration about the transformations, the dissolution and the reconfigurations of the concept of territory in the Roberto Bolaño’s work. The place of childhood, the intertextual relations and the contacts with other idiomatics worlds are the subjects exposed here. This mentioned subjects emphasize in the literary rupture of boundaries as a way to reconstruct a face and an identity but also can be read as a form of exile.

In this paper, a critical inscription is made about women in space, based on four fundamental works by Roberto Bolaño —Los detectives salvajes (1998), Amuleto (1999), Putas asesinas (2001) and 2666 (2003) —, in these analyze the concepts of space of reality and time that are presented in the literary narrative. Prior to the perspective offered by Roberto Bolaño is the vision of the german philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, who reflects on spatial worldly relations and circumstances through the concept of posthumanism. The objective is to reconstruct the criticism of the literary city and trace the possible horizons through a philosophical interpretation around the exposure of the feminine icons; that is, the voice of women at the time of the industrial city that explodes in Gore Capitalism, proposed by Sayak Valencia, ramifications with intimacy, violence and urban contours in necrosis. Something comparable in geometry with graceful and simple figures such as circles, and in this case the sphere. Those voices that a priori are lost among the immensity of capitalism, male oppression, and are constricted with the feeling of emptiness. The emptiness of the spheres that roll without stopping through the words that others narrate in a changing world. In this work we will proceed to contrast that association between the feminine voice and the simplest and most complex bolañian geometry: the dyadic and the Gore space.

After identifying its intertextual ties with some of the most prominent detective stories, a hardly studied aspect of Roberto Bolaño´s novel, this paper looks upon The savage detectives´ parodic nature and specially upon the negative reflection about writing itself that runs on every parody, where Bolaño´s is not the exception.