Brumal. Revista de investigación sobre lo Fantástico, 2020

Unlike the undead monsters it investigates, gothic criticism is more alive than ever. A discipline which once focused mainly on the study of Anglo-American fictions, it has now adapted to global cultural movements to become a wide-ranging, inclusive, and international academic field. It is not surprising, therefore, that there is a growing body of published works that engage with global and transnational forms of gothic fiction. Some examples include the analyses of Global Gothic (Glennis Byron), Asian Gothic (Katarzyna Ancuta), South African Gothic (Rebecca Duncan), and Tropical Gothic (Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodríguez; Justin D. Edwards and Sandra Vasconcelos), among others. This development has also reached the field of Hispanic and Latin American Studies, with the

Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 2019

Revista de Estudios Colombianos, 2009

This article analyses three Colombian films produced under the FOCINE regime in the 1980s, showing how they critique Colombian society and nationality through either straightforward or reconverted use of genre and other filmmaking conventions. It considers the various ways in which Pisingaña (Leopoldo Pinzón, 1985), Pura sangre (Luis Ospina, 1982) and Rodrigo D.: No futuro (Víctor Gaviria, 1988) articulate and intertwine the themes of real and psychological violence, popular modes of expression and postmodern superficiality. Drawing on theoretical notions from postmodern and postcolonial theory such as Jesús Martín Barbero’s secondary orality and Homi K. Bhabha’s Derridean supplementarity, it argues that each of these movies, in its own way, undermines the wholeness of national narratives by enabling or mobilising minority discourses. The endemic violence that pervades these films’ characters ultimately unsettles fixed concepts of identity, narration and truth.

2016

The reality of the production of literature that follows a non-mimetic code in Latin America is definitely a complex one. With the exception of Magical Realism, a mode of writing considered native to the territory and, therefore, respected and reinforced because of its necessary connection to (and acceptance of) the magic dimension of Latin American reality, the critics generally show a consistent lack of interest in narratives belonging to other forms of "the unusual". However, ignoring the great complexity of the several shapes that the "literary extraordinary" can take in the diverse fictions of Latin America, implies disregarding a great deal of hybrid fictions containing essential (yet distorted) reflections of the multifaceted reality of the territory. There are indeed several fictions that conform to a Magical Realist code; however, the narratives belonging to the fantastic genre, the Gothic, and science fiction should not be overlooked. We can think of these modes of representation as establishing an essential relationship towards a higher concept of non-mimetic literature that encompasses all of them, in a theory similar to the one presented by Rosemary Jackson: It could be suggested that fantasy is a literary mode from which a number of related genres emerge. Fantasy provides a range of possibilities out of which various combinations produce different kinds of fiction in different historical situations. Borrowing linguistic terms, the basic model of fantasy could be seen as a language, or langue, from which its various forms, or paroles, derive. Out of this model develops romance literature or 'the marvellous' (including fairy tales and science fiction), Ordiz Alonso-Collada 2 'fantastic' literature (including stories by Poe, Isak Dinesen, Maupassant, Gautier, Kafka, H. P. Lovecraft) and related tales of abnormal psychic states, delusion, hallucination, etc. (7) The modes of writing included in this higher conception of the fantastic are, especially in postmodern times, necessarily hybrid. In Lucie Armitt's words, fantasy is "constantly overspilling the very forms it adopts, always looking, not so much for escapism but certainly to escape the constraints that critics … always and inevitably impose upon it" (3). The hybridization of the different discourses of fantasy is directly connected with what Gary Wolfe has labelled "post-genre fantastic," or the essential mélange of horror, Gothic fiction and the recent "dark fantasy", that so well represents a confused (and confusing) contemporary reality marked by "globalized flows, strange interpretations and simultaneities" (Luckhurst 33). "Fantasy", "post-genre fantastic", "the literature of the unusual"; whatever the term we use to describe this postmodern crossbreed monster, it is already a reality of western literature in general, and of Latin American fictions in particular. It is not my intention to offer a detailed examination of all the different modes of the literary extraordinary in the Latin American territory, but rather to narrow down the scope of my analysis to the Gothic resources used in Mexican contemporary science fiction. I will mainly be focusing on the way in which this combination reproduces a mixed reality which, as the country's fictions, navigates between the preservation of a native identity, the recollection of a pre-Hispanic past and the acknowledgement of the overwhelming power of globalization. Miguel Ángel Fernández Delgado, in his anthology of Mexican science fiction, asserts that the study of this mode in Mexico necessarily brings along a "double marginality" (Ordiz 1045; Fernández Delgado 17) generated by the unconventionality of the genre in a country not traditionally associated with it. Adding the Gothic to the equation might be, then, exploring a path three times marginalized, but also deeply rooted in the popular cultural imagination of the Ordiz Alonso-Collada 3 country. The fictions I will be taking into account are, not surprisingly, intrinsically hybrid. As Rachel Haywood Ferreira points out, not only is SF a genre with "nebulous borders", but Latin American SF shows a "strong propensity to form hybrids with neighbouring genres" (8). A Gothic perspective implies a study of the points of intersection between both genres, which are defined by Fred Botting as "dark and disturbing, obscure regions, populated by terrors and horrors that knowledge has failed to penetrate or control" (131). As if these types of fictions were not enough of a muddle, we also need to take into account that the Gothic fictions of the 20 th and 21 st century commonly set off in two directions, conveying both a globalized reality and a specific set of cultural fears. As Glennis Byron suggests in her article "Global Gothic", the reality of contemporary forms of terror necessarily depends upon this universalization of culture: "the literature and film of different countries are feeding off each other to produce new forms of Gothic that reveal the increasing cross-cultural dynamics of the globalized world" (373). Also, "[a]s the global thrives on producing the local, commodifying it, and marketing it, so contemporary global Gothic increasingly appropriates and commodifies local or regional folklores" (374). The result of this dependent relationship between the specifically cultural and the global results in a type of narrative addressed both to local and universal audiences. This dual feature of the global Gothic acquires a special interest in a territory which has such a love-hate relationship with the United States, the ultimate "giant" of globalization. Addressing this type of cultural colonization, the younger generations of Latin American writers seem to propose an acceptance of the new power of globalization and its necessary connection to the contemporary reality of the continent. In the prologue of the 1996 book McOndo, 1 Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez state the following: 1 By the use of the word "McOndo," the authors introduce a wordplay referencing both Macondo (the fictional town described by Gabriel García Márquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude) as something distinctly Latin American, and McDonald's as a product of globalization. Ordiz Alonso-Collada 4 Our McOndo country is bigger, polluted and overpopulated, with motorways, subways, cable TV and slum areas. In McOndo we have McDonald's, Mac computers and blocks of flats, as well as huge malls and 5-star hotels built with laundered money. 2 (15) The younger generation of Latin American authors breaks with the idea of Magical Realism as the quintessential reflection of the reality of the continent and starts proposing a number of fictions which, addressing specific cultural concerns, open themselves up to other traditions.

Revista de estudios hispánicos, 2014

Paper published on "Revista Latina de Comunicación Social" (Spain)

Horror Studies, 2019

King: Homenaje al rey del terror (King: Homage to the King of Terror) (Cáceres, 2018) is an anthology of short stories written by Latin American and Spanish young authors in tribute to Stephen King and compiled by Ecuadorian writer Jorge Luis Cáceres. The anthology has been published in Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Argentina and Spain, and some of the texts in the collection have been translated into English by the online webzine Palabras Errantes. The stories illustrate some of the new directions that contemporary Latin American and Spanish cultural production are taking, such as the exploration of nonmimetic forms of fiction (other than magical realism), the embracing of international influences and the understanding of the local in relation to the global. As a tribute to 'the king of terror', the short narratives collected in the anthology use resources of the Gothic, horror, the fantastic and science fiction; I concentrate my analysis on the first two. My reading of the Gothic and horror devices in the stories is informed by recent criticism on the gothic mode, as well as contemporary theories of cultural globalization and glocalization. The aim is to recognize and analyse the processes of translation, circulation, deterritorialization and multiterritorialization exemplified in the narratives, and the different ways in which these processes define contemporary Hispanic Gothic.

2012

Violence has become a central characteristic of the aesthetics of film in Colombia. This is apparent in three films of the last two decades: Rodrigo D: no futuro (1990), Apocalipsur (2007), and Satanás (2007). In the first two, violence is a part of different everyday realities, presented with aesthetic commonalities. In Satanás, violence produces a catharsis, understandable to Colombia’s urbanites. In spite of the social differences among these films, there is a common discourse created from their different perspectives, and the result is the same: the triumph of violence over life, and the films’ tragedy creates an ethical and aesthetic sense which does not adorn Colombian reality with false expectations. Do recent socio-political and filmic realities indicate new directions for Colombian film and society?

Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 2019

Filosofía y culturas hispánicas: nuevas perspectivas. Editado por Nuria Morgado y Rolando Pérez. Newark: Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs. 2016. 344 pp.