Meridional. Revista Chilena de Estudios Latinoamericanos: Announcements

Call for papers: Call For Papers Meridional 26: "Archives, Violence, and Subjectivities: Practices, Discourses, and Aesthetics in 21st-Century Latin American Documentary Cinema"

2025-03-11T16:34:36+00:00

Meridional. Revista Chilena de Estudios Latinoamericanos is pleased to invite submissions for the issue "Archives, Violence, and Subjectivities: Practices, Discourses, and Aesthetics in 21st-Century Latin American Documentary Cinema", which will be published in April 2026 as issue number 26.

Since the early 21st century, Latin American documentary cinema has undergone a series of transformations, both in terms of its specific field (production mechanisms, consecration instances, circulation and exhibition networks, consumption habits) and in the framework of its discourses and aesthetics. While these transformations partially replicate those seen in global documentary filmmaking, they also acquire specific inflections tied to the traditions of Latin American documentary, regional production conditions, the socio-political history of Latin America, and the region’s conflicts and ways of inhabiting the present. Some of the most significant modifications in recent years relate to three key concepts: archives, violence, and subjectivity.

The turn to the archive, as proposed by Hal Foster (2004) in contemporary art and also present in audiovisual practices of the period, involves the exploration of both public, widely circulated archives and those intended for restricted circulation, spanning a broad spectrum from repressive archives to personal or domestic records. Within this variability, Latin American documentary cinema has developed a range of strategies to explore different modes of intervention in these archives. In some cases, this involves revisiting archives of dictatorial terror (Paz Encina, Anita Leandro, Teresa Arredondo); in others, it entails recovering family archives of victims of state terrorism (Nicolás Prividera, Agustina Comedi). Certain documentaries make use of television or official archives (Lucas Gallo), while others appropriate home movies and family films to intertwine intimate and historical records (Moreira Salles, Natalia Garayalde, Ignacio Agüero, João Moreira Salles, Eryk Rocha).

To a large extent, these interventions into the past through the recovery of archives are aimed at reassessing the history of violence that has plagued Latin America. Latin American documentary cinema has mapped both the criminal practices of dictatorships (Patricio Guzmán, Albertina Carri, Carmen Castillo) and the effects of neoliberal economic policies, often overlapping with these repressive regimes (Fernando Solanas, Carolina Adriazola, and José Luis Sepúlveda). A significant portion of Latin American documentary production stems from a desire to scrutinize the living conditions of the most precarious sectors of society. However, this approach has taken on new forms, distancing itself from both the tradition of "poverty porn" and the politically instrumentalized cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. In recent years, violence has also come to refer to the imposition of political models centered on coercion and authoritarianism, such as the expansion of drug trafficking as a "parallel state" (Tatiana Huezo, Everardo González), police repression (Carlos Araya), and prison conditions (Tana Gilbert, Francina Carbonell, Sepúlveda, and Adriazola).

If documentary cinema has managed to articulate discourses on the ruptures and continuities between past and present and has structured an approach to the present that accounts for different degrees and intensities of violence, it has also explored the emergence of new modes of subjectivity and new strategies of subjectivation. The intersection of identity politics and audiovisual practices has led to experiences that materialize discourses on subjectivities (individual and/or collective) that have historically been marginalized in regional documentary filmmaking. The emergence of dissident sexual identities, Indigenous populations, and minoritized ethnic or religious identities within the social fabric raises new questions about possible forms of representation for identities that have often been "othered" in Latin American history (Camila José Donoso, Aldo Garay, Juan Carlos Rulfo).

Additionally, documentary cinema in the region actively engages with its own tradition as a creative practice, establishing both breaks and affiliations with previous works. By incorporating elements such as essayistic approaches, experimentation, and hybrid formats, contemporary documentary expands its language beyond its own limits. In this sense, it constitutes an ever-evolving creative practice, incorporating not only new thematic approaches but also novel processes and aesthetic explorations. Filmmakers such as Albertina Carri, Ignacio Agüero, Bettina Perut and Iván Osnovikoff, Gustavo Fontán, Susana Barriga, and Andrés Di Tella, among others, explore essayistic and exploratory forms, blending registers, tones, and processes whose ultimate goal is to expand the documentary format through creative action.

Thus, contemporary Latin American documentary cinema serves as a site of critical exploration of themes such as history, politics, and the evolution of social structures while also functioning as a distinct language undergoing profound expansion.

Suggested (but not exclusive) thematic areas:

Reassemblies and archive aesthetics in relation to memory
Interventions in family archives: history in tension through the intimate
Precarious lives in contemporary neoliberalism: forms of violence and resistance
Subjectivity, body, and performativity beyond zero-degree documentary
Audiovisual activism and militancy in contemporary Latin American documentary: from protest to virality
Aesthetics, process, and essayistic approaches in contemporary Latin American documentary: hybrid languages for an expanding field
Violence and subjectivities: documentary cinema and its inscription in history beyond established maps
Documentary cinema at risk: violence and state disintegration. Drug trafficking, police repression, and the vulnerability of bodies

Meridional is indexed in the following databases: ERIH-Plus, Latindex Catalog, DOAJ, Dialnet, Gale-Cengage, Prisma.

Final deadline for manuscript submissions: September 30th, 2025.

For inquiries, contact, and submission of proposals: revistameridional@gmail.com

Guest Editors
Mariano Veliz (IAE-FFyL-UBA, Argentina)
Iván Pinto Veas (Film School, Ciah, Universidad Mayor, Chile)

Call for papers: Call For Papers Meridional 25: "Textualize the experience. Semantic, pragmatic and ideological aspects of the colonial archive in Latin American fiction and theory”

2024-07-02T21:44:27+00:00

Meridional. Chilean Journal of Latin American Studies is pleased to invite you to participate in the dossier “Textualize the experience. Semantic, pragmatic and ideological aspects of the colonial archive in Latin American fiction and theory” which corresponds to our 25th number and will be published in October 2025.

Every archive always begins “with the gesture of setting aside, of bringing together (...), denaturalizing things to turn them into pieces that fill gaps in a set established 'a priori'” (de Certeau 2006: 85-86). These “gaps in a set” were, throughout the 19th century until today, the monotheme of Latin American writers in relation to the construction of a myth for each of the national identities (González Echeverría 2006).

But the gesture of American archiving, its true “first domiciliation” (Derrida 1997), began with the same textualization of experience. This is what Bartolomé de las Casas points out when he narrates that Columbus, on his first voyage, threw a small box into the sea with his writings and first-hand documents, with the hope that, if the ship sank, his testimony could survive through writing. . Just as this little box contains supposedly fictitious written material, the same text by Bartolomé de las Casas also contains in its retextualization of the “diary” the desire to reconstitute – and archive through another text – an authentic lost document. The “text” and, above all, the “autograph” or the first-hand document, becomes, in the textual sphere of the colonial era (16th, 17th centuries), a fragile category, whose rescue is a real challenge (stylistic, pragmatic, ideological).

The practices related to this documentary material (the acts of handling, archiving, copying, reading or destroying these 'little boxes' and, with them, their privileged access to a documentary or experimental 'truth'), show in the literatures from the first colonial contact to contemporary fictional or theoretical rewritings, a desire to textually control and resemantize a fragile and moldable archive. This resemantization of practices is also linked to issues of subjectivity or authorship, as well as textual pragmatics (circulation, printing, reception).

The colonial archive revisited (Añón/Colombi 2021), the colonial archive as a permeable text (Ortiz Gambetta 2018; Béreiziat-Lang/Ortiz 2020) and literature in archival status (Ruiz 2018) takes up, in this way, the different perspectives of the discursive tradition of the American colony (Adorno 1992, 1995) as well as the different approaches to archiving (Foucault 2000, Derrida 2000, Didi-Huberman 2021) and its theoretical and interdisciplinary development in local production (Caimari 2017, Goldchuk/Pené 2003; González 2005; Chicote 2021, e.o.).

This dossier calls for works that address the drifts, uses and functions of this colonial archive as a material that generates Latin American (and global) representations, ideas and discourses, still in force. Regarding the core ideas of the present dossier, we propose the following:

The textualization (the composition, archiving and resemantization) of colonial texts.
The colonial as vehicles of experience, in different fictional and theoretical productions.
Discursive and symbolic survival of the colonial archive in contemporary representations and discourses.
Semantic, pragmatic and ideological aspects of the colonial archive.
Approach to colonial representations from different disciplines: contemporary Latin American literature, historical semantics, history of publishing, material culture, philology, ethnology and anthropology among others.
Approach to pragmatic inquiry into literary and historical texts.
The transmission of experience: from testimony to autofiction.
The archival turn in the humanities and social sciences: from colonial archons to the digital age.

Bibliography

Adorno, R. (1995). “Textos imborrables: Posiciones simultaneas y sucesivas del sujeto colonial”. Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 21. 41, pp. 33-49.

Adorno, R. (1992). “The discursive encounter of Spain and America: The Authority of Eyewitness Testimony in the Writing of History”. The William and Mary Quarterly 49. 2, pp. 210-228.

Béreiziat-Lang, S./Ortiz Gambetta, E. (2020). “El género épico entre Europa y América: poéticas, ideologías y prácticas culturales”. RILCE 36. I, pp.7-21.

Caimari, L. (2017). La vida en el archivo. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI.

Chicote, G. (2021). “El archivo entre la materialidad de los objetos y la transformación digital en América Latina”. Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 47 (93).

Certeau, M. de (2006). La escritura de la historia. México: Universidad Iberoamericana.

Colombi, B. y Añón, V. (2021). “El Archivo Colonial revisitado. Presentación”. Orbis Tertius 26 (34), e213. https://doi.org/10.24215/18517811e213

Derrida, J. (1997). Mal de archivo. Una impresión freudiana, Madrid: Trotta.

Didi-Huberman, G. (2021). “El archivo arde”. Trad. de J. Ennis. En: Ennis, Juan y Graciela Goldchluk (eds.): Las lenguas del archivo, La Plata, FAHCE-UNLP, Colección Colectivo Crítico, pp. 15-38.

Foucault, M. (2000 [1969]). Arqueología del saber. Aurelio Garzón (trad.), México: Siglo XXI Editores.

Goldchluk, G. y Pené, M. (comps.) (2003). Palabras de archivo. Santa Fe: Ediciones UNL y CRLA Archivos.

González, H. (2005). “El archivo como teoría de la cultura”, Revista La Biblioteca, 1, pp. 52-67.

González Echeverría, R. (2006). Myth and archive. A theory of Latin American narrative Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ortiz Gambetta, E. (2018). “Textos permeables: archivo colonial, prensa y literatura en el Río de la Plata”, Universum 2018 (Chile), 33. 1, p. 211-239.

Ruiz, F. (2018). “Literatura en estado de archivo”, Chuy 5, 23-44.

Meridional is incorporated in the following indexes and databases: ERIH-Plus, Latindex Catálogo, DOAJ, Dialnet, Gale-Cengage, Prisma.

The manuscripts’ deadline is on March 30th 2025.

Contact: revistameridional@gmail.com.

Dossier’s coordinators:

Dr. Stephanie Béreiziat-Lang (Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Alemania)

Dr. Eugenia Ortiz Gambetta (IdHICS, UNLP- CONICET)

Call for papers: Convocatoria para dossiers temáticos

2023-04-25T12:26:32+00:00

Meridional. Revista Chilena de Estudios Latinoamericanos se complace en invitarle a enviar propuestas de dossiers temáticos para sus números a publicarse a partir de octubre de 2024 con frecuencia semestral.

Son del interés de Meridional formulaciones en torno a problemáticas históricas o actuales del quehacer latinoamericano, abarcando disciplinas de humanidades y ciencias sociales con un marcado enfoque continental.

Cada propuesta debe contener:

Título del dossier.
Breve estado del arte del tema y/o problemáticas actuales con autores de referencia.
Lista de alrededor de 8 ejes.
Datos de coordinadores (nombre, grado académico, afiliación institucional). Al menos dos.

Debe tener una extensión de dos a tres páginas, con letra tamaño Times New Roman, tamaño 12 e interlineado 1,5.

Además, es deseable, pero no excluyente, que al menos uno de los/as académicos/as que se presenten como coordinadores del eventual dossier sea de fuera de Chile. Cabe recordar que el rol de quien coordina consistirá en colaborar con la difusión de la convocatoria en redes de especialistas, efectuar un primer filtro de afinidad temática y mínima calidad académica de los textos una vez se cierre la convocatoria, sugerir evaluadores adecuados para los artículos y confeccionar la presentación del número.

Todas las propuestas serán revisadas por el comité editorial de Revista Meridional, cuya composición puede consultarse en nuestro sitio web. Este comité puede sugerir cambios o precisiones antes de aceptar la propuesta. En el caso de ser aprobada, se le asignará un número de dossier según la fecha en que fue aceptada.

Las propuestas deben ser enviadas a revistameridional@gmail.com.

Leonel Delgado Aburto

Director Meridional. Revista Chilena de Estudios Literarios