SHAPE · Sharing the Pronoun. Extreme violence, social resistance and the shaping of cultural memory in Spanish American contemporary documentary poetry

SHAPE proposes a new cultural approach to the study of 21st century Spanish American documentary poetry as a form of social and community resistance in the shaping of a shared memory about extreme violence in Latin America. This is a peculiar type of poetry using in the very body of the poem a variety of ethnographic, historical (archive texts, chronicles), visual, audio-visual, and virtual documents that have not been created by the poet. The use of those texts in an intimate and non-mimetic code such as poetry determines a stylistic short-circuit which has developed, in different forms, across all Latin America. In this context, documentary poetry has been commonly used to verbalise the tragic consequences of the systemic institutional and non-institutional forms of violence against women, migrants, indigenous or LGBTQ+ people. In spite of the key social function this poetry has assumed in Latin America in recent years, no comprehensive study has been produced on it yet. SHAPE aims to fill this gap by building a model of interpretation of documentary poetry not only as an aesthetic expression, but also as a powerful tool to preserve and construct social memory about suffering. To that aim, SHAPE intends to adopt an interdisciplinary methodological approach involving literature, cultural studies, cultural history, and ethnography, in order to investigate how this poetry contributes to the processes of resistance to extreme violence. Due to the intertextual nature of documentary poetry, my expertise in intertextuality and genre contamination is a key factor for the successful completion of the project. The aim is to generate a new cross-cultural conceptual reflection on how to use literature to resist new forms of racial and social discrimination. Thanks to this MSCA grant, I will strengthen my academic profile by acquiring the relevant competences to offer a new wider perspective on how to view the problem of social and institutional violence in Latin America.