Lines of Research

Line 1: Narratives, Diasporas, Memory and History

In this line of research, the aim is to form an articulate set of researches which is focused on the understanding the destination of the literary field when it is located in the context of borders or when it is moving towards its borders. In this sense, the broad, multifaceted and rhizomatic polysemy of the “border” is obviously considered, mainly in its epistemological, social and geopolitical perspective. Thus, we are interested in continuing to test the viability of theories and dialectic methods which, instead of (just) making a relation between the literatures, also reveals the relations between these literatures and their cultural, political, social, historioraphical and economic concreteness.

In this scenario, it is possible to include investigations that are able to unveil the reach of the impacts from the past (memory, narratives, documents, journeys) onto the contemporary, thus creating a double series of challenges. Hence, researchers of this line of research are also interested in the production, expression and dynamics of the alterities in the great ethnic and anthropological scenario of Latin America.

Line 2: Themes, Images, Transculturality

This line of research is dedicated to the cross sectional comparative study of themes paradigmatic images recurring in the aesthetic-cultural Latin American production, with special attention to the relations between the Insular Caribbean and the continent. Our aim is to determine the transcultural forms of the aesthetic representation of society and the problems which are typical in the region, noticeably the theme-form confluence among authors, but also the confluence of literature and other types of art.

The studies which are developed in this line of study are aimed at comprehending the forms through which transculturality is manifested in the context of the literary production in the continent, with associated spaces for the analysis of multimodal languages (oral literature, visual literature, intermedia productions). The comparative methodological perspective of this line of research has artistic manifestations as its object, including those through words, sounds, images or in the digital form, in their poetic dimensions as ways of inventing possible worlds.