Articles by Guillermina De Ferrari
Book Title: Vulnerable States Book Subtitle: Bodies of Memory in Contemporary Caribbean Fiction, 2007
This book explores vulnerability as a trope in postcolonial fiction from the Caribbean. Chapters ... more This book explores vulnerability as a trope in postcolonial fiction from the Caribbean. Chapters focus on Severo Sarduy, Patrick Chamoiseau, Jamaica Kincaid, Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, Michelle Cliff, Maryse Condé, Magali Garcia Ramis.
Routledge Companion to 20th- and 21st-Century Latin American Cultural Forms, 2022
This article proposes a theory of hospitality for the Latin American context. Unlike Derrida's th... more This article proposes a theory of hospitality for the Latin American context. Unlike Derrida's theory of hospitality, which focuses on the figure of the refugee, a horizontal hospitality is a practice among equals and a political tool against authoritarianism. Examples from contemporary Cuba, especially Tania Bruguera's work.
Small Axe, 2021
Inspired by the enigmatic phrase “le poème tué” [the murdered poem] which I saw written on the wa... more Inspired by the enigmatic phrase “le poème tué” [the murdered poem] which I saw written on the walls of Port-au-Prince, I explore street art in Port-au-Prince as staging a public debate about different ways of approaching a life of precarity and persistent crisis. I analyze “Le poème tué” by young Haitian poet Ricardo Boucher, along with murals by Jerry and Francisco Silva, political graffiti about the PetroCaribe corruption scandal, and writing on taptap buses as emergent affects and ideologies about the art of flourishing in spite of all. I claim that, in a succession of accidental encounters, passersby find in the public city competing ideas about how to negotiate unlivable circumstances through moral character, building community, or revolution.
Interventions, 2020
Contemporary Cuban art often highlights the widespread practice of repair. Fixing broken applianc... more Contemporary Cuban art often highlights the widespread practice of repair. Fixing broken appliances and subdividing houses via DIY construction are frequent real-life responses to economic and social precarity. At the same time, these creative practices constitute political and ethical forms of engagement with crises, inequality, and an uneven access to modernity. I discuss specific objects and practices as a way to explore what repair says about Cuba today, as well as to reflect on how Cuban repair art contributes to a more general understanding of what it means to live in a world at risk.
Small Axe, 2020
This essay explores what it means to make decisions when one knows the results of one's actions. ... more This essay explores what it means to make decisions when one knows the results of one's actions. In other words, it studies Caribbean science fiction in light of two concepts, one from ethics and one from disaster studies: "moral luck" and "enlightened catastrophism."
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2018
This article explores the tension between the senses and the immaterial in Barbadian artist’s Jos... more This article explores the tension between the senses and the immaterial in Barbadian artist’s Joscelyn Gardner’s multimedia installation White Skin, Black Kin: A Creole Conversation Piece (2003), and Omi Ebora (2014) and in the poem Zong! by Trinidadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip (2014). By the immaterial I refer to the traces in contemporary art of the slavery trade and plantation culture. I analyze three aspects: how sensorial art functions, what is the spectral in sensorial art, and what does the specter (based on Derrida’s hauntology) do for the Caribbean in the present. I suggest that the spectral in Caribbean art functions as an injunction to deal with our inherited identities, which I defined elsewhere as membership beyond consent, in such a way that we can still live with moral freedom, defined perhaps as our right and our obligation to act differently. This is what the ghostly does for both Derrida and Gardner: in the intersection between past and present narratives, there is a responsibility; the ghostly is about the obligation to choose from one's inheritance.
Contrabando de sombras, 2018
Ensayo crítico de la nueva edición de la novela Contrabando de sombras, de Antonio José Ponte
Both Gilroy’s and Glissant’s theories seem to be animated by a similar question: What ideas of be... more Both Gilroy’s and Glissant’s theories seem to be animated by a similar question: What ideas of belonging, justice and responsibility operate in societies in which membership is based on neither filiation nor consent? With this question in mind, I discuss Relation from the perspective of moral philosophy in order to analyze the complex links between self and community, ethics and politics that subtend Caribbean societies. This article teases out “the possibility for each one at every moment to be both solidary and solitary” in Glissant and in Gilroy from the perspective of Communitarian ethics.
inVisible Culture, 2015
Combining the theories of Edouard Glissant and Severo Sarduy, I analyze three historical installa... more Combining the theories of Edouard Glissant and Severo Sarduy, I analyze three historical installations by Reynier Leyva Novo. I argue that the strategic misunderstandings that lend structure to Novo’s historical pieces happen through an illusory duplication of one surface in another (simulacrum), deformation and displacement (anamorphosis), and false clarity (trompe l’oeil). I suggest that, by alluding to history through layers of vital opacity, Novo’s art makes a political statement against the invisible deceptiveness of discursive clarity. This article is available online at http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/opacity-and-sensation-in-reynier-leyva-novos-historical-installations/
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2007
The production of the Cuban cultural field in the 1990s. This article explores curation in relati... more The production of the Cuban cultural field in the 1990s. This article explores curation in relation to international markets and internal politics.
Introducción al número "Post-Detection Padura" dedicado a la obra más reciente del autor cubano L... more Introducción al número "Post-Detection Padura" dedicado a la obra más reciente del autor cubano Leonardo Padura. Este ensayo da un panorama de la crítica publicada sobre el autor y comenta la novela Herejes en relación a la obra del autor.
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Articles by Guillermina De Ferrari