Archives in Transition: Collective Memories and Subaltern Uses

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Archives in Transition: Collective Memory and Subaltern Uses COMITÉ CIENTÍFICO DE LA EDITORIAL TIRANT HUMANIDADES Manuel asensi Pérez Catedrático de Teoría de la Literatura y de la Literatura Comparada Universitat de València raMón Cotarelo Catedrático de Ciencia Política y de la Administración de la Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociología de la Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia Mª teresa eChenique elizondo Catedrática de Lengua Española Universitat de València Juan Manuel Fernández soria Catedrático de Teoría e Historia de la Educación Universitat de València Pablo oñate rubalCaba Catedrático de Ciencia Política y de la Administración Universitat de València Joan roMero Catedrático de Geografía Humana Universitat de València Juan José taMayo Director de la Cátedra de Teología y Ciencias de las Religiones Universidad Carlos III de Madrid Procedimiento de selección de originales, ver página web: www.tirant.net/index.php/editorial/procedimiento-de-seleccion-de-originales Mariano López Seoane Editor Archives in Transition: Collective Memory and Subaltern Uses tirant humanidades Valencia, 2025 Copyright ® 2025 Todos los derechos reservados. Ni la totalidad ni parte de este libro puede reproducirse o transmitirse por ningún procedimiento electrónico o mecánico, incluyendo fotocopia, grabación magnética, o cualquier almacenamiento de información y sistema de recuperación sin permiso escrito del autor y del editor. En caso de erratas y actualizaciones, la Editorial Tirant Humanidades publicará la pertinente corrección en la página web www.tirant.com. © Varios autores y autoras © TIRANT HUMANIDADES EDITA: TIRANT HUMANIDADES C/ Artes Gráficas, 14 - 46010 - Valencia TELFS.: 96/361 00 48 - 50 FAX: 96/369 41 51 Email: [email protected] www.tirant.com Librería virtual: www.tirant.es DEPÓSITO LEGAL: V-0000-0000 ISBN: 978-84-1081-030-3 Si tiene alguna queja o sugerencia, envíenos un mail a: [email protected]. En caso de no ser atendida su sugerencia, por favor, lea en www.tirant.net/index.php/empresa/politicas-de-empresa nuestro Procedimiento de quejas. Responsabilidad Social Corporativa: http://www.tirant.net/Docs/RSCTirant.pdf Índice Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 9 Mariano López Seoane Limes and Archive: Maids in Argentina between History and Imaginary (19th – 21st centuries) ............................................................................. 17 Camilla Cattarulla Imagination surveyed. Ángel Rama in Punto de Vista ................................31 Silvana Santucci Register, anarchive, interrogate: theoretical impulses and linguistic praxis in the collaborative and ongoing Latin American Dictionary of the Spanish Language by the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero .................................................................................................. 41 Diego Bentivegna Do Novels Dream of Electric Media? Radio Archives at the crossroad between media and narration .......................................................................... 57 Por Giuseppe Episcopo Where the voice lives: digital repositories and audio archives of Latin American poetry ............................................................................................ 73 Nuria Girona Fibla Embroidering the archive, intervening the desert: #InakayalVuelve by Sebastián Hacher ..................................................................................... 91 Leo Cherri Mapping the Wave: self-narratives from the new Russian Diaspora ....... 119 Agnese Accattoli Theses on a Fantasy of Herstory ..........................................................................149 Cecilia Palmeiro Authors Bios ....................................................................................................................165 Introduction Mariano López Seoane Editor In the intricate tapestry of contemporary cultural criticism, the discussions around archives emerge as a discrete lens through which to explore current cultural and intellectual landscapes, particularly in relation to migrants and sexual minorities. This volume offers a survey of diverse scholarly inquiries that converge on archival practices referred to or practiced by these marginalized communities. Scanning decades of intellectual discourse and cultural practice, the essays within this collection delve into how archives—both physical and digital—preserve, challenge, and redefine the narratives that define contemporary discussions around culture. As we know, the collapse of the master narratives that used to organize and make sense of our history has produced a multiplication of minor histories and, consequently, encouraged scholars to rethink the ways in which chronologies, periodization, epistemologies, and even entire fields of knowledge had previously been structured. This transformation has had a twofold impact on archives. First, and in terms of research, documents and materials previously ignored by the disciplines that traditionally guarded the archive have now been included in different specific repositories, leading to the emergence of new conceptions and definitions of the archive and its boundaries. While postcolonial studies, for example, found in oral tradition and material culture a new way of investigating the past of subaltern groups, queer studies and feminist movements expanded their archives with a range of materials previously discarded as “trivial” or by being confined to the “private sphere.” 16 Mariano López Seoane pivotal role in preserving and challenging narratives that define current intellectual discourse, particularly those related to migrants and sexual minorities. As readers embark on this journey through texts that transcend disciplinary boundaries, they are invited to critically engage with the transformative potential of archival studies in the 21st century, reflecting deeply on its past, present, and future. Limes and Archive: Maids in Argentina between History and Imaginary (19th – 21st centuries) Camilla Cattarulla In the painting Tertulia porteña (c. 1831) by Carlos Enrique Pellegrini, a naturalized Argentinean Savoyan engineer who gained fame as a painter and portraitist in the South American country, a group of upper-class people is sipping mate. In the doorway, to the right, we catch a glimpse of the figure of an Afro-Argentine woman, surely one of the maids who, from the limes, without crossing the threshold into a space that does not belong to her, perhaps awaits orders to be placed by the hosts. 18 Camilla Cattarulla *** Pampa se había quedado dormida. Acarrucada en el umbral. Envuelta su monstruosa cabeza en el refajo de bayeta amarilla, que había levantado por detrás al sentarse; un pie montado sobre el otro, como para prestarse mutuo calor, calzados ambos en gruesos zapatos claveteados; las manos debajo del delantal blanco, dormía sobre la dura piedra, como sobre un cómodo colchón de muelles. ¡Pobre Pampa! Cansada del fregoteo de platos, del bruñido de cuchillos y del lavado de vasos, de traer y llevar, de bajar y subir, de salir y de entrar, había obtenido la promesa de acompañar la señora a una visita de intimidad aquel día, lo que le serviría de pretexto para ver las calles y quizá la plaza de la Victoria; pues con ser 25 de Mayo, fiesta patria, había tedéum, rifa, parada militar y que se yo. (Ocantos, 1891: 1-2) In 1891, Carlos María Ocantos, a diplomat and a writer who was an exponent of the so-called Generation of ’80, published the novel Quilito whose incipit introduces the character of the indigenous woman, the chinita, who is compelled into domestic work in a family in Buenos Aires. Seated on the threshold of the doorway, the chinita reflects on her condition and awaits the moment she can cross the limes, enabling her to roam the streets of the capital, and thus witness the anniversary ceremonies for the Revolución de Mayo, a revolutionary process that ended with the dismissal of the Spanish viceroy and the establishment of a local government junta (May 25, 1810). *** Limes and Archive: Maids in Argentina between History and Imaginary (19th – 21st centuries) 19 The drawing is a croquis titled Alarma. Cuadrito de entrecasa, published in issue 51 (Sept. 23, 1899) of the Argentine magazine Cara y Caretas. In the drawing, the inhabitants of the house rush to the cry of the woman holding a baby, only to discover that what had been perceived as an alarm was nothing more than the announcement of the baby’s first tooth. Among those who rushed in was the cook, who, however, remained in the background, near the door, on the limes, without approaching the family group. *** «ISABEL: ¿Sientes apetito? CHINA: Algo. ISABEL: Y yo. Tienen aún para media hora larga los de arriba. Y los de abajo: gárgaras. (Discépolo, 1981: 109) In 1925, Armando Discépolo published Babilonia. Una hora entre criados, a play attributable to the grotesque genre, of which the author was one of the leading representatives. The action unfolds in a one-act play and is set in the 20 Camilla Cattarulla basement of a mansion in Buenos Aires where are located both the kitchen and servants’ quarters. The scene also includes the staircase leading to the upper floors. All of the characters belong to the domestic service and hail from various backgrounds (Galician, Madrilenian, French, Neapolitan, German, Cordobese, Criolla). Among the women are the cook Carlota and the maids China, Isabel, and Lola. The dialogues intertwine various stories around the main one (the robbery of a jewel), but above all, they establish a continuous relationship between los de abajo (the servants) and los de arriba (the landlords), whose space is only accessible via what is defined as a limes, the staircase. *** In each of the four examples where limes is associated with female domestic service, we can see reflected specific moments in Argentina’s social, economic, and cultural history. Let us analyze that in particular. In Pellegrini’s picture, the Afro-Argentine maid is unmistakably depicted as a slave. In Argentina an initial partial abolition of slavery occurred in 1813 when the Constituent Assembly decreed the so-called “Freedom of wombs”, which established that children born to female slaves were born free. Slavery was then officially abolished with the Constitution of 1853, although complete abolition did not occur until 1860 with the first constitutional reform, which declared that slaves of foreign masters were also given freedom if brought into the country. Argentina’s black population was the result of the slave trade implemented during the colony in the viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, and it persisted after Independence until the fall of Juan Manuel de Rosas in 1852. Governor of Buenos Aires Province and head of the Confederation, de Rosas welcomed the support of the Afro-Argentine population during the civil war between Unitarians and Federals that was tearing the country apart. Until the first half of the 19th century, black women lived as slaves in patrician homes and were responsible for washing, cooking, ironing, sewing, embroidery, weaving, going to the market, dressing children, and following them through the day: these activities ultimately created new spaces for women’s work. Aside from Limes and Archive: Maids in Argentina between History and Imaginary (19th – 21st centuries) 21 the aspect of the limes, Pellegrini’s painting holds a particular relevance because it constitutes one of the pieces of evidence of the presence of the black population in Argentina as part of a national community. In the second half of the 19th century, the liberal elite – committed to advancing the building of the modern Nation project – would attempt to erase this presence from collective memory. And so, unknowingly, artists such as Pellegrini,1 acted as if they were social historians, leaving behind traces of the symbols of a national past that later disappeared from historical reality. 2 In the second example, Ocantos’s novel Quilito begins, rather unexpectedly for its time, with the introduction of the figure of the quinita. Until then, urban naturalist fiction had predominantly focused on the European immigrants, particularly Italians, often focusing on conflicting positions. Indeed, the migratory flood that was sweeping the country had sparkled reflections on the role of newcomers in shaping national identity. Novels such as Antonio Argerich’s ¿Inocentes o culpables? (1884) or Eugenio Cambaceres’s En la sangre (1887) underscored the lack of moral and social values in the character of the Italian migrant; by contrast, Manuel T. Podestá’s Irresponsables (1889) and Francisco Sicardi’s Libro extraño (1894) highlighted their alacrity, love of family, and capacity for assimilation. In Quilito, a novel centered on the economic crisis that hit Argentina in the 1890s, the basic Pampa indigenous (the ethnic group, not the name attributed to the character) 3 symbolize the other side of the 1. Afro-Argentines are among the subjects of costumbrista painting, whose development was initially due to the presence of European traveling painters, among whom should be mentioned the Swiss César Hipólito Bacle and the Englishman Emeric Essex Vidal. 2. On the subject of the presence of the back people and their disappearance see Schávelzon, 2003. 3. Pampa is the name by which various indigenous groups or ethnic groups in the territories south of the Río Salado were called. Obviously, it has a negative connotation, but over time the upper classes themselves considered the term an emblem of the “national spirit.” 22 Camilla Cattarulla migratory flux. This wave brought several thousand Patagonian indigenous to Buenos Aires at the end of the so-called Conquest of the Desert (1878-1879), a military expedition promoted by Minister of War Adolfo Alsina, President of the Republic Nicolás Avellaneda, and General Julio Argentino Roca. They aim at completing the project of the expansion of progress and civilization in southern Argentine territories by eradicating the indigenous peoples who inhabited there. When the war was over, a significant debate arose, involving government and church, regarding the fate of the indigenous people taken as prisoners. The decision was not to confine them in reservations (as in the United States), but instead to disperse them to different areas far from the frontier and to break up families.4 Consequently, women and children were sent to the Hotel de Inmigrantes in Buenos Aires, where the ladies of the Sociedad de Beneficiencia selected some to be employed as domestic workers. This is precisely the case with the character of Pampa who, asleep on the threshold of the house, the limes where she took refuge in search of tranquility, dreams of her traumatic arrival at the port of La Boca: Y como siempre que soñaba, veía a su madre, perdida, como sus hermanos, en la gran ciudad, la odiosa escena de la Boca se reprodujo con fidelidad pasmosa: el buque atracado al muelle; el muelle atestado de curiosos; sobre la cubierta el montón de indios sucios, desgreñados, hediondos, como piara de cerdos que se lleva al mercado, cohibidos y temblando, por lo que ven y lo que temen; las mujeres, cerca del marido; las madres, apretando a los hijos juntos a los senos escuálidos y tratando de ocultar a los más grandes bajos sus andrajos…Y un militarote, que arrastra su sable con arrogancia, procede al reparto entre conocidos y recomendados, separando violentemente a la mujer del marido, al hermano de la hermana, y lo que es más monstruoso, más inhumano, más salvaje, al hijo de la madre. Todo en nombre de la civilización. Porque aquella turbe miserable es el botín de la última batida en la frontera… (Ocantos, 1891: 9-10). In the third example we are in 1899. The cook who stays at a distance from the family group could be Italian or Spanish, immigrants for whom domestic 4. See Mases, 2008. Limes and Archive: Maids in Argentina between History and Imaginary (19th – 21st centuries) 23 service was the primary means of accessing the urban labor market during those years. In fact, despite the process of urbanization, modernization and industrialization that characterized Argentine society in the last decades of the 19th century, women were still precluded from many employment opportunities and, more frequently, the labor market itself confined them to a limited number of occupations, such as maids, cooks, seamstresses, laundresses, ironers, weavers, nannies: roles that are now paid but that previously had been performed by slaves. But between the 19th and 20th centuries, domestic service was no longer the exclusive privilege of upper-class families (who, moreover, could afford a wide number of domestic servants with specific roles). Even working-class families could afford domestic help, as indicated by the significant increase in the number of maids in Buenos Aires, rising from over 20,000 in 1887 to over 57,000 in 1914 (data that, moreover, do not includes cooks) (Allemandi, 2017: 72).5 During those years, domestic service still constituted “easy to secure” employment for migrant women (Allemandi, 2017: 239), and served as a potential stepping stone for a more improved economic circumstances. An example of this is the sketch Poliglotismo doméstico published in 1912 in Cara y Caretas, a magazine always keen to show contemporary social issues. The text illustrates the difficulties faced by an employer in trying to retain the same maid, preventing her from requesting a higher salary after just fifteen days of work: Don Ventura Tripotenti se daba con la cabeza contra las paredes, desesperado ante la imposibilidad de conservar servicio doméstico por más de quince días; las mucamas que periódicamente iba á recibir en el desembarcadero de la dársena norte, exteriorizaban pretensiones fabulosas, cual queriendo demostrar de primer intento que venían bien informadas acerca de las brillantísimas condiciones económicas de la Atenas del Sur. Gallegas de Pontevedra, napolitanas de Sorrentos y francesas de la frontera belga, inventariaban primeramente con abusiva prolijidad al postulante á la honra de tenerlas à su servicio, indagando si tenía «señora, criaturas menores, 5. Allemandi’s book includes also an extensive bibliographical apparatus: pp. 249-272. 24 Camilla Cattarulla perros de cría y loro que tarareara la Marsellesa o el Himno de Riego». […] La que no servía para barrer ni fregar, por vicio de conformación física, en cambio preparaba sabrosamente las «chuletas à la Gaditana» y las «patitas de cordero en salsa Montpensier-Pompadour», conociendo, además, todas las recetas de la culinaria universal, incluso la paraguaya. Y en tratándose de limpieza, aseo, economía y otras virtudes del oficio, á cada cual hubiérasele podido confiar, sin prevenciones, la custodia á puerta abierta de la Caja de Conversión. No obstante tales referencias y recomendaciones, don Ventura Tripotenti acudía invariablemente, cada mes, á mediados de semana, al flamante Hotel de Inmigrantes… Escrupuloso, como el que más, atendía cortesmente á las recién desembarcadas, sin dejarse imponer por los aires de bravata que afectaban algunos acompañantes del «sexo fiero», entronizados en guardias-de-corps de sus paisanas. Y, cerrado el trato, con á veces desesperantes dificultades de expresión dialectal por ambas partes, don Ventura arreaba à casa con la elegida. Así ocurrió que después de haber enseñado las primeras letras á una asturianita de dieciocho primaveras, dotada de la mayor buena voluntad por aprender, recibió don Ventura Tripotenti el merecido agradecimiento, bajo forma de un pedido de aumento de sueldo que, rotundamente negado, determinó la defección de la ingrata; la cual se nos dice ha calzado un puesto de maestra de segunda enseñanza, en una escuela comunal de La Quiaca. (Manigot, 1912: 117) The theme of aspiring to a better economic and social condition, and thus the intrinsic instability of the relationship between maid and employer as narrated in Poliglotismo doméstico, connects us to the last example: Armando Discépolo’s play Babilonia, set in the third decade of the 20th century. Argentine society, thanks to European and non-European migratory flows, had now definitively become multiethnic and multicultural, as demonstrated also by the success of the national theater, whose main characters are immigrants: the tano (Italian), the gallego (Spanish), the ruso (Jewish) and the turco (Middle Eastern). The staircase visible in the scene of Babilonia represents the immigrants’ aspiration to social and economic advancement, their willing to hacer la América, which is later disillusioned by the tough reality of merciless competition, by the paradox of living and working in a house of rich people who have become so only through a stroke of luck. The play depicts the ethnic and linguistic Limes and Archive: Maids in Argentina between History and Imaginary (19th – 21st centuries) 25 mixing of 1920s Argentina, as well as the struggle of immigrants (both man and woman) as they seek not only to survival but also success in society. The examples of limes analyzed so far offer a contribution to the history of maids and the connections between ethnicity, gender, and social class in Argentine daily life in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the words of Lucía Campanella: El servicio doméstico es, a la vez, una transacción económica fundamental al capitalismo que pocas veces se toma en cuenta en los análisis, un problema para la sociología del trabajo, un incómodo impensado de las relaciones de clase, una manera de solucionar la “vida material”, aquella que habilita y permite la vida espiritual; un indicador más de las diferencias entre hombres y mujeres, entre personas racializadas y aquellas que no son percibidas como tales, entre migrantes y locales. El servicio plantea entonces un problema ontólogico […], que recuerda y actualiza la permanencia de las jerarquías. (Campanella, 2019: p. 42) If in the first half of the 19th century the Afro-Argentine slave occupies the domestic space, starting from the second half of the century two female figures inhabit the household: the immigrant, mostly Spanish, but also Italian or French, as a consequence of the phenomenon of mass migration, and the chinita, the indigenous poured out into the cities in the name of civilization. While this experience pertains to the job market, the history of everyday life, family, and women, domestic service has remained relatively invisible in historiography. This invisibility can be attributed to a perceived indifference towards a form of employment considered archaic and non-productive, as well as the scarcity of sources, greater interest in other types of work and their actors, partial absence of official data and statistics, and legislative gaps. Historiographical attention to this subject has been increasing, at least in Europe and the United States, since the 1970s, in coincidence with the gradual rise of feminist studies. In Argentina (and more generally in Latin America) the situation has not been dissim- 32 Silvana Santucci theoretical-critical delimitation of “the lettered city” but also in the projective hegemony of a utopian totality that deliberately operated as a critical imperative. From it, the transcultural processes and the transcultural writers of the middle of the last century designed new regional and urban maps that allowed, on this continent, to look head-on at the institutions of power. As Mabel Moraña describes it in the mid-1990s–the moment when the first great return to the thought of Ángel Rama took place–reading Rama was like returning to that laborious and productive trajectory, paradigmatic in that it illustrated “the movements of rooting and uprooting of the intellectuals of the second half of the century” (Moraña, 1994: 8). This political and economic diaspora materialized the migratory flows in the biographical currents and also incorporated them as a fundamental theoretical perspective for the aesthetic projects of writing. Neither a purely local or folkloric anchorage, nor a balanced and harmonious totality. Between culturalism and hermeneutics, Rama’s work was then deploying “new forms of understanding meaning” (Moraña 1994: 8) and the intrinsic invoice of an industrious production from which agendas, plans and programs were formalized; who also knew how to start from the generic delimitation of a predominantly narrative aesthetic regime. Thus, speaking today as Ludmer did of “official ideologies” or “ideologized forms” of Latin American literature and narrative seems to lead us to problematic terrain in which something masked would be revealed, to a materialist and dialectical conception of history or to a cut that privileges the militant functionality of ideas as an instrument of political struggle. However, the modern notion of ideology that describes it as an imaginary force capable of pulling thought towards the enunciation and/or concretization of political realities, finds its enlightened beginnings in the French Revolution, the first use of the neologism ideology is recorded in 1796 in Memoirs on the Faculty of Thought by Destutt de Tracy. From then on, ideology was initially portrayed as a science interested in the signs with which ideas are expressed, but also in the character, origin, laws and relationships that govern them. It was then considered a part of Zoology insofar as it dealt with man, but focused, unlike animals, on his faculty of thinking. Imagination surveyed. Ángel Rama in Punto de Vista 33 Its method referred ontologically to the radicality of naturalism, since it returned to and asked about the physiological genesis of human ideas that had to be studied like a fossil or a mineral. This faculty of thought (voluntary or involuntary) was explained with and from two other notions or faculties also attributed to the human animal, but with a lesser degree of exclusivity: sensations and movements, whose character could also be voluntary or involuntary. Thus, these observations and the clarification of a deductive method formed part of the zoological ideology insofar as they proposed to describe sensual and sensitive aspects of human ideas, as well as to observe movements and motivations that today we would Freudianly identify under the always opaque empire of the drive.1 Returning to the frameworks of Latin Americanism and the dispute over the meaning of literary work on this continent, we can say with Julio Ramos that the 1990s gave shape to an “archival drive” in which the idea of the document and the documentary was re-signified, ratifying and increasing its value as evidence. Before that, the archive was only a legitimizing resource for positivist discourses. It becomes necessary, then, to affirm that in the field of operations of Latin Americanism in the middle of the last century, we can hardly speak of an awakening of the theoretical imagination about literature; rather, we observe the development of a theoretical enclave interested in reifying the interpretation of social reality within the framework of an area of studies that in the 1920s had already germinated in a utopian way. Henríquez Ureña, but also Alfonso Reyes, had affirmed the independent character of the critical forces of the new world that, despite being forced to face insurmountable obstacles, were able to “push traditional investigations of the past to safe harbors” (H. Ureña, 1989:3). Likewise, in these readings produced under developmentalist frameworks, the narrative still functioned embedded in a regime that was supposedly and defensively autonomous and protected by the parameters of 1. In previous works we saw that Ángel Rama is interested in thinking about the notion of Freudian drive. 34 Silvana Santucci national historical reality (Ludmer). In that sense, all those fixed identities that after the 90s end up diasporizing belong, despite migrations and exiles, to a social class or to subjects aesthetically configured with arrangement and roots to their activities. Hence the transcendent importance for this critique of the debate about the purposes and functions of the writers and intellectuals that Rama energized, but also leveled –with the difficulties that this entailedunder the name of “the learned” of Latin America. In one of the key readings to think about the current survival of Ángel Rama, Raúl Rodríguez Freire takes up Julio Ramos’ perspective: “the learned city” cannot be understood as a notion equivalent to that of “literature” and academics cannot be understood as analogous to “learned functionaries,” although, of course, as Viñas proposes, servility to power and bureaucracy can be, in effect, an excessively functional alternative. Freire remarks that, in agreement with Kant in “the conflict of the faculties,” the “learned” can be taken as a bureaucrat and as a merchant of knowledge, but the ambivalence between learned men and intellectuals continues to be constitutive of work in universities. Considering “all those who handled the pen” strategically as literate and, consequently, as a group of undifferentiated officials and bureaucrats, whose assistance is due exclusively to the favors of the empire in power, leads, from this perspective, to the dark reflective alleys of apathy. “Not for nothing – Viñas writes in the fragment from 1975 that completes the epigraph – do efforts at massive depoliticization characterize all reactionary or repressive regimes. And also men coagulated on their own and immutable certainties” (2023: 256). However, today, as a consequence of neoliberal disintegration, we know that this idea of a “lettered city” entered into crisis, as did the utopian theoretical program of Latin Americanism. Consequently, we are faced with a current critique that tries to position itself in the face of its decomposition.2 In this order 2. Julio Ramos takes up this idea from Clara Parra Triana, Raul Rodriguez Freyre and Mari Luz Estupiñán who between 2017 and 2019 developed the notion of “Latin Americanism in decomposition”. We have reviewed this idea in other works. Imagination surveyed. Ángel Rama in Punto de Vista 35 of ideas, we propose the reading of a minimal cut from the past, of a not so well-traveled critical episode of that integrative project. RAMA IN PUNTO DE VISTA. FIRST NOTES Of the four interventions by Angel Rama in Punto de vista (PdV), we are going to focus on one: the “Survey on the Sociology of Reading” of 1978.3 In this commented journey, I am interested in reviewing the conceptual development that Rama deploys and the place he gives to imagination and theoretical invention in his programmatic proposal of sociological fiction/or sociologist of literature. What texts, what reader, what literary forms and what institutions interest him in order to reflect on the design of his/her culturalist totality? According to Silvia Nicolini, also in that second issue of PdV, the sociology of reading and structuralism were, at that time, two of the most important literary currents of the century, since they called attention to the artificiality of the text, a fundamental aspect that gave body, support and definition to the field of literary studies (the other two were Russian formalism and the new criticism). In all of them, linguistics appeared as the guiding discipline that had provided perspectivism or the point of view and the tools or instruments for the analysis of literature. We highlight this because Nicolini or, better yet, without pseudonyms, Beatriz Sarlo was in charge of enabling the publication of the survey that Angel Rama carried out from the School of Letters to different university students of the Central University of Venezuela. Just a few years later we would see that in our country Sarlo replicated an 3. In addition to “Survey on the Sociology of Reading” from May 1978 and the interview conducted by Sarlo, we find by Ángel Rama “Argentina: Crisis of a Systematic Culture” in issue 9, July-November 1980; “The Effects of the Boom: Literary Market and Latin American Narrative” March-June 1981 and two reviews written by Susana Zanetti on his work. The first, “Newest Hispanic American Narrs in Progress” issue 14 March-July 1982 and the second “Suma Crítica on the Hispanic American Novel” issue 17, April-July 1983. 36 Silvana Santucci experience of this type (or at least participated in the replication) when the “Survey of contemporary Argentine literature” was carried out in 1982, a project directed by Susana Zanetti and developed by Carlos Altamirano and Sarlo herself. However, Rama had already been insisting on the use of surveys as a diagnostic methodology since 1960, when he published a sort of section in Marcha called “What do Uruguayans read?”, which led to interviews with different writers (for example, in 1964, Armonía Somers responded to the survey). It is, then, this process of expansion of a model of empirical elaboration, which gave a certain objectivism and scientism to literary work, which was beginning to become important not for invention but for the effective work of constructing a literature. A process that starts, then, in the Latin American case, from a double degree of productive artifice, of which Rama was one of its fundamental agents. On the other hand, since the evidential value of literature was not at stake in the archival regime that is instigated today (and that has been doing so bureaucratically since the 1990s), the survey that Rama published in Punto de Vista is more like a testimony in which the researcher reviews the development of his work, the instruments developed to carry it out and proposes some conclusions for the debate. I am particularly interested in commenting on the result regarding the ideological forms of reading that he arrives at. But to do so, it is necessary to first take into account some formal considerations. First of all, we can say that Rama’s survey was a type of work that today we would accuse of enormous determinism and a rather inconvenient will to generalize. Rama was clear in his objectives: he is interested in establishing “levels of reading, comprehension and aesthetic appreciation” of students in correspondence with different “urban sociocultural strata” of the city of Caracas. Thus, the proposal sought to interpret the cultural consumption of Caracas society when revolutionary utopias were already cracked in a good part of the continent and reactionary processes were administered with a recrudescence of which he was a victim. It is the effort to distinguish aesthetic and cultural visions of dentistry students from the uses of “literary reading” among “lower class workers” with “some training in humanities” that seems to motivate him Imagination surveyed. Ángel Rama in Punto de Vista 37 externally and internally. And to achieve such a diagnosis, he elaborates two different types of questionnaires. The first focused on clarifying “the economic, social and educational condition” of the students in order to review the “uses” and “utilizations” of literature and a second one, properly literary, based on the reading of a specific novel that was given to the respondent, along with three weeks to read and/or reread it and thus be able to answer thirty-three questions about the text. On the other hand, the criteria with which he tracks the class condition of the respondents are imported; He takes them from the group of studies of Sociology of Literature of the Institute of Advanced Studies of Paris, particularly from Jacques Leenhardt, a disciple of Lucien Goldman who had been developing this line and with whom Rama collaborates from Venezuela, contributing the data of his team. I do not think it is important to reproduce here, beyond the effort, the criteria that Rama observes and cuts taking as a base the proposal of the French, since the result is Borgesian: the Caracas society of the late 70s can be distinguished in upper class, lower class and four varieties middle class A; B; C and D, with subtypes each that in some cases are distinguished even in group I, II and III; let us say that logic lacks a current instrumentality. However, I am interested in the conclusions that he arrives at from the last of the 33 questions about The Colonel Has No One to Write to Him, the selected novel by García Márquez: The thirty-three questions of the survey covered various areas of intellectual, affective, social and economic life. Given the novel used, questions on political aspects were obligatory, although an attempt was made to keep their number to a minimum, compensating for this by using an incisive tone that could generate uncontrolled reactions. Here too, the answers and the emotional reactions they show establish a great distance between the lower and upper classes. While the former perceived the political aspects of the novel and, although having little historical information, granted them importance and admitted that they were explicit formulations of the text (as will be remembered, the novel takes place in the 1950s during the Colombian violence that pitted conservatives against liberals), the latter, although they also recognized their existence, proceeded to deny 38 Silvana Santucci their importance. The norm in Group III (without a similar attitude being recorded with the upper sectors of Group II (middle class) and, therefore, it can be considered a specific form of upper class behavior), consisted in the assertion that this point was not pertinent. It was not denied that there was a political approach within the novel (…) but the legitimacy of considering it within the analysis of a literary text was discussed. The pure aesthetic aspect of literature and of art in general was enhanced, establishing a dichotomy between beauty and message that, while valuing the former, tended to minimize the latter. We do not know officially then if there will be an “archive” of these surveys, if we can have access to the current objectifying value of literary studies, whose risk seems to tend towards the establishment of a bureaucratic relationship with the past that strains the patrimonial and institutionalist frameworks of its conservation. Who benefits from this reading? Who does it aim to benefit? What literary practice does it correspond to? What does it exhort? Following these questions that Ludmer traces in 1984, it is evident that the political aspect of Latin Americanism configures a theoretical approach that is sufficiently resistant and ideological. Its autonomous and self-determining stage presented many scenes like the one we have just reviewed, where the focus is placed exclusively on defining non-abstract materialities of literary reading. Not for nothing did Vargas Llosa describe Angel Rama’s plane crash as “a dire prophecy about the future of an intellectual discipline that has been declining in Latin America in a disturbing way.” 4 Until his death, the utopian character that Pedro Henríquez Ureña gave to Latin Americanism was accepted as an effective criterion, but the post-Soviet era and neoliberalism ended up dismantling it as a space for thought. The success of Rama’s survey is probably there, in the question about what’s behind the books he published; this is, about who were the readers. This inquiry implied the creation of a space for the question about the others that his project encouraged or tried to benefit. 4. Cfr. Moraña, 2009 p. 174 Imagination surveyed. Ángel Rama in Punto de Vista 39 BIBLIOGRAPHY Destutt de Tracy, Antoine (1992) [1796] Mémoire sur la faculté de penser, Paris, Fayard. Henríquez Ureña, Pedro. La utopía de América. (1925) Ed. Biblioteca Ayacucho. 1989 Estupiñán Serrano, Mary Luz; Parra Triana, Clara María; rodríguez freire, raúl. “Latinoamericanismo de la descomposición: una lectura de su crítica y de su crisis”. Pléyade (Santiago) [online]. 2019, n.24, pp.191-214. Ludmer, Josefina. “De la crítica literaria al activismo cultural”. Chuy. Revista de estudios literarios latinoamericanos. núm.4, 2017. Ludmer Josefina. “Prólogo a la Segunda edición de Cien años de soledad. Una interpretación”. Lo que vendrá. Una antología (1963-2013). Bs. As Eterna Cadencia editora. Moraña, Mabel. Ángel Rama y los estudios latinoamericanos. Instituto Internacional de Estudios Iberoamericanos. Pittsburgh, 1998 Moraña, Mabel. A 25 años de su muerte: Angel Rama y los imaginarios de la crítica. Revista a Contracorriente Vol. 6, No. 2, Winter 2009, 173-180 Rama, Ángel. “Encuesta sobre sociología de la lectura”. Bs. As. Revista punto de Vista n° 2, mayo de 1978. Rama, Ángel. Transculturación narrativa en América Latina. Buenos Aires: El Andariego, 2007 Ramos, Julio. Desencuentros de la modernidad en América Latina: literatura y política en el siglo XIX. México: FCE, 1989. Impreso. Ramos, Julio. Paradojas de la letra. Lengua, subjetividad y ley. Editorial mimesis. Valparaíso, Chile. 2022 (1ed. 1996) Rodríguez Freyre, Raúl “Un nuevo archivista. de las paradojas a la anarquía de la letra”. En Paradojas de la letra. Lengua, subjetividad y ley. Editorial mimesis. Valparaíso, Chile. 2022. Viñas, David. Trastornos en la sobremesa literaria. Textos críticos dispersos. Ed. Fondo de Cultura Económica, Bs. As. 2023 Register, anarchive, interrogate: theoretical impulses and linguistic praxis in the collaborative and ongoing Latin American Dictionary of the Spanish Language by the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero Diego Bentivegna “Because, on the other hand, no living language has, or can have, a dictionary that contains it completely…” (Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone dei pensieri, 29. March, 1822). I. “Let us define our world. Let us define the words of our world.” The motto of the Latin American Dictionary of the Spanish Language (hereinafter, DILE) (http://www.untref.edu.ar/diccionario/) names, from the beginning, a collective subject, a subject that is enunciated as plural. The DILE was created in 2014 by the impulse of Daniel Link, founder of the Program of Contemporary and Comparative Latin American Studies of the National University of Tres de Febrero. As explained by Link himself, the DILE has previous projects on its horizon, such as the Urban Dictionary in English (https://www.urbandictionary.com/), founded in 1999 in San Francisco California. Managed by UNTREFmedia (https://untrefmedia.com/ es/), the DILE is a network-designed device that is based on a plural self and appeals, at the same time, to an action, that is, a performative dimension 48 Diego Bentivegna form of activity in the world. For this, De Mauro recovers the Gramscian concept of praxis, to which we will return briefly. In turn, for De Mauro, the lexicon in historical-cultural languages is characterized by three major features: the instability of the vocabulary, the diversity of meanings, and the indeterminacy or semantic vagueness. The latter occupies a fundamental role in De Mauro’s theory–which will be reflected in the Grande dizionario. Likewise, praxis is based on some of De Mauro’s positions that specify the open, potentially infinite character–in his words–of the lexicon as the possibility of creating words or the potentiality of forming complex lexemes. In any case, for De Mauro, vocabulary is characterized as an unstable and variable set, effective and potential, that changes in space and time, from speaker to speaker and even in the same speaker to the extent that he participates, to say it with Bakhtin, in different spheres of social life. These are issues to which a device such as the DILE pays special attention. I would say, to be clearer, that they are issues that constitute it. The DILE proposes that for a speaker, everything in the language appears marked, circulating in a sphere, which may be very broad, a local, national, regional or global sphere, but which never ceases to be a determined sphere. The notion of linguistic praxis, which we have thought about fundamentally based on the elaborations of Antonio Gramsci (2013), implies thinking more in terms of collective processes (unlike certain ideas of activity and creativity that prioritize a singular speaker) and implies thinking not in differential terms, but in terms of integral repertoires constructed, assumed, reappropriated and re-signified by social subjects. In the language that the DILE proposes to map, everything is in movement, everything is touched, everything is inserted in the world and everything is agonistic: the word is conceived as an object of struggle, as a matter of hegemony, as a document of a heterogeneous historical memory. For this reason, rather than of slogans or terms, the DILE prefers to speak, Bakhtinianly, and probably to the scandal of many lexicographers, of words. I quote a fragment from Bakhtin’s colleague, Pavel Medvedev, from his book on the formal method in literary studies: Register, anarchive, interrogate: theoretical impulses and linguistic praxis 49 Every statement is oriented towards communication, towards a listener, a reader, in short, towards another person, towards some form of social communication, of whatever kind. As such, any word has to do with communication and cannot be separated from it without ceasing to be a word of a language (Medvedev, 1994: 160). In the same way as Bakhtin, Medvedev reacted against what he considered a dominance of the “unilateral monolingualism” of linguistics, a monolingualism, we would add, that had one of its first pillars, and perhaps one of its first effects, in the art of editing monolingual dictionaries. In the wake of Medvedev and the Bakhtinian circle, the DILE attempts to privilege the event of the word as a permanent generation of the latter: “In this generation, the word lives a very intense life, although different from that which exists in literary creation” (Medvedev, 1994: 161). VII. To define the world is to define the words of our world, we said at the beginning, recalling Wittgenstein’s statement in Philosophical Investigations, published posthumously in 1953. Before the Austrian thinker, in Soviet Russia, Medvedev claimed that it is not through language that we know reality, but rather it is the word, the statement (slovo, that which Voloshinov had defined as the “ideological phenomenon par excellence”, is the Russian word that is usually translated by both) that plays “a very important role in understanding the conception of reality” (Medvedev, 1994: 233). For Voloshinov, the word sets in motion “countless ideological facts that cut across all areas of social communication.” The word is the clearest indicator of social transformations, “even those that we barely see maturing, that are not yet fully formed and have not yet found access to the already formed and consolidated ideological systems” (Voloshinov, 2014: 43). Each word, thus defined, is also the object of evaluation by other speakers, a positive or negative evaluation that makes concrete the multi-accented character of the ideological sign that Voloshinov speaks of. It is an evaluation expressed in terms of votes, based on experiences on social networks or on YouTube. Beyond the filter that is supposed to be authorization, I would say endorsement, rather the approval of the 50 Diego Bentivegna DILE team–an endorsement that is aimed at avoiding the abuse that has been taking place in some cases, related to the appearance of offensive forms against political, religious, sexual and ethnic groups, and also to avoid what is called “trolling”–the proposed definitions are “voted” negatively or positively. This is important to record the perception that other speakers have of a certain definition–a word never exists isolated from its accents–and that can guide the consideration of that entry for users such as translators or specialists in some Latin American literature, to give two examples of people who can take advantage of a dictionary of these characteristics, around the relative validity of a certain definition, or around the degree of problematicity and conflict that emerge around a certain word and that, if we allow ourselves to allude for the last time–I fall into the temptation–to Voloshinov, operates as the accentuality that makes a sign remain alive. In fact, the number of definitions that a word has and the number of evaluations that are associated with it allow an electronic device such as the one that supports the DILE to put them in a place of evidence, with which the DILE device can function as an approximation to areas of the language that speakers intuit as more conflictive and problematic. Areas in which it is evident, paraphrasing Voloshinov again, that there is nothing absolutely stable in the language. Tullio de Mauro (2019) speaks, in a similar sense, of the word as a group of meanings, of emotive valences and, pay attention at this point, of memories. For the Italian linguist, the word is the nucleus of condensation of uses, of behaviors, of beliefs, of operational practices, of religious, moral and intellectual ideas. The entire cultural space, “in the immense variety of its articulations,” is based for De Mauro on semiotic articulations of linguistic space and linguistic history is articulated, as in the approaches of Vossler, Spitzer, but also Gramsci or Menéndez Pidal, as cultural history. Hence the irreducible flexibility of linguistic heritage, its infinite extensibility and articulability (words that do not sound very good, but which translate those adopted by De Mauro). The possibility of continuous variation is not an accessory characteristic, but intrinsic to the vocabulary of a language and its elements (De Mauro, 2019: 178). Register, anarchive, interrogate: theoretical impulses and linguistic praxis 51 VIII. Returning for a moment to Zimmermann, another of the points that he most insists on in his reflection on dictionaries is the privilege that the lexicographic tradition in Spanish has historically given to differential dictionaries, dictionaries designed in contrast with the repertoires of European Spanish and, fundamentally, with the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy. Zimmermann has emphasized, on this point, the neocolonial dimension of certain lexicographic practices, with the implicit–and, more often, explicit–privilege of European varieties. In fact, Zimmermann calls upon the term “glottopolitics” to think about this question, that is, he underlines the political condition of categories such as “pluri” or “monocentrism.” For the German theorist, it is a matter of thinking of the glottopolitics of the diasystem of a language as monocentric or pluricentric and of strengthening the forms of self-determination in relation to the language, to the extent that it operates in conflict with the differential conceptions, which, for Zimmermann, perpetuate the idea that the Spanish of America has for some reason less value than the peninsular. From critical and theoretical impulses such as these, the DILE is not conceived as a dictionary that “reflects the particularities” of a national language (as can be read on the back cover of the Dictionary of the Speech of Argentines of the Argentine Academy of Letters), nor a tolerable repertoire of “Latin Americanisms” that comes to merge the already existing dictionaries of Mexicanisms, Argentinisms, Chileanisms, Peruvianisms, which are presented as a “complement” of what is presented with authority in the Academic Dictionary. It is not, insofar as its object is the word, with the potentialities with which we have been declining it. It is not, insofar as its position is that of the region, but it is not that of regionalism. The DILE is a device that is proposed as an integral space of the Spanish language from Latin America, which is, itself, an entity that is the object of reflection, it is not, in our view, a closed totality. We do not know where it begins or where it ends. In the 18th century, recalls the anthropologist Ernesto de Martino (1961) in his work on tarantulaism, some Jesuit missionaries spoke of Calabria and other areas of southern Europe as “our 52 Diego Bentivegna America”; our Indies that had to be theologically, culturally, linguistically colonized. Perhaps that is part of Latin America. Perhaps the Spain that Sarmiento saw as part of Africa is also part of it. We do not know what Latin America is. No, we do not know, however, that term summons us, in some way it names us, that term asks us to think about it, it asks us about identity. We do not know what it is, but it urges us to imagine it. Thus, the field (rather than identity) that is called upon is not the “Hispanic American” one, even though a Dictionary of Spanish, but the “Latin” belonging of the American countries in which Spanish is spoken, which includes the United States, of course, due to the growing number of Spanish speakers, who were born, for example, in American territory, although one should also think about the place of the Latin communities in Europe, Dominican communities in Madrid, Argentines in Barcelona, Ecuadorians in Milan, Chileans in Stockholm: as a position in the world in which the different varieties of Romance languages (think of the interference of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese speech and of French erudite words in Rioplatense Spanish, for example) come together, merge, intersect and interfere with local varieties, more specifically American ones. IX. In conclusion, I consider it important to emphasize that, in order to think about DILE, it is a device within a Program: it is not something closed, it is a project, it is a work to be done, a protocol of experiences, as Gilles Deleuze, one of the authors to whom the members of the Program return insistently, would say, or as Pier Paolo Pasolini (2011), for whom reflection on language was never a marginal component, an “opera da farsi.” And the Dictionary itself has to be read in those terms: what is presented here is not a closed project, but rather a work that is, at this very moment, being done. That is proliferating, swarming, with all the danger, with all the risks and challenges that this implies. It is fundamental for us to raise this point, which differentiates a dictionary of these characteristics from other types of dictionaries that can be found on the Web, such as the Dictionary of the Academy itself, the Dictionary of the Speech of Argentines of the Argentine Academy of Letters or the Dictionary of Spanish of Mexico, coordinated by Luis Fernando Lara. The Register, anarchive, interrogate: theoretical impulses and linguistic praxis 53 DILE is not presented as an electronic complement to something that is somewhere else: a printed, closed, finished, closed and guarded Dictionary by a group of specialists, archons of the language before whom one can doubt, hesitate and, in any case, timidly state a question, but rather an open archive, a process, an action, an act of saying. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari, it is a question of thinking of possible treatments of the same language, “sometimes it is a question of variables to extract constants and constant relations from them; other times, to put them in a state of continuous variation” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1996: 106). This last direction is the one taken, or the one that DILE tries to take, which conceives language as activity and praxis and which is assumed as an anarchivist project, in which linguistic practices are seen as multiplicities that are never completely classifiable and orderable, a power without beginning or end. Anarchivistic machines make evident the latent inorganicity in all social organization of the records of bodies and corpus (Tello, 2018). They state that all order, of course also that of dictionaries, is based on the apeiron, on the open, on the indeterminate (Agamben, 2020). Is it possible to generate a dictionary that operates against the very logic of dictionaryization? That encourages the responsible appropriation of the tools by the speakers? That is a space for experimentation of dissident or subaltern political subjectivities? That does not operate as an instance of naturalization of the order that the establishment of hierarchies and classifications impose on “social production,” as postulated by the theories of the anarchive? That is conscious of the violence of the record, which tries to impose a determined order on that which flees from all absolute determination? In short, it is about “defining the world” as a way of intervening in the social registers of the lexicon and of self-affirmation and, ultimately, as a glottopolitical gesture exhibited as such by the speakers themselves, sovereigns of the words. 54 Diego Bentivegna BIBLIOGRAPHY AGAMBEN, GIORGIO. Endless Media. Valencia, Pre-Textos, 2002. AGAMBEN, GIORGIO. The Open. Man and Animal. Buenos Aires, Adriana Hidalgo, 2020. ARNOUX, ELVIRA. «Glottopolitics: transformations of a disciplinary field.». Languages: theories and practices. Government of the City of Buenos Aires, Secretariat of Education, 1999, p. 95-109. BADIOU, ALAIN. The Century. Buenos Aires, Manantial, 2005. BAJTÍN, MIJAIL. Aesthetics of verbal creation. Mexico, Siglo XXI, 2002. CHÁVEZ FAJARDO, SOLEDAD. Santiago de Chile, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2022. DE MARTINO, ERNESTO. The Land of Rimorso. Contribution to a religious history of the South. Milan, Il Saggiatore, 1961. DE MAURO, TULLIO. The value of words. Preliminary study by Stefano Gensini. Rome, Treccani, 2019. DELEUZE, GILLES AND FÉLIX GUATTARI. A thousand plateaus. Capitalism and schizophrenia. Valencia, Pre-Texts, 1994. DERRIDA, JACQUES. Archival disease; a Freudian impression. Madrid, Trotta, 1997. GRAMSCI, ANTONIO. Writings on language. Ed. by Diego Bentivegna. Saenz Peña, Eduntred, 2013. FERRARIS, MAURIZIO. Documentality. Because it is necessary to leave traces. Rome-Bari, Laterza, 2009. FOUCAULT, MICHEL. The archaeology of knowledge. Mexico, Siglo XXI, 1996. FOUCAULT, MICHEL. The order of discourse. Barcelona, Tusquets, 2002. LARA, LUIS FERNANDO. Dimensions of lexicography: on the subject of the Dictionary of Mexican Spanish. Mexico, El Colegio de México, 1990. LAURIA, DANIELA. Language and politics. Critical history of the dictionaries of the Spanish of Argentina. Buenos Aires, Eudeba, 2022. LEOPARDI, GIACOMO. Zibaldone di pensieri. Ed. by W. Binni and E. Ghidetti. Milan-Florence, Sansoni, 1993. LINK, DANIEL. “Anarchivism and post-philology”, conference at the University of Zaragoza. Mimeo, 2021. Register, anarchive, interrogate: theoretical impulses and linguistic praxis 55 MEDVEDEV, PAVEL. The formal method in literary studies. Madrid, Alianza, 1994. MILNER, JEAN-CLAUDE. For a politics of speaking beings. Olivos, Grama, 2013. ONG, WALTER. Orality and writing. Technologies of the word. Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1996. PASOLINI, PIER PAOLO. The Divine Mimesis. Buenos Aires, El cuenca de plata, 2011. RODRÍGUEZ BARCIA, SUSANA. “The ideological analysis of lexicographic discourse: a methodological proposal applied to monolingual dictionaries of Spanish”, in Verba. Galician Yearbook of Philology, vol. 39, 2021. SAUSSURE, FERDINAND DE. Course in general linguistics. Buenos Aires, Losada, 1945. TELLO, MAXIMILIANO ANDRÉS. Anarchivism. Political technologies of the archive. Buenos Aires, La cebra, 2018. VOLOSHINOV, VALENTÍN. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Buenos Aires, Godot, 2016. ZIMMERMANN, KLAUS. “Differential Lexicography and Integral Lexicography” in María Álvarez de la Granja and Ernesto González Seoane (ed.), Dialectal Lexicon and Lexicography in Ibero-Romany, Madrid-Frankfurt, Iberoamericana, 2018, pp. 121-144 Do Novels Dream of Electric Media? Radio Archives at the crossroad between media and narration Por Giuseppe Episcopo 1. ARCHIVES OF THE AIRWAVES The emergence of radio, initially viewed as a mere replacement for other forms of amusement, information, and social interaction, 1 ushered in not only the era of electric media but also an entirely novel and unexpected category of primary source material. Since its origin, radio has occupied a central position within an extensive cultural network, transforming itself into a significant artifact of the 20th century. Through its speakers, radio disseminates news, contemporary events that become historical, or ordinary facts that pertain to everydayness of life. Radio serves as an ambient medium in a dual capacity: firstly, it functions as a barometer of political and social shifts, and secondly, it actively imprints the cadence of daily life, akin to a shared social clock (a point 1. On this aspect, see Bertolt Brecht in his The Radio as an Apparatus of Communications (Brecht, 2000 :41). «In the beginning one got by without thinking. One looked around where somewhere something was being said to someone and simply tried to butt in and compete by also saying something to someone. This was the radio in its first phase, as substitute: a substitute for theatre, opera, concerts, lectures, coffeehouse music, the local pages of the newspaper, etc.». All translations from Italian are mine. 64 Por Giuseppe Episcopo that engage a “community of listeners” while preserving the ambiance of an intimate dialogue. The aural specificity of the radio medium – as an implicit trait of its language – seems to put the ancient art of storytelling back into circulation, to return to the tradition of storytelling or, as one could say, to draw on the degree zero of storytelling: the epic, the fairy tale. Starting from this point, considering the aural dynamics of radio and how it manifests in a post-literary oral context – acknowledging the diverse perspectives and nuances explored by scholars like Eric A. Havelock, Marshall McLuhan, and Walter J. Ong – we must inquire about the voice behind the radio when it speaks, and who we are truly listening to as we sit down and settle comfortably. In fact, to frame the question more precisely, we should initially ask: «by what is the radio spoken?» This inquiry arises because this new medium, the inaugural electric medium of the 20th century, carries out its contemporary role in the oldest of mediumistic forms. It harkens back to the ancestral, pre-electric, shamanic, spiritistic, parapsychological, and phantasmic modes of communication. The radio serves as a mediator between worlds, a conduit for the voices of others. So, what, indeed, does the radio convey and give voice to? What does it channel? The radio itself is an acousmatic object; it possesses no inherent sound unless we consider the voice emanating from it as its entropy such as tuning noise or interferences. We can draw upon scholars like Rudolf Arnheim, who authored one of the early theoretical volumes on radio in 1936, or turn to pioneers of radio semiotics like Andrew Crisell, Elke Huwiler, or Jarmila Mildorf for a narratological approach to the medium. They would elucidate that radio is permeated by auditory signs and that aural signs that are far from undifferentiated. Instead, they can be categorized into two macrocategories: noise and silence. These auditory signs, or signals, if we draw a parallel with mathematical models of information theory, can be seen as binary in nature, akin to Claude E. Shannon’s work between 1938 and 1948. Shannon’s work transformed Boolean logic into a binary 0/1 number system, which, in the context of transmitting systems, translates to “sig- Do Novels Dream of Electric Media? Radio Archives at the crossroad between media and narration 65 nal-that-passes” and “signal-that-doesn’t-pass.” In the realm of auditory signs, we can interpret this binary relation as “noise” and “silence.” Silence represents the empty segment in the auditory spectrum. However, from a narrative perspective, this silence, this empty canvas, serves as a fundamental element in constructing the auditory tapestry, an essential element in constructing the soundscape. Within the acoustic text, silence can function as a pause, an interruption, or as an auditory counterpart to specific dramaturgical conventions, such as marking a transition, or a change of scene. It has the capacity to sustain narrative tension or evoke a sense of suspense. The other pole in this binary relationship is noise, which, in conjunction with silence, plays a pivotal role in constructing the narrative along the temporal axis, contributes to the development of the diegesis. The story unfolds through the interplay of noise and silence, fullness and emptiness. Absent signal, silence is the vacuum in the pair of auditory senses. From the narrative point of view, however, silence, this empty segment, is traced back to constituent moments in the construction of the sound fabric, where in the acoustic text silence may count as a pause, an interruption, or as an aural counterpart for certain dramaturgical conventions (framing, as a fade in and fade out), may maintain a narrative tension or create an effect of suspense. Another pole of the binary relationship is noise, which together with silence contributes to the construction of diegesis on the time axis: the story goes on with noise and silence, with fullness and emptiness. Now, let’s shift our attention to the other end of the spectrum: what is that constitute the fullness, the noise, the resonant component? To return to An - drew Crisell’s Understanding Radio (1986) – whose title alludes to McLuhan’s work but limits the scope of the analysis to a single medium – we encounter three components: music, sound, and words. Let’s briefly examine each one in turn. Music serves as non-verbal acoustic communication, structured by rhythm, melody, and harmony. In the context of the narrative, it can fulfill a functional role, operating as a “complementary” element (providing extended commentary on the events represented), a “technical” role (as a curtain, pause, stylization, or soundtrack, marking dramatic time), or an “absolute” 66 Por Giuseppe Episcopo function. The latter is exemplified by the German tradition’s Funkoper, which aligns radio with musical drama, now explicitly composed for the radio medium. Lastly, and more briefly, in the grammar of radio narrative, speech represent the verbal communication of radio prose. Summing up the points of this reconstruction of the “building blocks” of radio drama, we come to the last question: what then is sound if speech count as narration, dialogue, monologue, discourse; music develops thematic elements, transitions between scenes, or counts as a sonic identifier of emotional states; and silence represents the punctuation of a discourse between other sounds, or acts as a counterbalance to the acoustic fullness? Sound in radio drama is the outcome of various elements: naturalistic sounds from the world, as well as those created through electroacoustic processing, generated by audio signal devices manipulated in an electroacoustic process. In the practical presentation of a scene, sound, as noted by Crisell, acts as an indical trace; it represents the audible evidence of the source of the sound itself. To illustrate this, consider these examples: When a doorbell rings, someone must have pressed it—unless, of course, we’re in a ghost story. If we hear the patter of rain on glass, it’s a result of the rain itself. Ambient sounds serve a dual purpose: they hint at the presence of objects and people, suggesting their existence, while also painting the acoustic landscape, shaping the environment in which the action unfolds. 3. LEAD LETTERS MELTING INTO AIR To recapture the emotional impact of auditory sensations, I would like to quote the words of an article’s writer – a direct witness and listener – regarding the radio play wrote by Bertolt Brecht with the music of Kurt Weill, Lindberg’s Flight, that opened at the Chamber Music Festival in Baden-Baden on 27 July 1929: «The theater of the air, after all, is the only one capable of producing the noises of the propeller, the murmur of ocean waves, the ovation of the crowd upon Lindbergh’s arrival in Paris». This quotation, retrieved and translated by Angela Ida De Bene- Do Novels Dream of Electric Media? Radio Archives at the crossroad between media and narration 67 dictis, dates to an unsigned 1929 review of the radio broadcast of Brecht’s cantata. What is really striking is that in the same article, the potency of auditory storytelling is contrasted with the ineffectiveness of sound signs in the theatrical presentation of the play: «All the powerful noises that had thrilled us on the radio were reduced [in the theater] to the modest output of a gramophone» (De Benedictis, 2004: 148). Approaching to a temporary conclusion, to white spaces of the page, to that void that in a page correspond to the silence, it is worth returning to Roland Barthes and Roland Havas’s essay Listening, originally published in the Einaudi Encyclopedia in 1976. They acknowledge that the perception of sound begins as a physiological act, rooted in hearing. Listening, on the other hand is a “psychological act”. With this initial distinction Barthes and Havas proceed to identify three areas of listening. This first listening might be called an alert, they say, and involves gathering information, clues; the second listening is hermeneutic and focus on deciphering the gathered information; the third one is created by the circuit of communication.5 It «does not aim at – or await – certain determined, classified signs: not what is said or emitted, but who speaks, who emits: such listening is supposed to develop in an inter-subjective space». (Barthes y Havas, 1991: 246) The three areas are, in more than a way, concatenated. The first listening gives sense to noises, links them to specific sources, has a categorizing function; the second act of listening «metamorphoses man into a dual subject: interpellation leads to an interlocution in which the 5. No wonder, if Ronald Barthes – and Haves with him – in his pages on listening did not immediately pay attention to the radio but considered the telephone the modern epitome of listening as a modern interplay: «the archetypal instrument of modern listening, the telephone, collects the two partners into an ideal (and under certain circumstances, an intolerable) inter-subjectivity, because this instrument has abolished all senses except that of hearing: the order of listening which any telephonic communication inaugurates invites the Other to collect his whole body in his voice and announces that I am collecting al of myself in my ear». (Barthes y Havas, 1991: 251-252) 68 Por Giuseppe Episcopo listener’s silence will be as active as the locutor’s speech» (Ibidem, 252). This is of a paramount importance in our discourse: this second listening is religious and deciphering: it intentionalizes at once the sacred and the secret (to listen in order to decipher history, society, the body, is still, under various lay alibis, a religious attitude). What is it that listening, then, seeks or decipher? Essentially, it would appear, two things: the future (insofar as it belongs to the gods) or transgression (insofar as transgression is engendered by God’s gaze). By her noises, Nature shudders with meaning: at least this is how, according to Hegel, the ancient Greeks listened to her. The oaks of Dodona, by the murmur of their boughs, uttered prophecies, and in other civilizations as well (derived more directly from ethnography) noises have been the immediate raw materials of a divination, cledonomancy: to listen is, in an institutional manner, to try to find out what is happening (it is impossible to note al the traces of this archaic finality in our secular existence). (Ibidem, 250) It is here, specifically in the intertwining of the act of listening and its evangelical function, that we should investigate further starting from a foundational essay of 20th-century criticism: Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis. In the first chapter that opens on this theoretical object, Auerbach places two very different scenes in a line of continuity. Odysseus’ scar – which accounts for the Homeric literary technique of digression – is followed by an episode from the Bible: the sacrifice of Isaac. The King James version translates the opening as follows (Genesis 22: 1): «And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said to him, Abraham and he said, Behold, here I am.» Even this opening startles us when we come to it from Homer. Where are the two speakers? We are not told. The reader, however, knows that they are not normally to be found together in one place on earth, that one of them, God, in order to speak to Abraham, must come from somewhere, must enter the earthly realm from some unknown heights or depths. Whence does he come, whence does he call to Abraham? We are not told. He does not come, like Zeus or Poseidon, from the Aethiopians, where he has been enjoying a sacrificial feast. Nor are we told anything of his reasons for tempting Abraham so terribly. He has not, like Zeus, discussed them in set speeches with other gods gathered in council; nor have the deliberations in his own heart been presented to us; un- Do Novels Dream of Electric Media? Radio Archives at the crossroad between media and narration 69 expected and mysterious, he enters the scene from some unknown height or depth and calls: Abraham […] Where is he? We do not know. He says, in deed: Here I am-but the Hebrew word means only something like “behold me,” and in any case is not meant to indicate the actual place where Abraham is, but a moral position in respect to God, who has called to him-Here am I awaiting thy command. Where he is actually, whether in Beersheba or elsewhere, whether indoors or in the open air, is not stated; it does not interest the narrator, the reader is not in formed; and what Abraham was doing when God called to him is left in the same obscurity. (Auerbach, 2003: 8) The biblical text embodies a different narrative rationale compared to the Homeric narrative, where events occurred «without leaving any - thing in the shadows». In the biblical dialogue, everything is shrouded in darkness, and the external reality remains an unspecified place created solely by the words spoken by the only two figures present in the section of the text exemplified by Auerbach: God and Abraham. They exist within a purely aural, acoustic, and auditory relationship. To this suggestion, for which I declare indebtedness to Gabriele Frasca, I add as most consequential among the corollaries, what we read in a chapter devoted to Beckett’s Company by Gabriele Frasca. In Company, much like Auerbach’s Abraham, we find ourselves in a situation where we all share the experience of having to imagine that a voice comes to someone in the dark. With Samuel Beckett, as Frasca underscores, the written letter undergoes a transformation, shifting from a solid, lead alloy cube to a breath, a pneuma. Similar to all things solid, the letter also seems to melt into air: One skims only the first few lines of the text, then, and ends up being inside the “company,” only to discover, as if that were not enough, that one is exactly the party to a “discourse,” and therefore a “listening subject.” It is not “literature” short-circuited in a sound box or a screen; it is only its rescinding into the element from which it was born, to detach itself from it bit by bit (but, as it turns out, never definitively) in the hot stages of typographic culture, of that same culture which, once further “overheated” by electric media, cannot but return to deliver it to the art that contains and transcends it (and which has always been the real object of our studies): the “art of discourse.” (Frasca, 2005: 251) 70 Por Giuseppe Episcopo BIBLIOGRAPHY Arnheim, Rudolf. Radio. An Art of Sound. Boston: Da Capo Press, 1972. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis. The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Barbier, Frédéric. Histoire du livre. Paris: A. Colin, 2000. Barbier, Frédéric. L’Europe de Gutenberg: le livre et l’invention de la modernité occidentale (XIIIe-XVIesiècle). Paris: Belin, 2006. Barthes, Roland y Roland Havas. “Listening”, in Barthes, Roland. The Responsibility of Forms. Berkeley y Losa Angeles: University of California Press 1991. Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller. Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov”, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books 1969. De Benedictis, Angela Ida. Radiodramma e arte radiofonica. Storia e funzioni della musica per radio in Italia, Torino: De Sono–EDT, 2004. Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Film and Radio. Marc Silberman (trad. y ed.). New York y London: Bloomsbury, 2000. Crisell, Andrew. Understanding Radio. New York y London: Routledge, 1986. Frasca, Gabriele. La lettera che muore. La letteratura nel reticolo mediale. Roma: Meltemi, 2005. Gadd, Ian. The History of the Book in the West: 1455–1700. New York y London: Routledge, 2017. Huwiler, Elke. “Storytelling by sound: a theoretical frame for radio drama analysis”, in The Radio Journal – International Studies in Broadcast and Audio Media, Volume 3 Number 1, 2005. Kagel, Mauricio. Parole sulla musica. Conversazioni, discorsi, saggi, radiodrammi. Kristina Pietra (trad.). Macerata: Quodlibet, 2000. Lorman, Jurij. La semiosfera. L’asimmetria e il dialogo nelle strutture pensanti. Venezia: Marsilio, 1992. McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York y Toronto: McGraw-Hill 1964. Do Novels Dream of Electric Media? Radio Archives at the crossroad between media and narration 71 Mildorf, Jarmila y Till Kinzel. Audionarratology:Interfaces of Sound and Narrative. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2016. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy. New York y London: Routledge, 2013. Vargas Llosa, Mario. “È pensabile il mondo moderno senza il romanzo?”, in Franco Moretti (ed.), Il romanzo (Vol. I, La cultura del romanzo), Torino: Einaudi, 2001. Where the voice lives: digital repositories and audio archives of Latin American poetry Nuria Girona Fibla The poem is a duty of thought. Alain Badiou. We can hear Borges reciting “Fundación mítica de Buenos Aires” in various places on the Web.1 The recording is always the same and in it we recognize, unmistakably, the author’s voice: a high-pitched timbre, a fragile tremor, a monotonous tone. We hear the grain of the voice, Barthes would say, the articulation of the body, of the language, not that of meaning, that of language, “a whole stereophony of the deep flesh” (1993: 109). We will no longer be able to reread the poem without evoking that voice, it will no longer be possible to reproduce it without remembering its cadence, like the memory of a melody that accompanies it. Whether we associate the face of the old man or the written arrangement of the verses with this memory will depend on other skills that have nothing to do with hearing or the need to attribute an origin to those words. After all, the truth of the voice lies in hallucination (Barthes, 1986: 267). 1. For instance, in “Voces que dejan huellas”, “Poemas del alma”, “Palabra virtual”, “La voz y la palabra” (RTVE), and other shows. 80 Nuria Girona Fibla Yánover recorded between 1967 and 1968, there are no female poets;7 in the collection of books with CDs, started in 2005 by the Visor publishing house, we will have to wait until 2010 to incorporate the first, Gioconda Belli, and until 2017 for the second, Elvira Sastre. But beyond this repetition of the series, the collection of digitalized audio files also responds in part to the need to attribute to them an unequivocal origin: a work, a body and a surname, and to insert the poetic event they record into a discursive regime, an aspect that I will return to later. But not all digital repositories of poetic audios are linked to institutions or claim their patrimonial status. “Palabra virtual”, which is perhaps the largest archive dedicated to poetry in the Spanish language,8 is presented as a Mexican portal created by Blanca Orozco de Mateos. Its website does not mention any sponsor, only the collaborators who make it possible. It states that “it does not pursue any profit motive. Its objective is exclusively cultural and educational, through the dissemination of Ibero-American poetry and universal literature.” The “Voices that Leave Traces Collection”, another important repository, is not linked to any institution either, although it mentions the documentary transfer of the UNAM, the National College in Mexico and various publishers.9 Here the name “collection” eludes the repetition of the archival series 7. The recordings can be heard on the portal “Voces que dejan”. Of a total of 26 LPs, only the voice of Alfonsina Storni is included on the album “Poesía y Teatro Argentinos. Homenaje a Milagros de la Vega”. The albums dedicated to narrative include samples from two writers, Silvina Bullrich and Beatriz Guido. 8. It is reported that it has 1551 poets and 4356 poems in audio and video. 9. This is how it is presented: “Over many years we have been building and enriching the collection of sound recordings of the most important writers of the Spanish language who have written in their own voice since the mid-twentieth century.” It includes the “Voz Viva” collection of the UNAM (founded in 1959, which to date has more than 280 titles), the compact discs published by the Colegio Nacional in Mexico; the “Entre Voces” collection of audio books that continues to be published by the Fondo de Cultura Económica, the collection of readings of “Poesía en la Residencia,” etc. Where the voice lives: digital repositories and audio archives of Latin American poetry 81 and refers to the singularity of its materials. The priority is not the word, as we have seen so far, but the effect of listening to the voice. The ordering of the Web page also differs from those associated with libraries or record libraries. In addition to accessing the recordings through the index of authors, it allows consultation from the collections that comprise it according to their provenance, that is, according to the origin of the archived event. Finally, although it exceeds the purpose of these pages, it is necessary to mention that we can find spaces on the Internet where sound memory is not conceived as a reservoir but as a source of experimentation and creation, where the archive is not given. The “PoéticaSonoraMX” project, for example, proposes an artistic and academic program of practices related to voice and word extended to the poetic and sound field and linked to material and immaterial sound memory.10 Closer to the essay than to the enduring or archontic, the “Identity and Sound Memory Laboratory” seeks to reflect on how sound can influence memory from a decolonial perspective, focused on Latin American identity and sound memory.11 THE SUPERSTITION OF THE VOICE There is only one recording of Gabriela Mistral reading her poems, which the Library of Congress of the USA turned into an LP in 1950. Since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (1945), the Hispanic Foundation had been waiting for the opportunity to record her voice for posterity, but Mistral had always been reluctant to read her poetry in public. When she learned about the Library project, the writer showed her enthusiasm: “I am very interested in this work of the Library of Con10. Linked to the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and other institutions that can be consulted on its website. 11. Promoted by the Directorate of Artistic Creation (DiCREA) of the Vice-Rectorate of Research and Development of the University of Chile and developed by the group of researchers “Ruido propio”. 82 Nuria Girona Fibla gress. Silent and inert poetry in books fades away or dies. The air, not the printed word, is its natural home. Poetry should not suffer the fate of a stuffed bird. Recordings do it a good service” (Aguilera, 1960: 84). Mistral’s words propose the air as the natural home of poetry, freed from the dissection of the museum or the silence of the book. The materiality of the voice unfolds in the air, in a space intrinsic to the production of the poem itself (to its poetics), which is different from the author’s interest in imitating a certain orality in her verses. A space inseparable, as Nancy points out, from the appearance of sound that puts poetry “on listening,” by it and for it, where “listening is being stretched toward a possible meaning and, consequently, not immediately accessible” (2007: 18). In that instance, the written poem recovers something that is proper to its nature, being an object of language composed to be performed before an audience. Recordings serve this sound space in the expansion and opening that they foster. They are not only part of a medium or a support, but rather participate in the very condition of poetry because the possibility of meaning is identified with the possibility of resonance, that is, with sonority itself (Nancy, 2007: 59), which goes beyond meaning. Two questions therefore emerge when approaching these poetic registers: a listening scene where, as I have suggested, the ability to hear is transformed into an expressive element, and a voicing of the poem. 12 An execution that should not be considered a mere reflection of a previous textual dimension. During the speech, the “inscription” (the letter) is dead. Each reading aloud activates a new poem, making it unique. It can be guided by the text, but the result is not measured only in what was written; it yields an interpretation, with all the implications that this term entails. 12. The listening scene, which cannot be defined, as Barthes points out, except by its object, has varied over time and distinguishes between listening oriented towards indices (alerts), deciphering (to capture signs) and the unconscious (which establishes significance) (1986: 243-256). Where the voice lives: digital repositories and audio archives of Latin American poetry 83 What is legible then becomes audible, in relation to a syntactical and syllabic order, and a verbal materiality. It is possible that what is visual also becomes audible, blank spaces and the arrangement of the poem on the page. A rhythm can be heard that may come from the meter or from the silences that the voice chooses to mark. In this voice, one can distinguish a timbre, an accent, a tone and an intonation that modulates the poem: where it rises or where it changes the register, what it emphasizes and what it inflects, in short, its liveliness or its weakness. We could say that in this singularity of the voice, it matters less who reads than how one reads, although as I will argue later, a whole imaginary surrounds it. But in sound, the voice is anonymous, it has no name as it has no presence. In this sense, the propagation of the voice seems to contribute to its virtuality, to the disappropriation of the body of the one who recites, to the text that is absent. Perhaps due to this elusive nature, the “Archive of the Word” of the Library of Congress of the USA insists on its work of collection: “Today, curators in the Hispanic Reading Room continue to actively capture voices of contemporary literary figures for the collection”. What exactly does this purpose capture or capture? What changes in listening when the voice is institutionally archived? Here it is not indifferent who reads. The voices of these authors are not heard as mere interpreters because it is a reading of authority. “Why is the poet privileged in terms of a possible oral presentation of his text?” asks Luis Bravo with respect to this type of reading: “because he is the one who knows the intention of the text best; because he has heard the tone of the internal voice in the process of gestation, because his job is to give rhythm and voice to his creation of language” (2011: 17). He then adds that he can also be the worst interpreter of his own text, if he has forgotten that fundamental part of the nature of the poem that is the presentation (2011: 17). Whether read well or read badly, from this perspective, the authorial reading ensures the link with creation and with a primordial sense, making 84 Nuria Girona Fibla the writer the privileged medium of his work when reciting it.13 It gives back an origin, always uncertain, to the voice, as a trace of a presence. Because the voice always raises a question about its origin and its place, that is, about the place where it manifests itself. Audio then operates as an authorial performance, where the voice is one more attribute of its function, in an attempt to gain what the recordings lack: the body, the person, the name, the work. It not only reinforces the symbolic capital of the heritage, as I explained before, but it becomes a phantasmatic support. What is celebrated then is not the event of the word but the event of being. How would Sor Juana Inés read her poems? Here an imaginary dimension opens up that the superstition of the voice sets in motion, that which the reader internalizes as the voice of a ghost, “the voice of the imaginary subject of the poem” (Monteleone, 1999: 149). Ana Porrúa calls “tonal calligraphy” all those elements that, when read aloud, “pamper, attach or brutally displace the poem” (2011: 152). She thus refers to a non-existent calligraphy that would require a type of notation similar to music. Although her approach has more to do with “vocality” as the historicity of the voice and its cultural inscription, it is based on her experience as a listener. He comments on how Girondo constructs a strange monotonous tone for En la masmédula and Perlongher lets out his voice until scandal (151), Neruda reads the love poem as well as the political or epic poem (2011: 161), with a psalmody that Nicanor Parra came to strip away in the recitation of his work (2011: 162), among others. Porrúa points out what Barthes never tired of repeating, that listening speaks (1986: 255). In the variations that these authors added to their text, the voice of the imaginary subject of the poem is “one more of the layers 13. This approach guides a listening to decipherment, according to Barthes, subject to a hermeneutics, linked to religious communication, to the sacred and the secret (1986: 247). An auratic listening, one might add. Where the voice lives: digital repositories and audio archives of Latin American poetry 85 that come into play in the vocal version of one’s own or another’s poem.” These variations produce symmetries or asymmetries in relation to the imaginary listening itself, to the listening woven by the features of an era or by other voices that circulate. Most of the time there is no record of tonal calligraphy in poetry and reconstructing the listening will mean resorting to one’s own imaginary listening, to the listening that an author has of his own text, to the history of that voice, to its inscription in culture (Porrúa, 2011: 158). The ways of reading, concludes Porrúa, “do not always correspond to what is read” (2011: 62). We thus return to the starting point, to what is not written in the text and to the voice beyond its physiological or histrionic quality, at the intersection that the voice occupies between work and archive, name and body, writing and reading, letter and sound. Because it is not, as Mladen Dolar points out, a voice and nothing more: it is what cannot be said, although it makes saying possible (2007: 28). One more example to end this journey in which the sonority of poetry oscillates between presence and absence. Of the multiple options with which to present the listening of poetry on the Web, the “Phonodia”14 project chooses to ensure the authorial voice accompanied by text: “it is not an indifferent fact that it is not just any reader or a professional actor who produces the vocalized version of the poem, but the author himself” (Mistrorigo, 2018: 22). The status conferred on this figure is that of the “author-reader”. It is a special interpreter, Mistrorigo states: “since, being also the author, he exercises a high degree of authority in terms of the transposition of his text into the medium-voice” (2018: 23). Access to the audio file appears at the top of the page, next to a photograph of the writer; below, the poem and the data of the work to which it belongs appear: “The arrangement of the elements on the page and the graphic presentation respond to the need to highlight the relationship established 14. “Phonodia” is an online, freely accessible multimedia archive dedicated to the voices of contemporary poets reading their own verses, which includes more than a thousand recordings in almost twenty different languages. It’s linked to Universidad Ca’ Foscari in Venice. 86 Nuria Girona Fibla between the poetic text and the audio of the author’s reading and for the user to appreciate it in the best way” (2018: 18). “Making a relationship evident” does not make it an intrinsic property of the related members. In this arrangement, poetic meaning does not come only from listening, but rather from combining it in figures and representations, from incarnating it in various presences, from embodying the meaning. Graphic representation attempts to unify what we see and what we hear, the body and the voice, between word and sound. To safeguard the division that separates the real from reality.15 A LESS BOUND POETIC LISTENING Let us return to the opening scene, to the listening of Borges in the collection “Voices that leave traces”. A still photo also accompanies the audio recording, without text. The voice acquires a spectral autonomy. Not only because it is a record of the past, of a deceased author, of a time gone by, but because the voice never ends up belonging entirely to the body that accompanies it. So that even when we see a live person speak, Žižek points out “there is always a minimum of ventriloquism at play” (2007: 12). Elsewhere we can hear it with an animation of the photograph, where the author moves his mouth as if reciting. The ventriloquism effect is even greater and the strangeness does not come only from the technical roughness of the video. We cannot identify the origin of the voice with that origin, with that mouth that speaks to us, with that borrowed body, it does not come from within. The same estrangement occurs when listening to the greeting or the insult of a talking cockatoo, as if the animal were suddenly endowed with subjectivity and an interiority of its own. Ultimately, Dolar suggests, the 15. “The gap that separates the voice from the body is the same one that separates the Real from reality” states Žižek (2007: 12). Where the voice lives: digital repositories and audio archives of Latin American poetry 87 voice is always acousmatic: “it appears rather in the void from which it is supposed to emerge but with which it does not fit, an effect without an appropriate cause” (2007: 87), it never sounds like the person who emits it. On the YouTube channel of “Poemas del alma” 16 we hear the naked voice of Borges reciting “Fundación mítica de Buenos Aires”. What happens when the voice is dissociated from the body, when we listen to the audios of poetry without photography and without text, we do not look and we only hear? Without that network, the material quality of sound comes to the foreground. We remain attentive to its resonance, to what there is of meaning in the sound, of sound in the meaning, as Nancy indicates, to “that where sound and meaning mix and resonate one in the other or one for the other” (2007: 19). When the orphan voice modulates the poem, it is neither on the side of the signifier nor of the meaning, beyond language as articulated sound. The voice does not correspond completely either to the phonological properties or to the meaning of what is said, in an experience of language that is more sonorous than semantic. From there, the poem becomes a personal idiolect where the meaning of poetry “is a meaning always to be made” (Nancy, 2013: 156), always to arrive, always to happen. At the end of his reflections on the act of listening, in a time without computers or networks, Barthes notes that what he perceives in contemporary art is not the arrival of a meaning, an object of recognition or decipherment, but the same dispersion, “the mirroring of the signifiers, constantly driven to follow after a listening that ceaselessly produces new signifiers, without ever retaining the meaning” (1986: 256). He thus advocates a free listening, in which it is not enough to speak, because a listening that circulates, that exchanges, that destroys, through its mobility, the fixed scheme of the roles of speech is necessary. The freedom 16. The channel corresponds to the “Poemas del alma” portal where the texts that make up the repository are transcribed. 88 Nuria Girona Fibla of listening is as necessary as the freedom of speech: “It is not possible to imagine a free society accepting the preservation of the ancient domains of listening: those of the believer, the disciple and the patient” (1986: 256). Barthes sees listening as a kind of theatre “in which the two modern deities compete, one good and one bad: power and desire” (1986: 256). The uses of the poetic voice in digital archives are also disputed in these two spheres. But where desire does not yield, there, the voice lives. BIBLIOGRAPHY Aguilera, Francisco. “Hispanic Literature on Tape”, Quarterly Journal of Current Acquisitions, Vol. 17, 2, pp. 84-92, 1960. Atienza, Raúl. “Identidad sonora urbana: tiempo, sonido y proyecto urbano”. EURAU’08, 4ème Congrès Européen de Recherche Architecturale et Urbaine. Paisaje Cultural-Paysage Cultural-Cultural Landscape. Madrid, EURAU, pp. 16-19, 2008. Barthes, Roland. Lo obvio y lo obtuso. Imágenes, gestos, voces. Barcelona, Paidós Comunicación, 1986. El placer del texto y Lección inaugural. México, Siglo XXI, 1993. Borges. Jorge Luis. “La supersticiosa ética del lector”, Obras completas. Buenos Aires. Emecé, 1984. pp. 202–205. Bravo, Luis. “La puesta en voz de la poesía, antiguo arte multimedía”, SIC, 1, pp. 6-22, 2011. Cloe Maurel. “Les effets pervers du classement au patrimoine mondial de l’Unesco”, The Conversation, 2007. Disponible en: https://theconversation. com/les-effets-pervers-du-classement-au-patrimoine-mondial-de-lunesco-70727#:~:text=Un%20tourisme%20de%20masse%20sur%20les%20 sites%20class%C3%A9s&text=Et%20cette%20mise%20en%20tourisme,Vietnam%2C%20ou%20la%20p%C3%A9riode%20coloniale Derrida, Jacques. Mal de archivo. Una impresión freudiana. Madrid, Editorial Trotta, 1997. Dolar, Mladen. Una voz y nada más. Buenos Aires, Manantial, 2007 Edmondson, Ray. Memoria del mundo. Directrices para la salvaguardia del patrimonio documental. París, Unesco, 2002. Where the voice lives: digital repositories and audio archives of Latin American poetry 89 Foucault, Michel. La arqueología del saber. México, Siglo XXI, 2009. González Aktories, Susana. “Lecturas literarias en voz de sus autores: sobre el acervo fonográfico del Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut de Berlín” en Miguel A. García (Ed). Los archivos de las (etno)musicologías. Reflexiones sobre sus usos, sentido y condición virtual. Berlín, Estudios Indiana. Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 2023. Disponible en: http:// www.iai.spk-berlin.de/es/publicaciones/estudios-indiana.html Mistrorigo, Alessandro. Phonodia. La voz de los poetas, uso crítico de sus grabaciones y entrevistas. Venezia, Edizioni Ca’ Foscari–Digital Publishing, 2018. Monteleone, Jorge. “Voz en sombras: poesía y oralidad”, Boletín del Centro de Estudios de Teoría y Crítica literaria, Rosario, 7, pp. 147-153, 1999. Morales, Lourdes. “«Memoria Sonora»: porque la Biblioteca Nacional de España también se escucha”, Desiderata, 19, pp. 6-12, 2022 Nancy, Jean-Luc. A la escucha. Buenos Aires, Amorrortu, 2007. “Hacer, la poesía”, Badebec, 5, 3, pp. 155163, 2013. Porrúa, Ana. Caligrafía tonal. Ensayos sobre poesía. Buenos Aires, Entropía, 2011. Rodríguez Reséndiz, Perla Olivia. El archivo digital sonoro. México, UNAM. Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliotecológicas y de la Información, 2020 Salazar Hernández, Mariela. La conservación en un archivo sonoro. México, Secretaría de Cultura. Fonoteca Nacional, 2018. Žižek, Slavoj: “Un libro acerca de la voz como objeto” en Dolar, Mladen. Una voz y nada más. Buenos Aires Manantial, 2007 Webliografía “Laboratorio Identidad y Memoria Sonora”: https://dicrea.uchile.cl/laboratorios/identidad-y-memoria-sonora/ “Palabra virtual”: https://palabravirtual.com/ “PoeticaSonoraMX”: https://poeticasonora.unam.mx/acerca-de/ “Voces que dejan huellas”: http://www.cecilia.com.mx/viva.htm Asociación Internacional de Archivos Sonoros y Audiovisuales (IASA). https:// www.iasa-Web.org/es/sobre-iasa 96 Leo Cherri Figure 1. Source: Nicolás Colombo, “Prisoners in the Museum of La Plata”. El día, La Plata, November 1, 2017. Available at: https://www.eldia.com/nota/2017-11-1-8-58-0-prisionerosen-el-museo-de-la-plata-blog-misterios-de-la-plata. Accessed on: June 2, 2022. Inakayal was a Tehuelche chief who was part of this group of prisoners. In captivity, Inacayal was photographed, and his image became part of the Museum’s brand-new photographic laboratory – first run by the Italian preparer Santiago Pozzi and then by the photographer and phototypist of the attached printing workshops, Carlos Bruch (1869-1943), whose visual archive Ten Kate “would use in 1906 as an appendix in a work made up of anthropometric data, a description of psychological characteristics, and the end of 1884, after the Conquest of the Desert was already concluded, the chiefs Inacayal and Foyel and their people were arrested and transferred to the El Tigre prison (Ten Kate, 1904). The efforts of Francisco P. Moreno allowed their transfer to the La Plata Museum some 18 months later. Modesto Inacayal died in the museum on September 24, 1888 according to Ten Kate (1904) and Onelli (1908), although according to the review by Oldani, Añon Suarez and Pepe (2011) this date could have been a year earlier, on September 26, 1887” (Amentrano, 2015, p. 2). Embroidering the archive, intervening the desert: #InakayalVuelve by Sebastián Hacher 97 the study of the brain” (Farro, 2008, p. 294). Later, the skeletal remains, “scalp, brain and death mask” (Lehmann-Nitsche, 1910) of the indigenous prisoners were preserved and exhibited by the MLP for about fifty years. Lehmann Nietzsche in the Catalogue of the Anthropological Section of the La Plata Museum of 1910 and Luis María Torres in Guide to visiting the La Plata Museum of 1927 give an account of the cataloguing of his remains, the assignment of a number and the placement in a glass window: Some of the skeletons kept in the large stained glass window in the centre deserve special mention, namely: number 1834, the chief Inacayal (window 72); number 1835, his wife (window 72); and number 1797, Margarita, daughter of Foyel (window 71), as representatives of the ancient lords of the pampas (Torres, 1927, p. 255-256). The creation of the Museum – its name change, even, from the General Museum to the Museum of Natural Sciences – coincides with the captivity, registration and post-mortem conservation of the bodies of others, objectified and assimilated as an available natural resource. On September 1, 1989, the formal request for restitution of the mortal remains of Chief Inacayal was entered (File 1000-31799/89 FCNyM-UNLP), a request that was not completed until 2014, ten years after a restitution law had even been approved. 4 With this legal fact, we can appreciate the long validity – and the recent crisis, change or, better, transition process – of a knowledge and, above all, of a way of managing the living and the bodies. In this sense, the intervention of #InakayalVuelve coincides with a new stage opened by the processes of “restitution” and, therefore, raises the question of the correlation that this exercise has in a sociopolitical, community and even ritual dimension, where art and aesthetic reflection intervene. In this sense, Hacher’s project is part of a larger series in which 4. For more comprehensive studies on museum, anthropological and legal restitution processes see Ametrano (2015), Oldani, Añon Suárez and Pepe (2011), Crespo (2018), Sardi, Reca and Pucciarelli (2015), Sardi and Ametrano (2017). 98 Leo Cherri visual works such as the short film Nueva Argirópolis (2010) by Lucrecia Martel and the photographs that Guadalupe Miles has been taking with the Wichi communities of the Chaco salteño (Bernabé, 2020) participate; texts such as La tierra del fuego (1998) by Sylvia Iparraguirre, Una vaca ya pronto serás (2006) by Néstor Ponce and La extinción de las especie (2017) by Diego Vecchio. These are texts that change, depending on the case, “the paradigms of the representation of the indigenous ‘other’ through a disenchanted story about disagreement (Iparraguirre), a denunciation of domination (Ponce), an anthropological parody (Vecchio)” (GarcíaRomeu, 2020, p. 58). The series extends into even more recent texts such as the novel-artefact El museo de la bruma by Galo Ghigliotto (2019) or Elástico de sombra (2019) by Juan Cárdenas. These are “archival fictions” that, rather than “housing indigenous and Afro identities in the universe of democratic ‘diversity’”, activate “indigenous and Afro worlds, worlds that are not “cultural identities”, but rather territorial agencies, diverse historicities, human and non-human” (Giorgi, 2021, p. 10). Broadening the horizon to Latin America, the series becomes even more extensive. We can mention the sculptures of the Colombian Nadin Ospina or the works of Denilson Baniwa, a Brazilian artist belonging to the Baniwa indigenous people. Although diverse, these artists and their works “pervert the epistemology imposed by coloniality” (Ribeiro dos Santos; Dagli Hernandez, 2022, p. 89) to the extent that they appropriate icons and artistic forms of Western culture to reflect on the fetishization and exoticization in the forms, techniques and technologies of representation of “the indigenous”, while imagining possibilities of cultural negotiation. Regarding the case of #InakayalVuelve, its exercise of restitution has several dimensions. Faced with this archive that indicates a genocide (an annihilation of the living, both physically and legally, and, above all, so- Embroidering the archive, intervening the desert: #InakayalVuelve by Sebastián Hacher 99 cio-affectively), the first thing that Hacher’s intervention proposes is to give visibility back to the image and, with it, a spark of life (Figures 2 and 3).5 Figure 2. Inakayal. Source: Archivo del Museo de La Plata. Figure 3.Inakayal illuminated by Sebastián Hacher. Source: https://inakayal.revistaanfibia.com/ 5. The relationship between image (visibility) and life was explored early in the 20th century by Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg, although recently philosophy and aesthetics have built new interpretive proposals such as that of Giorgio Agamben – images live to the extent that they are elements that contribute to history (Agamben, 2007, p. 54) – and that of Emanuele Coccia – the image lives to the extent that it is the possibility of survival of thoughts (Coccia, 2007) and a matter “that can live beyond us” granting us a sensitive survival (Coccia, 2011, p. 37). It is interesting to note that similar concerns were formulated by José Lezama Lima. For the Cuban scholar, an image (and, above all, what we see in the image) is not only a cultural and historical construction, but to the extent that cultures “go towards their ruin, but after the ruin they live again through the image” (Lezama Lima, 1972, p. 462), the image is a “current survival” or power of the living. This is what allows “the redemption” of a culture: that it is not lost, that it is saved and, even more, that it is reacquired (from the present, at a later time, with most likely renewed meanings and functions). 100 Leo Cherri This visibility begins by recovering the photographic document that was “lost among the museum archives” (Hacher, 2017). This work was carried out by Xavier Kriscautzky, a photographer who worked at the La Plata Museum, and by GUÍAS, a collective of anthropologists. 6 At the beginning of the project, Hacher obtained most of the photos from the British Library, in medium quality (Hacher, 22 Aug. 2018). 7 But it was Máximo Farro, an anthropologist who studied the formation and history of the MLP, who contacted Hacher to inform him that these images were available in high quality at the Museum. This recovery of the archive – its analog materiality and, with digitalization, its potential accessibility for civil society – broadens the horizons of the #InakayalVuelve procedures: reproducing these images, printing them in a large size on cotton paper and, finally, embroidering them. Paradoxically, Hacher does not “make visible” the “original” document until after having intervened in it: by coloring the images, “illuminating” them, as they say in photographic jargon. There is no criterion of “reality” or “verisimilitude” in this procedure, since, as Hacher says, a photo is an artifice. 8 The criterion that guides the 6. Xavier Kriscautzky relates: “The La Plata Museum – although I managed to rescue some three thousand glass plates from a completely abandoned archive in the basement of the Museum – has an archive that must exceed ten thousand plates distributed in different laboratories and departments” (Kriscautzky, 2022). In their research work on anthropometric photographs, Alejandro Martínez and Liliana Tamagno provide a similar testimony (Martínez; Tamagno, 2006, p. 95). 7. The Museum does not offer digital access to these images. Surely, the institution will have reasons or arguments that support its institutional policy. However, in times of digital Humanities, where repositories and archives are opening up to civil society and communities to provide digital access to their archives, such a situation becomes somewhat complicated. Even more so when a Google search leads us to these photographic archives, but made available by the British Library (https://eap.bl.uk/collection/EAP207-1) or the periodical press. 8. The logic of this reflection by Hacher runs through the entire history of photography and its theorization. This has been grandly summarized by Philippe Dubois in The Photographic Act (Dubois, 1986), when he argues that at first photography is considered as the mirror of the real/the discourse of mimesis/ Embroidering the archive, intervening the desert: #InakayalVuelve by Sebastián Hacher 101 editing practice is, then, affective and political, achieved in an intervention carried out under a paradoxical power: if the photos in the archive were taken by the executioners, the intervention supposes giving them life, breathing life into them, recovering, thanks to digital editing with color, an animosity and a force of the image, even making the atmosphere and the photographic record delirious, as is the case of the figure of Inakayal’s cousin who is seen appearing on an astral landscape (Figure 4). Figure 4. Iayeñamku, Inacayal’s cousing. Source: https://inakayal.revistaanfibia.com/ an icon (we will review this question below). At a second moment photography is taken as the transformation of the real, the discourse of code and convention, the symbolic. And, finally, there is a return to the referent, photography as a trace or indication of the real, but thought from Pierce’s trilemma of the sign: where the index refers to the object, but is not a faithful copy of it. In this summary of the photographic adventure there is a century of history and thought. We recommend the prologue of Dubois’ text to restore or revise the intellectual history of photographic thought and practice. Today, some artists or theorists have come to formulate a post-photographic moment, as is the case of Joan Fontcuberta (2016) or, in other terms, but with similar scope, Mario Bellatin (Cherri, 2022a). 102 Leo Cherri The paradoxical logic that we see in Hacher does not refer to a contradiction in his artistic practice, but to a set of operations that take photography out of its documentary and historical dimension, to turn it into something else (an artifice, for example), without annulling said historical-documentary dimension. The paradox would then be something like a double valence that remains in the document after Hacher’s intervention and, therefore, a dimension created by the artist’s intervention. The latter is even more evident in the following intervention in his work: the perforation of the photographic record through embroidery. Intervening it not only in its visual aspect, but in its very materiality, even in its tactile character, taking it, to a certain extent, out of the reproductive sphere to which the archival and museological ratio consecrated it: the modern archival ratio – and even more so when it crosses photographic archives – is linked to the historicist aspiration to reveal – and visually reproduce – events “as they have occurred” (Tello, 2018, p. 23). The danger of this episteme, as Walter Benjamin (1990) insisted, is that in the ordering and restoration of historical events (which is equivalent to the records transformed into their source and proof of a visual-veracity), an “‘eternal’ image of the past” is postulated (Oyarzún, 2008, p. 63) that, in addition to returning to homogeneous and empty time, in this case supposes an exoticization and reification of the living. That is why Hacher’s proposal is to embroider… the image, yes, but as the micro-site says, “to embroider the Mapuche genocide.” 9 And 9. The concept of “Mapuche genocide” is a designation for Hacher’s project and for the Mapuche-Tehuelche communities that participated in it. Although there is a complex debate about the historical distinction between Mapuche and Tehuelche, the Tehuelche descendants identify themselves with a certain or complete fusion with the Mapuche culture and community. This perspective is, I believe, what leads Hacher to support this term. Since 1991 there has been a Mapuche-Tehuelche flag. According to the social anthropologist Ana Margarita Ramos “the flag represented two Peoples – the Mapuche and the Tehuelche –, that is, a history of interrelations that pre-existed the States. In this way, they not only challenged the racist Embroidering the archive, intervening the desert: #InakayalVuelve by Sebastián Hacher 103 the power of that practice, of that exercise on the image, rests above all on the fact that it is not only Hacher or Corral who carry it out, but a community, the Mapuche-Tehuelche community, of course, but also a community whose existence the project calls upon, whose identity is never postulated or synthesized in a name, but rather proliferates thanks to the enumeration: “Old women, lonkos, poets, artisans, singers, teachers, nurses, doctors, employees embroidered. Country people and city people embroidered; Mapudungun speakers and people who are discovering their identity embroidered” (Hacher, 24 Sep. 2018). Now, why embroider? The practice of embroidery opens up several analytical dimensions. In this journey I will mark just three. 10 The first dimension involves a confluence between the aesthetic and the ritual. The Shipibo-Konibo people of the Amazon embroider as an exercise in beautification, taking from the graphics of plants the possibility of healing the physical, the psychological, the social and the spiritual. Hacher is aware of the deliberate “mixture” of cultures that underlie her reflection and choice of embroidery. And she is not concerned with the “anachronism” or the cultural “hybridity” that could be attributed to her project, but rather with the possibility of finding power in such practices. Thus, embroidering between two is the irruption of a trance and a collective dance – embroidering is dialoguing with the Other who embroiders, but also with the memory of the image –. Embroidering is, in short, the possibility of exercising an anarchivist practice on the archive, that is, a use or intervention that transforms the “order” and the ethnological theories that the academy had produced to classify people as Tehuelches or Mapuches, but they also questioned the official history that constructed the Mapuche (considered ‘foreigners’) as enemies of the Tehuelches (considered ‘Argentines’)” (Ramos, 2018, p. 16). 10. Bernabé analyses, for example, the confluence between narrative, embroidery and web programming as a dimension where the artistic overlaps with the artisanal (Bernabé, 2020, p. 179-180). 104 Leo Cherri “mandates” that have permeated the archive since its “origin”, cataloging and political-institutional use. 11 The second dimension of the embroidery practice is its artistic echo, which Hacher points out, but does not explore exhaustively. When I saw the embroidery of InacayalVuelve, I immediately remembered the work of Mónica Millán (Figure 5), an artist from Misiones who insistently explores the aesthetic possibilities of embroidery and weaving, especially ao po’i, a technique she learned on her trips to Paraguay, to Yataity del Guayrá, a town of weavers. 12 11. For a review of the concept and practices of anarchivism, see the thorough book by Maximiliano Tello (2018) and the article by Daniel Link and Rodrigo Caresani (2018). The Program of Contemporary and Comparative Latin American Studies (UNTREF) has dedicated three international Colloquia to the concepts of Archiving, De-Archiving, Anarchivizing. A book has already been published by Tirant that brings together the results of the first Colloquium (Cherri and Link, 2024), while the second volume is in press (ed. by López Seoane, Cytryn, Dusaut). 12. For a tour of Millán’s work, see “Una especie de fulgor” by Emilia Casiva (published in the catalogue of the exhibition Paisajes peregrinos at the MAM, 2023). Recently, the MALBA exhibited different exhibitions that allow us to think about the importance of weaving and embroidery in contemporary art. Aó Episodios textiles de las artes visuales en el Paraguay, brings together the work of artists such as Millán, but also Feliciano Centurión, Karina Yaluk, Félix Cardozo, among others. The exhibition Tejer las piedras by the artist Ana Teresa Barbosa. The exhibition dedicated to the artist couple Yente (Eugenia Crenovich) and Juan Del Prete. In this retrospective, we can see how embroidery invades – in the late fifties and early sixties – abstract art. Embroidering the archive, intervening the desert: #InakayalVuelve by Sebastián Hacher 105 Figure 5. Mónica Millán (1996). S-T, parto of the series Viaje por el río. Source: https://museomoderno.org/exposiciones/paisaje-peregrino/ However, in #InakayalVuelve the only artistic reference to embroidery alludes to Feliciano Centurión, to a reference to his work that Hacher finds in an exhibition by the artistic duo Chiachio and Giannone (Figure 6). 13 This reference is very curious, because it not only relates the project to a series of contemporary art in which weaving or embroidery become tech13. Hacher writes in #InakayalVuelve: “[Centurión] was a Paraguayan painter and embroiderer, he mixed ñandutí with embroidery […] in Guillermina’s workshop at Formosa Galería we talked about him again, we saw his works. Centurión embroidered even when he fell into the hospital: he did it on blankets, on whatever he had at hand. All his work is of extreme beauty and delicacy. When I started embroidering for #InakayalVuelve I went to see an exhibition by Chiachio and Giannone at the CCK. In one of the paintings they quoted Centurión. ‘Divine light of the soul’, it said on the shirt of a self-portrait by Leo. It was what struck me most of the entire exhibition.” 112 Leo Cherri This movement begins with gestures of de-archiving: taking the photographic archive out of the museum, restoring its colour and democratising it. Then, by restoring a use to the document through the collective intervention of embroidery, the photographic document is a complex material in which the image is a force of community experience, of paradoxical power of thought and, finally, a force of life that, therefore, returns to the world, to the earth, as a spark of life, or better, as a seed. Hacher calls it planting an image (Figure 8). That is, also restoring the image, making it return to the world. And let the sun and the water of the south be the elements that reveal it. Van Dick Brown is the name of a 19th century technique that reveals images using sunlight. Using sunlight and water from each place, Hacher thinks, is “setting up a process to finally return the photos to the place from which they should never have left” (Hacher, 12 Feb. 2018). It is an “alchemical” process, says Hacher. Figure 8. “Plantar una imagen”. Fuente: https://inakayal.revistaanfibia.com/. For all these reasons, #Inakayalvuelve is a kind of dialectical image that, like a flash of lightning, reveals to us a limit in the archive, a complete Embroidering the archive, intervening the desert: #InakayalVuelve by Sebastián Hacher 113 episteme and an aesthetic-political vanishing point based on knowledge, rituals and aesthetics, in short, dissident and minoritized ways of life. It is a “singular exercise in restitution,” but also about finding in anarchivistic practice the possibility of a community and a power of life.19 BIBLIOGRAPHY AGAMBEN, Giorgio. La potencia del pensamiento. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo, 2007. ALIMONDA, Héctor; FERGUSON, Juan. 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After the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, this exodus became massive and precipitous, as it involved additional hundreds of thousands of people and brought the problem to international attention (Ebel, Ilyushina, 2023; Laff, 2023; Inozemtsev, 2023). As Russian and international governmental apparatuses and institutional archives are unable to produce realistic or effective qualitative or quantitative data on this ongoing process (Beljaeva, 2022; Escape from War, 2023), the best sources for mapping this wave, i.e., its extent, socio-economic, political and cultural profile, destinations and future developments, are the ones that migrants themselves put into digital space. The internet has revolutionized migration, enabling both migrants to self-narrate their experience and scholars from various fields to observe, analyze and describe migration processes, with the results being keenly debated within a relatively recent branch of research called Migration Studies (Preiss 2022; Steffen, Rinken, 2022; Blaagaard et al., 2023). In a bid to grasp the importance of the reflections within this debate, this present work 120 Agnese Accattoli traces a provisional profile of the new wave of Russian migration by using the many forms of self-narrative that migrants produce and disseminate. This approach was also chosen because in the varied spectrum of genres and methods within the collective self-narrative of the Russian diaspora, academic research occupies an important position. Alongside the material published by migrant media, debate on social networks, plus cultural and artistic production, sociological, anthropological and historical self-investigations are the richest, most qualified and up-to-date materials available for describing and understanding the latest round of Russian migration. It is no surprise that this production of digital culture is a high standard and particularly extensive, as Russian migrants are young and educated, being predominantly creatives, academics, activists, students, technicians and entrepreneurs in the digital and communications sectors. Study centers, political coordination networks, voluntary associations, service agencies, artistic and cultural projects, websites, blogs, videos, podcasts of groups and individuals compose the framework of a lively and polyphonic self-narrative in which science and creativity, militancy and solidarity converge. A number of groups has launched projects with both an academic and journalistic approach that are an important tool for self-investigation and can be used as a permanent observatory on migration: The independent research project OutRush, which publishes original content on Russian migration after February 24, 2022. Currently, it has produced about ten studies and manages an ongoing survey in which more than 5,000 people from 60 countries have participated;1 1. All works are signed collectively or individually by a group of young sociologists and political scientists: Emil Kamalov (European University Institute, Firenze), Nika Kostenko (Tel-Aviv University), Ivetta Sergeeva (European University Institute, Firenze) and Margarita Zavadskaja (Finnish Institute of International Affairs, Helsinki) https://outrush.io/ Mapping the Wave: self-narratives from the new Russian Diaspora 121 The NODA project, adopted as the name for the OK Russians NGO since June 2022. It conducted the Ėvakuacija 2022 survey (Evacuation 2022), which was later removed from the web. The website Kartina Mira (The Map of Peace) is also associated with “OK Russians”. It focuses on mapping and networking all anti-war initiatives and support for new Russian migration worldwide, as well as on collecting funds and donations; 2 Re: Russia. Expertise, Analysis, and Policy Network, a portal directed by scholar Kirill Rogov and financed by the Zimin Foundation. It produces and publishes analyses, studies and discussions, not only on migration, which is one of the main themes, but also on Russian politics, economics and contemporary society;3 Exodus-22 Team, an independent social research group that studies current migration from Russia to Georgia and Armenia. This collective of researchers includes sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, data analysts, sociolinguists, journalists and philosophers;4 Ideas for Russia, a research initiative founded in 2022 by the Faculty of Social Sciences (Charles University), the Prague-based Institute of International Relations, and the Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom. The project in partnership with Social Foresight Group has so far produced preliminary sociological research on emigration (Volkova et al., 2023a).5 Mapping Diaspora. Russian Art in Exile, a project curated by the Center for Russian Studies (CSAR) at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice. It serves as 2. https://kovcheg.live/initiatives/ok-russians/; “Karta mira. Russkojazyčnye antivoennye soobščestva” https://mapofpeace.org/ 3. https://re-russia.net/ 4. The project, which before January 2023 was called After24 Research Group, received financial support from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in 2022 https://exodus22team.wordpress.com/ 5. https://nemtsovfund.org/en/our-projects/ideas-for-russia/ 128 Agnese Accattoli that the most tensions arose when the migrants arrived, as Georgians associated the invasion of Ukraine with the 2008 invasion of Georgia, fearing short-term disorder and economic risks (Kakachia, Kandelaki, 2022; Kucera, 2023). After an initial stay in Georgia, some opted for destinations where the perception of Russians was more neutral. One study has investigated their experience from an emotional standpoint, using the concepts of emotional entitlement, which is the right to feel a certain emotion. In this case, Russians feel that they are victims of both the Russian regime and the xenophobia of their host country. The study also includes emotional obligation, which is the obligation to feel a certain emotion. In this case, Russians are ashamed of being Russian nationals, a feeling that it is often reinforced among themselves (Figari Barberis, 2023). This study is merely one example of how the psychological aspects of relokacija are the subject of attention and analysis. Unfortunately, there is no space to discuss this topic here, despite it being a significant aspect of migration connected to the debate on collective guilt and the delicate issue of the relationship between Russians abroad and Ukrainian refugees (Dubrovskij, 2022). Israel is a separate case as it home to a one-million-plus strong Russian-speaking community (Russians and Ukrainians). It encourages Russian-Jewish immigration, i.e. the entry of Russian nationals with up to third-generation Jewish roots, as part of Aliyah, a naturalization procedure also known as new repatriation. The number of Russian migrants trying to move under this procedure has soared in the last two years: 37,000 people applied in 2022, with the trend doubling in the first six months of 2023 (McKernan, Kierszenbaum, 2022; Repatriacija iz Rossii po-prežnemu značitel’na, 2023; Strukova, 2023). It is no surprise that Russians are rushing to find Jewish relatives so that they can obtain citizenship and settle indefinitely in their country of origin. According to some Israeli media, demand has surged further in 2023 because Russians fear both that a new military mobilization is imminent and that the Israeli government may tighten regulations, as it has found that many repatriates do not move to Israel, but stay for the minimum period required to obtain a passport (Klein, 2022; Khanin, 2023; Glezer, 2023). Although the new war between Mapping the Wave: self-narratives from the new Russian Diaspora 129 Israel and Palestine that broke out in October 2023 was a major trauma for newly emigrated Russians, when interviewed many said they did not regret their repatriation and still felt safer than in Russia (Ponomarev, 2023). A similar problem has arisen in Argentina, an increasingly popular destination among fleeing Russians thanks to its liberal immigration policy and a relatively quick naturalization process. An Argentine passport is one of the world’s most highly desirable, as it offers holders visa-free travel to 171 countries (a Russian passport offers 80), thus attracting many Russians in search of an escape plan. Young Russian women go to Argentina to give birth, in order to obtain citizenship for their newborns and passports for their parents (Russian women are flocking to Argentina to give birth, 2023). Birth tourism has become so widespread, with at least 10,000 Russians giving birth in Argentina since the war began, that the local government launched an investigation, finding that many of those who obtained Argentine passports later emigrated elsewhere or returned to Russia. This caused a scandal in the international press in early 2023, leading to widespread anti-Russian sentiment in Argentine public opinion and increased scrutiny of all stages in the migration process (Sauer, 2023; Goñi, 2023). Since then, local media has let migrants tell their stories, changing their image considerably. This has resulted in increased Russian immigration to Argentina, creating young, enterprising, high-income communities with many children, a valuable resource for a country in perpetual economic crisis (Bugarín, 2023). The local LGBTQ+ community has received a surprisingly high number of requests for assistance with asylum applications from Russians fleeing from war and persecution because of their sexual orientation (Escaparon de la homofobia de Putin y se casaron en Argentina, 2022; Pisarenko, Rey, 2023). SELF-PERCEPTION The new wave of Russian migration is not bound by excessively rigid definitions and labels. Although some refuse to call themselves migrants because of the term’s weighty historical legacy, preferring the generic relo- 130 Agnese Accattoli kant, almost all reject the term refugee, which they reserve for Ukrainians fleeing the war in their country, with much debate surrounding the issue of whether certain categories of Russian migrants should claim refugee status or be recognized as refugees (Pascual, 2023; Prashizky, 2023). In their personal narrations, some speak of flight and evacuation, but most resort to more neutral expressions, seeing themselves simply as people who–for the time being – “have left” (Okrest, 2023). Modern-day migrants also generally differentiate themselves from Russia’s historical émigrés, with the only exception being some who compare their experience to the first wave, or White emigration, sparked by the 1917 October Revolution. Major similarities do exist between the two exoduses: political motivation, the confluence of a war, a high intellectual component, and absolute uncertainty about future developments in Russia. It is striking that these events occurred exactly a century ago, and today, as then, many migrants are celebrities from the world of art and culture whom the regime seems to have no interest in retaining; on the contrary, it appears to encourage them to leave. This approach is reminiscent of one of the most symbolic episodes in the White emigration: the departure of the Philosophy Steamer, which was used to deport hundreds of intellectuals from Bolshevik Russia between late 1922 and early 1923. A portion of today’s migrants consider themselves the heirs of the firstwave of intelligentsia; they are rediscovering their texts and emotions and, in spite of themselves, following in their footsteps. One major example of how this group identifies with the younger migrants of the first wave, the “unnoticed generation”, is the album Posle Rossii k 100letiju pervoj ėmigracii iz Rossii / “After Russia”: 100th Anniversary of the First Russian Emigration. “After Russia” refers toMarina Tsvetaeva’s collection ofémigré poems, published inParis in1928, and 100th Anniversary marks the departure date of the Philosophy Steamer. The album itself is a collection of works by 20th-century émigré poets set to music by some of Russia’s most popular contemporary artists, all of whom have migrated since the Mapping the Wave: self-narratives from the new Russian Diaspora 131 war began.8 A large slice of Russia’s new migrants comes from the world of contemporary music, and they are actively disseminating abroad an alternative Russian narrative to the regime’s patriotic, nationalist one (Reshetnikov, Gaufman, Morozov, 2023; Troitsky, 2023). A team of sociologists has conducted research into Russians moving to five non-European countries after the war broke out: Serbia, Kazakhstan, Israel, Armenia and Turkey. Their hypothesis was that despite the extremely varied social, political and economic conditions of these destinations, all of them are developing similar dynamics, i.e. the creation of a migrant nationality, where the aggregating element is not ethnic, national or religious, but an ideal, i.e. opposition to the war (Volkova et al., 2023b). Scholars thus see a partial analogy with the experience of the first wave of émigrés, who all fled a single oppressor, Bolshevism, despite radical differences in their political views. Contemporary migrants also share an idea with the first wave of political exiles, i.e. a possible imminent return to the homeland, which failed to materialize, and the attempt to preserve Russian culture and language for future generations. Today’s migrants, however, are far more versatile when it comes to integrating into their host societies and certainly less tied to the patriotic, nationalist discourse of the past (Gan, 2019). Indeed, the key difference between the diasporic narratives of the two waves lies in their relationship with the past. Whereas the early 20th-century diaspora saw émigrés, especially White ones, yearn for the mythical or heroic Russia they had left behind, today’s migrants have no positive past to idealize. They have spent their childhood or youth in Putin’s Russia, the same Russia they are fleeing, and they share an exasperation with the motherland. Another trademark is their new relationship with Russian language and culture, which they view as cosmopolitan cultural and political spaces residing inside and outside of the Russian Federation. The writer Maxim Osipov, who migrated to the Netherlands in the summer of 2023, launched 8. https://afterrussia.world/ 132 Agnese Accattoli and runs a magazine entitled The Fifth Wave, which publishes content in Russian by Russian and Russian-speaking Ukrainian writers, as well as by others writing from Portugal, France, Germany, and the United States:9 No, it is not really an immigrant journal. In fact, my thought process has changed since we began producing the journal. Since then, my attitude to the Russian language has changed because I realized that the Russian language doesn’t belong to the Russia state or the country. It doesn’t even belong exclusively to the Russian people. It belongs to anyone who thinks, writes, speaks, dreams, reads in Russian. […] The geography is immense. This is testament to the cohesion in the international Russian-speaking community around confronting the war in Ukraine. We are united by the dream of having Russia free and peaceful (Manley, 2023). Note that this discourse is the exact reversal of the regime’s rhetoric about the Russkij mir (Russian world), according to which all Russians, former Russians, Russian émigrés, pro-Russians, Russophones and their descendants, as well as sympathizers and devotees of the Russian language and culture abroad, are a population in solidarity with the motherland (Kozdra, 2018: 63; Pieper, 2020). Vast swaths of migrant activists, including members of environmental, feminist, sexual minority, media and humanitarian associations, as well as politically active individuals, are partaking in a challenging, lively and sometimes bitter debate about their condition and the future of Russia in the digital space of their exile. Sociologists consider it a valuable “political laboratory” in which these exponents of Russian civil society can exercise the right to debate and argument needed for the introduction of democracy, which was and is not practicable either physically or digitally within the Russian Federation (Volkova et al., 2023b). This is an additional similarity with the proverbial quarrelsomeness of the first-wave diaspora, 9. “Fifth Wave” is a magazine published by Van Oorschot Publishers (Amsterdam), that will offer a platform to independent Russian writing https://fifthwavemagazine.com/ Mapping the Wave: self-narratives from the new Russian Diaspora 133 which experimented with its own political laboratory a century ago, but was unable to find common ground. Although post-1917 exodus seems the most akin to its contemporary cousin, comparisons can also be made with what is known as 20th-century Russia’s fourth migratory wave, which occurred in the 1990s as the USSR began to disintegrate. The people of this diaspora, who still reside across the world and work to preserve Russian culture abroad, are more sensitive to the Russian regime’s nationalist discourse about compatriots abroad. It is they, especially those living in the former Soviet republics, who are the key part of the Russian world, which has become a pillar of Putin’s propaganda (Pieper, 2020; Degirmen Dysart, 2021). The Fourth Wave shares some features with the current one–both involved highly qualified migrants–but it is vastly different in terms of their economic status and political orientation: Intergenerational tensions in the emigrant community are growing and have the potential to become increasingly politicized. Many within this new wave of emigrants believe strongly in a feminist agenda, LGBT+ acceptance, openness to ethnic and racial diversity, and decolonization, but these issues are less important for older emigrants, potentially widening the gap between older and younger generations of Russian emigrants (Kostenko et al., 2023). It is significant that the two generations tend not to communicate, despite occupying closely adjacent spaces in their destination countries. In a shorter historical perspective, the current wave, considered by some scholars to be the fifth and by others the sixth, began twenty years ago and intensified in 2011, in the aftermath of mounting political repressions against the regime’s critics (Fomina, 2021). A 2016 independent report examines its causes and characteristics and points to a significant loss of human capital, as well as to a silent, inexorable brain-drain uncaptured by official statistics (Vorob’eva, Grebenjuk, 2016; Muchametšina, 2016). According to a 2019 report, two million people had left Russia since Putin came to power (Herbst and Erofeev, 2019); more recent estimates extend this calculation to five million (Za poslednie 20 let iz Rossii uechali do 5 mln čelovek, 2022). 134 Agnese Accattoli TIMELINE OF THE NEW WAVE Current migrants comprise several main groups who started to leave before the war: people declared by a 2012 Russian Federation law—one that became even more extensive in 2019—as Inoagenty, or “foreign agents”, i.e. citizens whose behavior or actions marked them as political opponents; the LGBTQ+ community, which has been subjected to increasingly persecutory laws, further aggravated since the beginning of the war as Russian politics and the Orthodox Church appealed for “traditional values”; and ajtišniki, or IT workers, who emigrated mainly for socio-economic reasons and, as mentioned above, are a substantial part of the relokanty. The first two categories are particularly disliked by the Putin regime, which has never encouraged them to remain in Russia. The more political opponents and sexual minorities that leave Russia, the more the population spontaneously “cleanses” itself of undesirables (Zavadskaya, 2022b). However, the third category, which has seen a mass exodus in the last few years for economic and socio-political reasons, is human capital that Russia does not want to lose, with the State introducing measures to hold them back that have proved ineffective (Zacharova, 2022; Russia’s IT exodus and the Kremlin’s futile efforts to reverse it, 2023). After the Russian aggression against Ukraine, these three categories continued to migrate, but on a larger scale, with other Russian citizens who had probably never thought of leaving the country joining the exodus at various stages. In Russian journalism, the terms fevraljata (February leavers) and sentjabrjatа (September leavers) have now entered the national lexis to differentiate between Russians who left in two waves. The first immediately followed the start of the war, between February-March 2022, and the second followed the partial mobilization in September 2022 (Birger, 2022). Both waves are referred to as voennaja ėmigracija (“war” or “military” emigration), although the former is considered more political. The first to leave were the most ardent opponents of Putin’s government and its “special military operation”. It included both activists and genuine Mapping the Wave: self-narratives from the new Russian Diaspora 135 dissidents who, at the outbreak of the war and the issuance of the “fake news laws”, risked repressive measures, as well as people who had long harbored discontent with the government and may have thought of leaving Russia in the past. Surveys reveal that the motivations for this wave were not solely political, as some had to relocate their businesses, while others feared the imminent imposition of various war measures, such as mass mobilization, martial law and border closures. Many of these early migrants left hastily with their families; others were later joined by their relatives, with some returning to Russia after a few months only for a portion to leave again, either before or after the mobilization. The second wave comprised mostly young men who left the country to avoid the mobilization announced on September 21, 2022, thereby avoiding becoming mobiki, a derogatory neologism for those conscripted (Vasil’čenko, Kondrašova, 2022). They were less financially well-off than the average fevraljata and, due to their urgent departure, lost additional resources and employment. Nevertheless, they are still more privileged than the average Russian (Kamalov, 2023b: 5). There is also an age distinction between the two waves: the first was more heterogeneous in terms of age and gender than the second, which primarily comprised 18-to-50-year-old males. However, many families of sentjabrjatа joined them shortly or after a few months, and according to surveys, many other families that remained separated plan to reunite abroad. The term relokanty is more commonly used for Russia’s September leavers, as their political motivation was statistically less important than it was for February-March leavers. However, the ideological differences between the two waves are not always so distinct, with many who view mobilization as the decisive reason to expedite their previously hatched escape plans. If these were the two peaks of the exodus, the outflow has never completely stopped. Between the two waves and afterward, people who could prepare to migrate less urgently also began to leave. They accumulated money, prepared visas and documents, and generally organized their lives in a way that would allow them to manage a new existence abroad. Some 136 Agnese Accattoli even traveled to various countries to assess the advantages and disadvantages of the most plausible destinations, obtained foreign visas or even citizenship so that they could migrate at any time should the situation in Russia deteriorate. The general impression is that those who can afford to migrate, but have not yet done so, have prepared an escape plan. COMMUNICATION AND ATTITUDES Communication among the migrant population, as well as with friends and family in Russia, is one of the most discussed topics by observers and protagonists. Technology has revolutionized their migratory experience, almost completely erasing one of its most unpleasant trademark features: isolation. For past waves, regular contact between migrants and the motherland was almost unthinkable, yet today it is the extraordinary and unprecedented ability to communicate with ‘home’ that makes this wave radically different from previous ones. Mark Feigin, a former lawyer, opposition politician and migrant with over two million social-media followers, believes that being able to minimize the distance from Russia, interact with loved ones in real-time, and appeal to a potential audience of listeners or sympathizers, provides crucial support to new migrants, both psychologically and politically. It is through technology, he says, that current migrants can influence compatriots who have remained in Russia more successfully than previous waves (Fejgin, 2022). Indeed, numerous migrant influencers—news outlets, dissidents and activist collectives—communicate with a Russia-based audience, which still follows them, possibly even expanding after the attack on Ukraine (Kotrikadze, 2023). Many of these new migrants, states a recent sociological study devoted to them, are among the country’s best speakers: famous professors, writers, directors, poets, etc. Many of them didn’t need to speak at an international level, but now they can share, and probably will, some alternative Mapping the Wave: self-narratives from the new Russian Diaspora 137 opinions and deeper analyses of the situation in Russia and its potential developments (Kamalov et al., 2023b: 6). Note, however, that the average Russian migrant does not believe long-distance communication to be a particularly effective political tool. Most are in daily, or near-daily contact with their Russia-based family and know that politics is mostly taboo in these conversations. Diverging opinions on the war, which usually pits generations against each other, means that certain subjects are avoided, to some extent increasing uneasiness and a lack of communication, even when every-day and close family matters are being discussed. According to one interviewee for this study, Russian migrants can be divided into two groups when it comes to communication with home. The first comprises the optimists about Russia’s future; they plan to return home in the medium-term and see contact with Russia-based compatriots as essential. The second group is the pessimists, who do not expect Russia to become a ‘normal’ country, have no intention of returning permanently, and have no confidence or interest in communicating with people at home in a bid to influence or convince them. Another major feature of this current wave is communication within migrant communities and with their host countries. Russians abroad have formed cohesive communities and have been able to integrate effectively as they are constantly connected with people experiencing the same difficulties; they have also created virtual social networks, can transfer practical information immediately, thus replacing the word-of-mouth underpinning earlier migrant chains, and have access to mutual assistance. When their online lives are observed, new migrants tend to be hyper-connected, as they use the potential of social media to seek compensation for the disorientation and uncertainty that accompanies the initial phases of their relocation. Their ability to create effective transnational networks, trust one other and unite under shared experiences, though remotely, is a remarkable countertrend to what sociologists have observed in Russian society in recent years, as historian Dmitrij Dubrovskij notes: 144 Agnese Accattoli McKernan, Bethan and Quique Kierszenbaum. “‘It’s driven by fear’: Ukrainians and Russians with Jewish roots flee to Israel”, The Guardian, 16/10/2022 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/16/ukrainians-russians-jews-jewish-roots-flee-israel-aliyah Medvedev, Sergej. 2019 Medvedev, Sergej. “Pjataja volna”, Svoboda, 06/03/2019 https://www.svoboda. org/a/29805879.html Mkrtčan, Nikita and Julija Florinskaja. 2018 Mkrtčan, Nikita and Julija Florinskaja. “Kvalificirovannaja migracija v Rossii: balans poter’ i priobretenij”, Monitoring ėkonomičeskoj situacii v Rossii. Tendecii i vyzovy social’no-ėkonomičeskogo razvitija, 2018, 1 (62), Janvar’, 16. Muchametšina, Elena. 2016 Muchametšina, Elena. “Iz Rossii uezžaet v razy bol’še ljudej, čem učityvaet statistika”, Vedomosti, 06/10/2016 https://www.vedomosti.ru/politics/articles/2016/10/06/659896-iz-rossii-uezzhaet Okrest, Dmitrij. 2023 Okrest, Dmitrij. “Otličija voln migracii: do sobytij 24 fevralja, vesennaja, mobilizacionnaja”, Podcast Oni uechali, 2, 04/03/2023 https://www.forbes.ru/podcasts/oni-uehali/485665-otlicia-voln-migracii-do-sobytij-24-fevrala-vesennaa-mobilizacionnaa Pascual, Julia. 2023 Pascual, Julia. “Russians who refused to fight in Ukraine are eligible for political asylum in France”, Le Monde, 23/07/23 https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/ article/2023/07/23/russians-who-refused-to-fight-in-ukraine-are-eligiblefor-political-asylum-in-france_6063599_7.html Pieper, Moritz. 2020 Pieper, Moritz. “Russkiy Mir: The Geopolitics of Russian Compatriots Abroad”, Geopolitics, 2020, vol. 25, 3, 756-779. Pisarenko, Natacha and Débora Rey. 2023 Pisarenko, Natacha and Débora Rey. “A growing number of LGBTQ+ Russians seek refuge from war, discrimination in Argentina”, Associated Press, 27/05/2023 https://apnews.com/article/argentina-russia-lgbt-gay-lesbian-refugees-9141d139da2ec8c984583ca471f64cba Mapping the Wave: self-narratives from the new Russian Diaspora 145 Ponomarev, Kirill. 2023 Ponomarev, Kirill. “Driven From Home by War, Russian Emigres in Israel Resolve to Stay Despite Hamas Attacks”, The Moscow Times, Oct. 12, 2023 https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/10/12/driven-from-home-by-warrussian-emigres-in-israel-resolve-to-stay-despite-hamas-attacks-a82726 Prashizky, Anna. 2023 Prashizky, Anna. “‘Living in limbo’: Digital narratives of migrants fleeing Russia after the Russian invasion of Ukraine”, First Monday, Vol. 28, 6-5, June 2023 https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/13174/11039 Preiss, Carlotta. 2022 Preiss, Carlotta. “Digital Migration Infrastructures”, in: Peter Scholten (Eds). Introduction to Migration Studies. Cham: Springer, 2022, 99–109. Reshetnikov, Anatoly, Lisa Gaufman and Viacheslav Morozov. 2023 Reshetnikov, Anatoly, Lisa Gaufman and Viacheslav Morozov. “Can music help Russians unite against the regime?”, Russia.Post, 22/04/2023 https://russiapost. info/culture/music_help Rofe, Žan. 2022 Rofe, Žan. “Rosstat: S načala goda iz RF uechali 419 tysjač čelovek”, DW, 06/09/2022 https://www.dw.com/ru/rosstat-s-nacala-goda-iz-rf-uehali-419-tysac-celovek/a-63026596 Rybakova, Tatyana. 2023 Rybakova, Tatyana. “‘Come Back, We Will Forgive Everything’. Are the Departed IT Specialists Ready to Go Back to Russia?”, Russia.Post, 07/07/2023 https:// russiapost.info/society/it_back Sauer, Pjotr. 2023 Sauer, Pjotr. “‘Everyone is looking for options’: Russian women fly to Argentina to give birth”, The Guardian, 03/01/2023 https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2023/jan/03/everyone-is-looking-for-options-russian-women-fly-toargentina-to-give-birth Steffen, Pötzschke and Sebastian Rinken (Eds.). 2022 Steffen, Pötzschke and Sebastian Rinken (Eds.). “Migration Research in a Digitized World. Using Innovative Technology to Tackle Methodological Challenges”. Cham: Springer, 2022. 146 Agnese Accattoli Strukova, Tat’jana. 2023 Strukova, Tat’jana. “Čislo repatriantov v Izrail’ iz Rossii vyrastet v dva raza po itogam 2023”, 31/08/2023 https://rtvi.com/news/chislo-repatriantov-v-izrailiz-rossii-vyrastet-v-dva-raza-po-itogam-2023-goda/ Tinčurin, Artem et al. 2021 Tinčurin, Artem, Tat’jana Berlina, Elizaveta Jaznevič and Darina Rogackina. “Ėmigracija 2000-ch: kuda i počemu uezžali in Rossii”, Esli byt’ točnym, 05/10/2021 https://tochno.st/materials/emigratsiya-2000-kh Tofanjuk, Elena and Julja Sapronova. 2022 Tofanjuk, Elena and Julja Sapronova. “Rossiju posle 21 sentjabrja pokinuli okolo 700.000 graždan”, Forbes, 04/10/2022 https://www.forbes.ru/society/478827rossiu-posle-21-sentabra-pokinuli-okolo-700-000-grazdan Troitsky, Artemy. 2023 Troitsky, Artemy. “Almost All Famous Artists Have Left or Will Leave, and Those Who Remain Will Be Blacklisted and Banned”, by Aleksei Medved, Russia. Post, 23/05/2023 https://russiapost.info/culture/troitsky_interview van Brugen, Isabel. 2023 van Brugen, Isabel. “Kremlin Threatens Returning Russian Citizens with Exile— in Russia”, Newsweek, 11/10/2023 https://www.newsweek.com/kremlin-russians-exile-ukraine-war-1833905 Vasil’čenko Vitalij and Nataša Kondrašova. 2022 Vasil’čenko Vitalij and Nataša Kondrašova. “Mobiki”, Meduza, 2022 https://us10. campaign-archive.com/?u=ff4a009ba1f59d865f0301f85&id=8181164fa8 Vock, Ido. 2023 Vock, Ido. “Finland to close entire Russian border after migrant surge”, BBC News, 28/11/2023 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-67555626 Volkova, Maria et al. 2023a Volkova, Maria, Kseniia Pavlenko, Anna Kuleshova, Alexei Voronkov and Dmitry Kokorin. “New Russian Diasporas outside the European Union”, Working paper, July 2023 https://nemtsovfund.org/cp/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/ REPORT_Ideas_for_Russia_New_Diasporas_working_paper.pdf Volkova, Maria et al. 2023b Mapping the Wave: self-narratives from the new Russian Diaspora 147 Volkova, Marija, Anna Kulešova and Ditrij Dubrovskij. “Lico ėmigrantskoj nacional’nosti” by Aleksandr Sergeev, T-invariant, 23/08/2023 https://www.t-invariant.org/2023/08/litso-emigrantskoj-natsionalnosti/ Vorob’eva, Ol’ga and Aleksandr Grebenjuk. 2016 Vorob’eva, Ol’ga and Aleksandr Grebenjuk. “Ėmigracija iz Rossii v konce XX– načale XXI veka. Analitičeskiij doklad”, Komitet graždanskich iniciativ, Moskva 2016 http://www.demoscope.ru/weekly/2016/0701/biblio02.php Zacharova, Nina. 2022 Zacharova, Nina. “‘Pri putinizme my žit’ ne soglasny’. Massovaja ėmigracija ITkadrov”, Sibreal, 21/04/2022 https://www.sibreal.org/a/massovaya-emigratsiya-it-kadrov/31797774.html Žadanova, Ol’ga. 2023 Žadanova, Ol’ga. “Novaja russkaja ėmigracija: kto, kuda i začem uezžaet iz Rossii segodnja”, Podcast Jura, my vsё uznali!, 18/03/2023 https://open.spotify. com/episode/3n2gfxhNFRaSmrK8BFzE5U Zavadskaya, Margarita. 2022a Zavadskaya, Margarita. “Čem nynešnjaja volna ėmigracii otličaetsja ot drugich? Predstaviteli kakich professij uechali? Sobirajutsja li migranty vernutsja?”, Meduza, 31/07/2022 https://meduza.io/feature/2022/07/31/chem-nyneshnyaya-volna-emigratsii-otlichaetsya-ot-drugih-predstaviteli-kakih-professiy-uehali-sobirayutsya-li-migranty-vernutsya Zavadskaya, Margarita. 2022b Zavadskaya, Margarita. “Anti-war wave of emigration: should I stay or should I go?”, Riddle, 25/07/2022 https://ridl.io/anti-war-wave-of-nbsp-emigrationshould-i-nbsp-stay-or-nbsp-should-i-nbsp-go/ Zavadskaya, Margarita et al. 2023 Zavadskaya, Margarita, Veronica Kostenko, Emil Kamalov and Ivetta Sergeeva. 2023 “New activists or new ‘common folk?’ The evolution of political activism among Russian anti-war emigrants”, Russia.Post, 15/01/2023 https:// russiapost.info/society/common_folk Author not identified. “Escaparon de la homofobia de Putin y se casaron en Argentina: ‘En Rusia vivíamos con miedo, acá somos libres’”, Infobae, 15/07/2022 https:// 148 Agnese Accattoli www.infobae.com/lgbt/2022/07/15/huyeron-de-la-homofobia-de-putin-y-secasaron-en-argentina-en-rusia-viviamos-con-miedo-aca-somos-libres/ Author not identified. “Escape from War: New data puts the number ofRussians who have left atmore than 800,000 people”, Re: Russia, 28/07/2023 https://re-russia.net/en/review/347/ Author not identified. “Finland Joins Baltics, Poland In Shutting Border To Russian Tourists”, RadioFreeEurope, 30/09/2022 https://www.rferl.org/a/ finland-bans-russians-border-shut-visas/32058939.html Autor no identificado. “Proekt Ok Russians: iz Rossii uechali bolee 300 tysjač čelovek”, Romb, 25/03/2022 https://romb.tv/ok_migration/ Author not identified. “Repatriacija iz Rossii po-prežnemu značitel’na: bolee 5000 čelovek v janvare”, Lechaim, 22/02/2023 https://lechaim.ru/news/repatriatsiya-iz-rossii-po-prezhnemu-znachitelna-bolee-5000-chelovek-v-yanvare/ Author not identified. “Russian women are flocking to Argentina to give birth. Here’s why”, Holod, 14/03/2023 https://holod.media/en/2023/03/14/give-birth-in-argentina/ Author not identified. “Šadaev: programma obratnoj relokacii dlja IT-spacialistov ne potrebovalas’”, Delovoj Peterburg, 20/06/2023 https://www.dp.ru/a/2023/06/20/ shadaev-programma-obratnoj Author not identified. “Russia’s IT exodus and the Kremlin’s futile efforts to reverse it”, The Bell, 24/01/2023 https://en.thebell.io/russia-s-it-exodus-andthe-kremlin-s-futile-efforts-to-reverse-it/ Author not identified. “Za poslednie 20 let iz Rossii uechali do 5 mln čelovek. Čto issledovanija govorjat o novoj volne ėmigracii”, Esli byt’ točnym, 04/03/2022 https://tochno.st/materials/za-poslednie-20-let-iz-rossii-uekhali-do-5-mlnchelovek-chto-issledovaniya-govoryat-o-novoy-volne-emigratsii Theses on a Fantasy of Herstory Cecilia Palmeiro What if our sense that we already know what feminist history is blocks the divine madness, the inspired arousal, that is precisely an encounter with the unknown? What if we rewrote feminism’s history as the story of a circulating critical passion, slipping metonymically along a chain of contiguous objects, alighting for a while in an unexpected place, accomplishing a task, and then moving on? Joan Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History INTRODUCTION In times of massive loss, when millions of lives have been lost to the Covid pandemic, and when the devastation of bodies-territories reached the highest peak in the world’s history, the work of memory becomes crucial, as not only it helps make sense of the present and past, but also to imagine a possible future to shape this present, particularly from a feminist perspective. The difficult task of imagining any future in a moment of such apocalyptic sentiment, allows to create (at least partial, situated) utopias and claims for here and now fueled by desire as a revolutionary force, one that needs to be fed and nurtured, not as lack but as potency. A feminist memory of the present, of this present, is a way to staying with the trouble and not assuming that this is the end and that nothing else matters (Haraway 2016). As Wendy Brown suggests in her book In the Ruins of Neoliberalism. The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West, sentiments of fatalism and 150 Cecilia Palmeiro nihilism are politically very dangerous as they are the subjective foundations of the new far right social movements, both from below and from above. At this point, the question of desire as a force of submission or insurrection becomes central. In her book Spheres of Insurrection: Notes on Decolonizing the Unconscious, Suely Rolnik formulates the concept of the colonial-capitalistic unconscious as the subjective micropolitical foundation for the colonial capitalistic or pimpistic regime (translational financialized capitalism). In her book, she advances that in contexts of general destabilization by crisis, certain practices might orient desire in an active way, exploring unknown paths for the flow of life, resulting in a micropolitical mutation which is the first step towards any creative political practice; or, to the contrary, desire might be reactively oriented towards the repetition of traditional forms which result in anguish, fear, disease and hate -and therefore, reactive politics. Memory plays a fundamental role in the construction of subjectivity, therefore the experimentation with collective forms of memory might interfere in the process by which subjectivity is reduced to individuality in a neoliberal sense. The shaping of collective memory has been a central feature of the emergence of a new political subject -the Feminist Tideand is crucial to reorient desire in an active way towards the perception of the germs of worlds to come, to pollinize the seeds of revolutionary times in a dark present, in which we need to mourn and transform the energy of mourning into energies of invention and struggle. The Brazilian resistance against the coup posits in a poetic form: LUTO e LUTA (mourning and struggle). From the perspective of the experience in the Ni Una Menos collective and movement, the task of collective mourning for those victimized by machista violence pollinized the seeds for a new feminist political imagination and allowed to reorient the libidinal energies towards the transformation of the present, but also towards the perception that future is possible as a collective invention and creation -not as deferral of the proper revolutionary time that never comes, but as the concrete transformation of our lives here and now. This collective reorientation of desire is probably one of the most critical tasks of this historical time, and Theses on a Fantasy of Herstory 151 the lessons coming from the recent feminist experience might provide perspectives to the debates on the destruction of loss. THE GLOBAL FEMINIST TIDE Since 2015, feminisms around the world have caused the earth to tremble. Women and those with feminized bodies have been composing a collective political subject through the organization of oceanic demonstrations across the planet. While some scholars and activists talk about a fourth wave, this new subject recognizes itself as a Global Feminist Tide, la marea in Spanish and in Italian, as it was originally formulated. For its massive and radical character, the period extending from the emergence of the Ni Una Menos movement in Argentina in 2015 constitutes a distinct historical era in terms of political struggles. The Ni Una Menos collective and movement surged when a group of writers and journalists joined efforts to create a new political language to contest the narratives reproducing gender-based violence, advanced by the media andpublic opinion while facing an alarming increase infemicide rates. In our understanding, the cruelty of those femicides and the narratives representing them in the media were paving the way for a process of conservative restoration of privileges that were threatened by a decade of progressive politics in Latin America. This was the emergence of the Ni Una Menos collective and social movement, first as an attempt to politicize femicide and to install that concept in the public discourse mobilizing affects of the multitudes, from mourning into an aggressive celebration of collective enjoyment, of self-exploration of our capacities and of subjective expansion, mobilizing feminized bodies from the screens into the streets to experiment our own potency as desire to change everything1. After promoting the hashtag #NiUnaMenos on social 1. Written during the age of the feminist tide, my reflections on this process are in permanent dialogue with my comrade Veronica Gago’s analysis in her 152 Cecilia Palmeiro networks, which became a Trending Topic and went viral, the collective called for a rally on June 3rd 2015.That protest surprisingly gathered 300.000 people in Buenos Aires and 500.000 all over Argentina. It was the biggest feminist rally in Latin American history so far, and the first appearance of the Feminist Tide. Soon after that, massive demonstrations were held around the world through a process that I call political translation2. In 2016, the global feminist tide was consolidating itself when we took the next step and started a radical new practice, the women’s (later called feminist) strikes. First in Poland, later in Argentina, and later all together, the practice of the strike, re-functionalized from the heritage of the workers movement, meant a leap in terms of political intervention in the realm of capitalist production. In March 8 2017 we organized the first International Women’s Strike in which 55 countries participated, in 2018 we changed its name to International Feminist Strike with 65 countries taking part, in 2019 with 100 countries and in 2020 with 110 countries in it, continuing this practice into 2021, in spite of -but also becausethe pandemic. book The Feminist International. How to change everything (London, Verso, 2020). Gago elaborates al alternative theory of power coming from below, from the bodies as revolutionary impulses. “To embrace feminist potencia is to vindicate the indeterminacy of what one can do, of what we can do—to acknowledge that we do not know what we’re capable of until we experience the displacement of the limits that we’ve been made to believe and obey. (…) feminist potencia is the potencia of the body that is always individual and collective and that also always exists in variation, that is, as singular. However, feminist potencia also expands the body due to the way it is reinvented by women’s struggles, feminist struggles, and the struggles of sexual dissidences that time and time again update that notion of potencia. (…) feminist potencia is desiring capacity. This implies that desire is not the opposite of the possible, but rather the force that drives what is perceived as possible, collectively and in each body.” (Gago 2020: 15) 2. Palmeiro, C. “Ni Una Menos and the Politics of Translation”, Spheres, N6 2020. Available at: https://spheres-journal.org/wp-content/uploads/spheres-6_Palmeiro.pdf Theses on a Fantasy of Herstory 153 This short account of the history of the Feminist Strikes reveals the continuous process of growth and radicalization of this movement as the strikes are the most massive political events in history at a global level, mobilizing four million in Chile and six million in Spain in the 2020 edition. But the Feminist Strikes are also a process through which the feminist movement has expanded its reach to all social classes, ethnicities, nation - alities, identities and generations, intervening in the order of production, demonstrating the relevance of feminized labor in the capitalist economy, mapping reproductive labor as a source of capitalist accumulation, and fueling struggles against machista violence in every order of life. Each year we have focused on different aspects of gender-based violence in order to interrupt it. First we focused on femicide and sexual violence, continuing by revealing the connections of these forms of violence to exploitation and extraction, of bodies and territories, of raw material, labor force, and even desire; then we analyzed the specific form in which the State’s external debt produces private debt reinforcing familialism and “family values” as a façade for the privatization of the State’s provision and arranges a structure of obedience for women (Cavallero and Gago, 2021); then we focused on the subsequent crisis of social reproduction while demanding the legalization of abortion (which we pushed for and achieved in Argentina on December 2020), or defending reproductive rights in places where those rights are in danger, and further on demanding food sovereignty and health sovereignty from a feminist perspective, now in the context of a crisis of human life itself. Collective creation has been a central part of the foundation of the Tide, but the process of the feminist strikes unleashed an unprecedented collective creativity and an extraordinary invention capacity coming from below. The strike itself shows the expansion of the political imagination of the possible, and to be practiced, it requires new forms of conceptualization, communication and agitation. Since then, a collective radical imagination was emancipated from the realm of art and applied to the creation of experimental forms of community and the alternative