Spanish & Portuguese Research Group (SPRG)

Isabel de Sousa Ramos: 'Ocultos de nós mesmos': A exclusão dos (i)migrantes em O Meu Nome é LegiãoEm O Meu Nome é Legião (2007), António Lobo Antunes dramatiza a exclusão e incriminação experienciada pelos imigrantes em Portugal, deixando entrever a discriminação vivenciada pelos imigrantes das ex-colónias africanas e, em particular, seus descendentes. Pode-se argumentar que o romance, de facto, demonstra como essa discriminação é fruto de estereótipos e preconceitos, que permeiam o pensamento português e europeu característico de nações ex-coloniais.

O propósito da presente comunicação é analisar a representação de tais preconceitos e estereótipos a partir de uma abordagem interdisciplinar e tendo especificamente em conta a investigação que tem sido levada a cabo por cientistas sociais relativamente aos chamados novos racismos em Portugal. Assim, pretendo pôr em evidência como o romance de Lobo Antunes dá conta de fenómenos tais como a "etnicização da criminalidade"; "racismo-nacionalismo fundido"; violência institucional; segregação habitacional; marginalização; dessensibilização e suplício físico-psicológico; confusão identitária; "stress aculturativo" e interiorização da discriminação.

John Trevathan: Decapitated automatic woman: surrealist gestures and woman´s agency

Focusing on surrealism as a mediating lens for a unique female gaze, my paper explores the film "The Headless Woman" (2008) by Argentinean director Lucrecia Martel. I am particularly interested in how the director's non-traditional story telling emulates an "unconscious" sphere within the film. Inspired by Breton's image of "écriture automatique" portrayed as a woman and Luce Irigaray's interrogation about "whether the feminine has unconscious or whether it is the unconscious", this "para-space" where meaning takes place is undoubtedly characterized with woman´s attributes.

I am concentrating on Surrealism as a force for deconstructing discourses and for materializing a new space of "resistance to hegemonic cultural formations as well as the psychic contagion as a sign of collective imaginary" as Natalia Lusty insists. Moreover, it also creates a highly emotional (new) reality, contrary to tradition and the laws for logic, causality and syntax. These two aspects are extremely valuable for interpreting Martel's "The Headless Woman". Throughout the film the director deliberately disarticulates the narration to achieve this non-hegemonic "para-space", that my research in interested in. She accomplishes this by dissecting the story into multiple storylines and by selecting specific filming techniques such as CinemaScope, crisp framing, selective focus and non-traditional takes.

In Freudian as well as in Foucaultian terms, the idea of "the unconscious" as an alternative gaze engages with multiple lines of academic study and stimulates not only a revision of surrealist esthetic as critique of pure reason, but also its relationship with memory and trauma theories.

Carla Manzoni: Loving with Hatred: Violence and Utilization of North African Space in Nedjma and Count Julián

This project explores the ambivalence of the North African cultural space as manifest in Kateb Yacine's Nedjma and Juan Goytisolo's Reivindicación del Conde don Julían, focusing on different manifestations of structural and textual violence exhibited in each text. If we are to think of the novel as a possible vehicle for socio-linguistic development and awareness, then the employment of violence in the parodic novel functions as a catalyst, asserting something different from its predecessors. In the case of Goytisolo and Kateb, the various phenomena of violence mark attempts to expose and open up language to the heterogeneous processes of nation-state building.

Count Julian is the second novel in the Álvaro Mendiola trilogy. The text is best described as predominantly discursive, designed to obsessively engage and terrorize the Spanish literary tradition and scholarship, as well as utilize the bitter relationship between Spanish culture and the Moroccan city of Tangiers: as a problematic synecdoche for North Africa, Spain's cultural other. Kateb's decision to write an Algerian novel in French instead of Arabic or Berber already signifies a confrontation between a European textual space and an Algerian geographical space. The act of writing a novel allows Kateb to engage the North African space from a European form.

Both novelists are insiders, posing culturally or linguistically as outsiders. Importantly, both of these authors cannot avoid this subject of homeland. There is an inextricable link between the text [novel] and homeland, which I will call a relation of love. While this term obviously does not suggest that either author "likes" or "enjoys" being Spanish or Algerian, it certainly posits an imperative to critically write about their environs. Indeed, contrarily (and parodically), this attachment manifests itself in forms of violence. To use the Lacanian term, the logic of hainamoration prevails as the mode of ambivalence: loving with hatred.