Journal Articles by Nicolás Campisi
Revista Iberoamericana, 2023
Este artículo analiza Cadáver exquisito (2017) de la escritora argentina Agustina Bazterrica y De... more Este artículo analiza Cadáver exquisito (2017) de la escritora argentina Agustina Bazterrica y De gados e homens (2013) de la brasileña Ana Paula Maia como novelas del ecohorror que desarticulan las narrativas fundacionales de Argentina y Brasil en torno a la prosperidad del modelo ganadero. A partir de imaginarios abyectos que giran alrededor de la industria de la carne, ambas novelas ponen en tela de juicio las fantasías de progreso asociadas con la ganadería al mostrar su alianza inextricable con otros males que aquejan a las sociedades contemporáneas: el racismo, la violencia de género, la xenofobia y la contaminación ambiental.
Istmo. Revista virtual de estudios literarios y culturales centroamericanos, 2021
This article analyzes the use of the archive in works that depict the necropolitical conditions o... more This article analyzes the use of the archive in works that depict the necropolitical conditions of Mexico’s southern and northern borderlands through the perspective of migrant children. Through readings of Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019), Balam Rodrigo’s Libro centroamericano de los muertos (2018), and J. Michael Martinez’s Museum of the Americas (2018), I argue that these texts refuse the mechanisms of imperial knowledge that have characterized archives throughout history, as well as contest the notion of progress or linear history by conceiving literature as a collaborative practice between the voices of the living and the dead.
Revista Hispánica Moderna, 2020
This essay studies César Aira’s works through the notion of the contemporary. Following Giorgio A... more This essay studies César Aira’s works through the notion of the contemporary. Following Giorgio Agamben, Theodore Martin, Julio Premat, and Lauren Berlant, I posit the contemporary to be a critical concept that provides strategies for historicizing the conditions of the ongoing present. In order to frame the discussion of the contemporary in Aira’s texts, I create a vocabulary of three aesthetic figures that lay bare his literary project: the sketch, the brief, and the precarious. The notion of the sketch allows Aira to register the contemporary before it becomes a historical event, whereas the description of his oeuvre as an accumulation of short forms gives the impression of a seemingly endless encyclopedic project. Lastly, I contend that in Aira’s works the contemporary does not come into view through the representation of historical events but through the development of new genres that track the disorienting historicity of crisis. Thus, I argue that Aira’s aesthetic procedure, which he insistently describes as a “flight forward,” serves as a device for registering the contemporary.
Chasqui 49.1, 2020
, novela del escritor brasileño Julián Fuks, aborda la pregunta por la tensa relación entre histo... more , novela del escritor brasileño Julián Fuks, aborda la pregunta por la tensa relación entre historia, memoria e invención literaria. Ganadora de los prestigiosos premios Jabuti (2016) y Saramago , A resistência está narrada por un alter ego del autor que procura reconstruir la historia de su hermano adoptivo al indagar en la vida de sus padres. Hijo de militantes argentinos que se exiliaron del país durante la última dictadura militar y acabaron radicándose en São Paulo, el narrador emprende un viaje de regreso a Buenos Aires en un intento por dilucidar los orígenes de su hermano adoptivo, a saber, si sus padres biológicos-cuya identidad sigue sin conocerse hasta la fecha-fueron víctimas del terrorismo de estado. Pese a no poder recabar información contundente sobre el parto clandestino de su hermano, el narrador reflexiona sobre la serie de mediaciones que lo van alejando de la verdad, entre ellas, la del propio discurso literario. El título de la novela evoca un sinnúmero de referentes en el marco de la lucha por los derechos humanos. Por un lado, apunta a las militancias revolucionarias de los años setenta y, en particular, al acto de resistencia que suponía concebir un hijo en un contexto político que amparaba el secuestro de bebés recién nacidos. El epígrafe del libro pertenece a Ernesto Sabato, autor intelectual del informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (CONADEP), el Nunca más. 1 Por otro lado, el verbo "resistir" remite en el contexto brasileño al Memorial da Resistência de São Paulo, ex sede del Departamento Estadual de Ordem Política e Social do Estado de São Paulo (DEOPS-SP) y centro de detención durante el período 1940-1983 devenido museo. 2 En este sentido, el enfoque transnacional del libro le permite insertarse en
A Contracorriente, 2020
Este ensayo examina dos novelas contemporáneas, El huésped (2006) de la escritora mexicana Guadal... more Este ensayo examina dos novelas contemporáneas, El huésped (2006) de la escritora mexicana Guadalupe Nettel y Distancia de rescate (2014) de la argentina Samanta Schweblin, a partir de los conceptos de comunidad (Roberto Esposito) y supervivencia (Georges Didi-Huberman). Ambas obras se inscriben en el género fantástico para narrar las frágiles existencias de niños que sufren la amenaza de factores ecológicos: la crisis de la superpoblación y los desastres ambientales en la Ciudad de México (Nettel), así como la toxicidad de los agroquímicos y los alimentos transgénicos en el campo argentino (Schweblin). En El huésped, la narradora es una mujer que durante su niñez es invadida por una entidad humano-animal, a la cual denomina “La Cosa”, que se apodera de su cuerpo y le induce una progresiva ceguera. Esta entidad desconocida es una figura de los “factores inmutables” de la volátil atmósfera urbana, que la narradora combate al formar una comunidad con quienes sobreviven en los márgenes (o los subsuelos) de la sociedad: los ciegos. Mientras tanto, en Distancia de rescate Schweblin narra una historia gótica de los niños-monstruos que nacen con malformaciones o que corren el riesgo de intoxicarse en el ambiente rural argentino. De esta manera, delinea el panorama actual de las fantasías agroexportadoras decimonónicas que no han traído riqueza, sino enfermedad y muerte. Mi hipótesis es que esta preocupación por un ethos ecológico sirve para repensar los lineamientos del debate sobre qué es “lo contemporáneo” y cómo escribir una historia del presente en la época del Antropoceno.
Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, 2018
This article traces the origins of football (soccer) literature in the River Plate (Río de la Pla... more This article traces the origins of football (soccer) literature in the River Plate (Río de la Plata) region of South America (comprised by Argentina and Uruguay) through works that outline the development of the River Plate football imaginary at a period that marks the beginnings of the profound rivalry between the two nations: Dos a cero o alambrado olímpico: novela de ambiente foot-ballístico (1932) by Argentine Domingo R. Cinalli, creative non-fiction by Uruguayan Julio César Puppo (known under the pseudonym of El Hachero) from Crónicas de El Hachero (1966), and sketches of manners by Uruguayan-born Ricardo Lorenzo (Borocotó) from Pelota de trapo (1942). Cinalli’s melodrama stages debates of the period over the benefits and dangers of football’s transition into professionalism. Meanwhile, El Hachero’s crónicas show that in the 1920s and 1930s football became a strong vehicle for discourses of national pride and cohesiveness. Finally, through his sketches of manners Borocotó became the master articulator of the River Plate football imaginary, by locating it in the space of the potrero (an informal playing field) and casting it against the British style of play. By examining social and economic changes that came about with the professionalization of the sport, these early works are shown to shed light not only on the creation of a transnational imaginary and the transition of the sport into a mass spectacle, but also on the current state of football in the region.
Cuadernos LIRICO, 2019
Este ensayo examina El año del desierto de Pedro Mairal a partir de diferentes teorizaciones en t... more Este ensayo examina El año del desierto de Pedro Mairal a partir de diferentes teorizaciones en torno al concepto de lo contemporáneo. En contraposición a las novelas de genealogía, se trata de un texto que trabaja con los restos de la literatura argentina y que vuelve hacia atrás con el propósito de encontrar filiaciones literarias que le permitan enmarcar el presente de la crisis. Así, la novela de Mairal conjura la figura del escritor contemporáneo como un huérfano que puede reapropiarse de todos los códigos y protocolos de la tradición literaria.
INTI: Revista de Literatura Hispánica 87-88, 2018
In the opening scene of Eduardo Halfon's Monasterio (2014), we encounter the narrator-who shares ... more In the opening scene of Eduardo Halfon's Monasterio (2014), we encounter the narrator-who shares Halfon's name but both is and isn't Halfon-stuck with his brother at Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv, an airport that "no longer seemed like an airport" (Monastery 11), awaiting his luggage in front of the carousel. Halfon has traveled to Israel for his sister's wedding to an orthodox Jew from Brooklyn, an event that forces him to directly confront his inherited Jewish identity. Simultaneously, Halfon narrates another journey-perhaps even more relevant-to Łódź, Poland, to visit the home where his grandfather was kidnapped before being taken to Auschwitz. The image of the misplaced baggage foreshadows Monasterio's imaginary of a negative cosmopolitanism, which indicates the narrator's state of national, linguistic, and religious precariousness while being lost in the world. In what follows I will read Monasterio through two distinct yet interdependent lenses: how the novel enacts the contemporary moment through a cosmopolitanism of loss (Siskind) and/or mourning; and how as the narrator traverses the globe, he sets out on an unresolved task of familial "postmemory" (Hirsch) that reflects the endless drifting and the helpless searches of a generation that has lost most "living connections" to a traumatic history and a distant geography (41-42).
Book Chapters by Nicolás Campisi
The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature, ed. Douglas A. Vakoch, 2023
This chapter explores ecofeminism through the work of South American theorists, poets, and fictio... more This chapter explores ecofeminism through the work of South American theorists, poets, and fiction writers who have weaved relationships between gender, decolonial praxis, and ecological consciousness. The chapter is structured around key issues that lay bare the symbiotic relationship between patriarchal violence and the accumulation by dispossession of territories in the region. The first section focuses on the work of Indigenous and Afro-Latin American writers who are contesting the history of colonial violence and cultural appropriation of Indigenous concepts such as Pachamama, the Aymara, and Quechua word for “Mother Earth.” The second part turns to contemporary ecofeminist literary responses to the use of synthetic pesticides in soybean plantations and the daily work in the meat-packing industry, two of the pillars of the agricultural and livestock economies of Southern Cone nations, through works of ecohorror or ecological horror. The last section analyzes the writings of ecofeminist thinkers who have contributed to the founding of the fourth-wave feminist movement Ni Una Menos and theorized the concept of “bodies-territories” to refer to the relationship between the ongoing extraction of natural resources, the subordination of the labor force, and patriarchal violence against women.
Postglobal Aesthetics: 21st Century Latin American Literatures and Cultures, edited by Benjamin Loy and Gesine Müller (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter), 2022
Fútbol y sociedad en América Latina – Futebol e sociedade na América Latina, edited by Thomas Fischer, Romy Köhler, and Stefan Reith, Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2021
Este artículo examina las obras de ficción de Ricardo Lorenzo Rodríguez, mejor conocido como Boro... more Este artículo examina las obras de ficción de Ricardo Lorenzo Rodríguez, mejor conocido como Borocotó (1902-1964), un reconocido periodista de la revista argentina El Gráfico y fundador del imaginario del potrero en el Río de la Plata. A partir de una lectura de su novela El diario de Comeúñas (1951), propongo que Borocotó hizo una radiografía literaria de la etapa de popularización del fútbol argentino. Mi argumento principal es que la narrativa de Borocotó plantó las semillas para el desarrollo no sólo del imaginario futbolero criollo, sino también de varios de los principales tropos literarios que han definido a la ficción de fútbol rioplatense desde entonces.
Mario Levrero: I(nte)rrupciones críticas, 2020
Book and Film Reviews by Nicolás Campisi
H-Environment, 2024
Commissioned by Daniella McCahey (Texas Tech University) As I finished reading Andrea Marston's i... more Commissioned by Daniella McCahey (Texas Tech University) As I finished reading Andrea Marston's impressive book, Subterranean Matters: Cooperative Mining and Resource Nationalism in Plurinational Bolivia, a failed coup attempt on the current Bolivian president, Luis Arce, shook the country's political arena. It also exposed the tribulations of a South American country whose economy and identity are inextricably tied to resource nationalism: the exploitation of its natural assets by the government and the people. A member of Bolivia's Movement to Socialism (MAS) party, Arce is now a political rival of his once ally, former president Evo Morales, who appointed him finance minister during his presidency. Arce is said to have engineered the commodity boom of the early 2000s due to rising gas and oil prices. The attempted coup inaugurated a new chapter in the rivalry between Arce and Evo. Whereas Arce accused foreign
Latin American Research Review, 2023
The recent films of Fernando Solanas, André D'Elia, Lucas van Esso, and Ernesto Cabellos Damián e... more The recent films of Fernando Solanas, André D'Elia, Lucas van Esso, and Ernesto Cabellos Damián explore the advance of the extractive frontier for the onset of agricultural and mining activities. Three of these documentaries focus on the relentless expansion of soy monocultures into Indigenous lands and natural parks protected by law. Viaje a los pueblos fumigados chronicles the consequences of implementing soybean production as the new agricultural paradigm. Among them, Solanas explores the impact of agrochemicals on the health of communities including the Wichí Indigenous group and small towns in the pampas. Gran Chaco also centers on agribusiness expansion through land clearing and deforestation, which has severely affected the ancestral lands of the Wichí community in Salta, Argentina. Sertão velho cerrado focuses on the Chapada dos Veadeiros National Park in the Brazilian state of Goiás, an eco-region of tropical and subtropical grasslands. The region has become an extractive zone where hydroelectric, gold-mining, and agricultural corporations circumvent environmental laws to appropriate communal territories. Finally, Hija de la laguna documents Indigenous resistance in Cajamarca, Perú, where the Yanacocha mining company-owned by the Newmont Mining Corporation and the Compañía de Minas Buenaventura-sought to drain various lakes and exploit Mount Quilish, considered sacred by the region's Indigenous communities. The connecting thread of these documentaries is the violent advance of the extractive frontier through intimidation of Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities and agreements with local governments. Each film shows that deforestation and land clearing are rampant across diverse bioregions and ecosystems such as the Cerrado in Brazil and the Gran Chaco in Argentina.
Chasqui, 2019
héroe cristiano y vehículo para el "transplante de instituciones" en el Nuevo Mundo (130). Ángulo... more héroe cristiano y vehículo para el "transplante de instituciones" en el Nuevo Mundo (130). Ángulo-Cano pone particular énfasis en la introducción del caballo al Nuevo Mundo, lo cual facilita, en primer plano, la victoria militar de los españoles y, en segundo plano, la circulación de los objetos fundamentales para la evangelización de la población indígena (128-131).
Chasqui, 2018
environs); the fragmentation of bodies; open endings; the queering of narrative; the framing of s... more environs); the fragmentation of bodies; open endings; the queering of narrative; the framing of space: such aspects transform the relationship between a spectator and on-screen queer subjects. In lieu of the scopic, here the spectator is provided a capacity to identify with a queer body and desires and attain some degree of empathy. Venkatesh is supple with employing the label 'New Maricón cinema,' and films such as Plan B (Marco Berger) make for a distinct type, or "separate strand" (147), of New Maricón cinema. With images of water, the rendering of porteño urbanscapes as tactile, and the normalization of queer romance, Plan B again holds out the possibility for an affective dimension for a spectator. Equally important, in the penultimate chapter, Venkatesh underscores that Maricón cinema persists, especially in mainstream cinema. He locates a neoliberal aesthetic to illustrate a current form of Maricón cinema that ostensibly seeks to normalize homosexuality but that nevertheless eschews affective structures in favor of clichés from genre films, such as romantic comedies and melodramas.
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Journal Articles by Nicolás Campisi
Book Chapters by Nicolás Campisi
Book and Film Reviews by Nicolás Campisi