Alessandra Santos

No abstract available.

In this case study of the organization and film and video archive known as Vídeo nas Aldeias (Video in the Villages or VNA), founded in 1986 by Vincent Carelli, I develop an argument for VNA as a critical filmic archive worthy of study and safeguarding. Crucially, I examine VNA as a producer of knowledge through an interdisciplinary framework. Its collection comprises over ninety films on and by Indigenous peoples, representing over forty Indigenous nations across Brazil. As a practicing media artist and filmmaker, I apply an interdisciplinary framework to develop philosophical arguments and film analyses to conceptualizing VNA’s archive as a pluriversal and anti-colonial technology of knowledge. Over-arching concepts of visual sovereignty, as elaborated by Native American scholars Michelle H. Raheja (Seneca) and Jolene Rickard (Tuscarora Nation), as well as concepts by Laura R. Graham to include representational sovereignty, as theoretical frameworks with which to examine individual films and the archive as a whole, guide my analysis. I use Amalia Córdoba and Juan Salazar’s discussion of “imperfect media” to root my analysis in Latin American theory. I argue that the films are constituent of cosmopolitical processes that can be framed within onto-epistemic oriented cinema; I appraise how the films and the archive have repercussions on and off screen. A key objective of this dissertation is to broaden the field of film studies to include Indigenous cinema, not as an addendum to film studies, but as integral to film history and film culture. I conclude by examining how VNA, by means of its creation of a growing, alternative filmic corpus, is working to invigorate futures for Indigenous peoples and for cinema studies.

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The research examines the conditions of production and the function of critical discourse, (mainly texts that circulate in parallel to the production of fiction, such as interviews, essays, speeches, or newspaper articles) elaborated by Latin American writers since the mid-20th Century. The objective is understand the writer's strategies of positioning and the place that this discourse has in his literary project. For this purpose, the research proposes the concept of literary ethics to analyze the creative relationship of the writer with society and the literary field. Since a considerable part of critical discourse circulates in the mass media, the construction of the writer's public figure has also been problematized under the notion of personification taking into account the possible relations of ambiguity that occur when there is an identification between a fictional character and the personification.To study this processes, Roberto Bolaño, Ricardo Piglia and Fernando Vallejo have been chosen as representative writers of the literary system, considering legitimacy, extensive discursive production, deliberate construction of the personification/character relationship and contemporaneity, as relevant elements. The research concludes that literary ethics allows us to analyze the tension between an historical moment and the creative production in a writer's career and that this process shapes critical discourse, whose main function is to establish and maintain a literary position, through canonical reorganization, the alteration of modes of reading or social criticism. Lastly, it is established that personification, critical discourse and works of fiction can be linked through ambiguity in the public reception of the writer's image.

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How do writers of Hispanic Caribbean diasporas write community in a transborder era? This dissertation focuses on contemporary literature of the Cuban and Dominican diasporas that challenges notions of belonging as tied to a specific place, nationality, culture, or social group. Examining works by Severo Sarduy, Achy Obejas, Loída Maritza Pérez, and Junot Díaz, this project argues that such writing redefines the parameters of coexistence to imagine solidarities that escape categorization. Rather than affirming identities limited to a Cuban, Dominican, or North American body politic, these texts invite the reader to contemplate commonalities that privilege negotiation over identity politics. As characters participate in intercontaminations of socio-cultural praxes, their connections form neither bounded nor undifferentiated collectivities but open rhizomes of relation with the world. They thus preclude any attempt to distinguish a singular race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, or sexuality as the basis of their solidarity. This discussion of writing that reconsiders the performance of community takes shape in the pairing of Édouard Glissant’s concept of Relation and Giorgio Agamben’s community theory. These thinkers’ notions of human interaction across boundaries provide a framework for understanding how fiction problematizes discourses of exclusion and inclusion with a poetics of inessential sociality. Contributing to the dialogue on belonging in the literature of Hispanic Caribbean diasporas, this study opens space for research into narratives of unrepresentable communities and their dissonant potentialities.

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The 1970s and 1980s were decades of turmoil as political violence spread through different parts of Latin America in the context of the Cold War. Exiles from the Southern Cone made their way to the Canadian west coast, followed soon by Central American refugees. During this time, the emergent Pan-Latin American diaspora and local alternative media activists produce the radio program América Latina al Día [Latin America Today] or ALAD as a tool with which to create a sonorous space for discourse and praxis. Since its creation, the radio show has been bilingual, run by volunteers and has been on air for more than forty years from the Vancouver Radio Cooperative studios. This dissertation examines closely why and how different waves of Latin American exiles arriving in Vancouver in the last third of the 20th Century made use of bilingual radio. Through an oral narrative approach, this case study maps the radio experience as an everyday practice in the life of 10 former ALAD radio collective members during the 1980s. The author also weaves her own experience(s) as media activist, radio producer and exile. The study’s interdisciplinary focus provides rich insights in four broad themes that emerged from the oral interviews: 1) radio as a social and connective medium and its impact on the lives of the participants, 2) radio seen as a new kind of Latin American public plaza, 3) the emotional and physical challenges brought into the lives of the interviewees due to their participation in the radio collective, and 4) the process of producing ALAD as a practice in motion. This case study sheds light into the ways exiles recreate communication media to maintain a link with their home countries, while rebuilding their political identity and re-creating trans diasporic communities. ALAD is a unique example of a communication practice in motion (Rodriguez, 2001) and constitutes an exercise of cultural agency, not only for exiles and migrants from Latin America, but also for local activists who share the utopian conviction that alternative media can be a tool for social transformation.

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This study establishes how three Colombian writers, Margarita García Robayo (1980), PowerPaola (1977), and Andrés Felipe Solano (1977), express their personal and literary experience through life writing. The autofiction Lo que no aprendí (2014), the autobiographical graphic narration Virus Tropical (2011), and the literary diary Corea: apuntes desde la cuerda floja (2016), are different types of life-writing which fill the mobile stage created by the “biographical space” (Leonor Arfuch). Even tough it is possible to see these life-writing texts like primary or simple discursive genres (Mijail Bajtin), from the perspective of this study these works by García Robayo, Solano and PowerPaola are read as secondary (complex, as Bajtin mentioned) texts. This research points out how these works occur in a more elaborated condition of communication, rework diverse primary discourses and transform themselves into secondary texts. These writings, therefore, pass from simple situations of everyday life to become artistic events.The first-person narrator, character who is witness and participant of every single experience, weaves the life writings analyzed here. Nevertheless, this singular perspective does not mean that these writings have a solipsistic intention. This study reflects how these works are linked to the Colombian context and culture, indicates the way that the authors critique and think over Colombian society and their vision about what to expect in the future for the South American country facing the twenty-first century.Finally, these life-writings develop not only the identity of the subject, but also weave the “author’s fiction” (Julio Premat) inside their narratives. This investigation determines how Margarita García Robayo, PowerPaola, and Andrés Felipe Solano create their own image as authors inside their works. The purpose is to identify why these Colombian writers build their image in a particular way and determine tools for researchers in the creative writing process.

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