Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies - Journal articles
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Item On plants and regimes of waste: Reading Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s A visão das plantas in times of systemic collapse(Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA), 2025) Garrido Castellano, CarlosAbstract: This article engages with plants and wasted lives in A visão das plantas [ The Vision of Plants ] to make sense of the role of ‘contained’ and ‘looked after’ nature as a platform for colonial governmentality and postcolonial dispossession within and beyond the Portuguese-speaking world. Examining how ‘cleaned’ and ‘natural’ environments were the condition of possibility of a system of extraction that kept the gendered and racialized bodies of the ‘cleaners’ out of sight, this essay urges for a critical redefinition of coloniality based on plants and interspecies entanglements. It analyses how domestic and physical labour was mobilized and displaced as part of a regime of accumulation that relied on a logistics of waste (including disposable and extractive nature and wasted lives) to materialize a universalist logic of value. Waste and nature, contained unruliness, and suppressed surplus, come together in Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s A visão das plantas , the main object of study in this piece. I explore how the journey of Celestino in the novel echoes a kind of redemption that walled natural spaces offer in Françoise Vergès’s apt reconceptualization of more-than-human regimes of waste and value. The attentiveness with which the former man-of-arms looks after the garden space reveals the underside of an anthropocenic pastoral, in which recourse to the land and the flora can be strategically managed to generate a safeguarded postcolonial amnesia.Item Batida and the politics of sonic agency in Afro-Lisboa(Routledge, 2023-12-14) Raposo, Otávio; Garrido Castellano, Carlos; Irish Research Council; Fundação para a Ciência e a TecnologiaThis article examines the politics of sonic agency in batida, the most successful recent electronic musical style emerging from Lisbon’s outskirts in Portugal. The genealogies of batida are closely linked to the emergence of a young generation of Djs do Gueto [Ghetto Djs] who unabashedly claim their right of belonging as major players within the Portuguese acoustic and cultural fields. We analyse batida as a space for agency and affirmative mobilisation of Afro-Portuguese populations. Two elements are of special interest: the digital recombination to celebrate the irreducibility of Afro-Portuguese experience, and the way in which racial exclusion, urban segregation, and racism are problematised through the act of inscribing the neighbouring sounds of peripheral neighbourhoods in their music. Through the examination of these two elements, we aim to position sonic agency as a central space in the configuration of racial politics and processes of nation building in the Portuguese case.Item In process: The Catalan independence movement in on-stage translation(The Anglo-Catalan Society, 2019-09-21) Buffery, HelenaThis article focuses on aesthetic responses to what has come to be called “El Procés”, tracing different ways in which the recent evolution of nationalist politics in Catalonia has been represented on contemporary Catalan stages (including the Teatre Lliure, the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya, the Biblioteca de Catalunya and the Teatre Romea) through works by dramatists such as Sergi Belbel, Victoria Szpunberg, Narcís Comadira and Marc Rosich, and directors such as Lluís Pasqual, Xavier Albertí, Joan Yago and Oriol Broggi. After reflection on the limitations of dramatic forms for mediating the complexity of debates and positionings, alongside the ambivalent deployment and treatment of the theatrical in relation to the Catalan Independence movement, I go on to analyse different ways in which the sociopolitical trajectory of the pro-independence movement has been represented or re-framed on stage, ranging from attempts by Catalan dramatists to provide a space for negotiation of the velocity and impact of socio-cultural change, the use of on-stage translations from other, international contexts to mediate and reflect critically upon the local case for and against secession, to ephemeral experiments with documentary theatre in order to explore alternative ways of performing the relationship between the personal and the political. Placed in counterpoint with the overarching politics of framing and translation generated in the build-up to 1 October 2017 and its aftermath, these stagings emerge as dynamic environments of memory for past and more recent cultural trauma narratives.Item Into the Woods: Translation and the transnational transmission of trauma on minority language stages(The Anglo-Catalan Society, 2022-02-25) Buffery, HelenaThis article approaches contemporary Catalan theatre as a translation zone, in which subjective limits are negotiated and identities (dis)articulated in the process. Focusing on works directed by Calixto Bieito and Oriol Broggi, who, despite their many differences, are known for engaging with interlingual and intercultural translation in the creative process, often beckoning overt reflection on the relationship between languages, environment and identity, the article excavates what three particular plays, Forests (2012), Incendis (2012) and Boscos (2017), all based on translations from more hegemonic languages, reveal about the place of minority languages on the global stage and about looking at the world from a minority-language perspective. In so doing, the article seeks to go beyond the more optimistic and celebratory readings of previous work on Catalonia-in-translation and to attend to the ways in which the asymmetries faced by minority languages in multilingual settings result in, or are experienced as loss, violence and/or trauma. Via diverse processes of translation, languages such as Catalan provide sensitive lenses for the transmission of narratives of transnational trauma, as a direct result of the daily negotiations of place, relatedness and resilience that they demand for survival. The title of the article, “Into the woods,” is intended to be read both literally and figuratively, in recognition of the increasing attention to eco-critical and environmental concerns in contemporary Catalan theatre and of the ways in which renewed attention to ecological survival often goes hand in hand with a commitment to language ecology. On a more figurative level, the article follows the cues provided by the metaphorical wordplay about woods and trees in the reception of Bieito’s Forests and Broggi’s Boscos in order to address the question of what the fact of different languages enables and prevents us from seeing—and what we can learn from making the effort to look at the world multilingually from the perspective of a minority language speaker.Item The linguistic landscapes of contemporary Catalan theatre(2022) Buffery, HelenaThe concept of linguistic landscape emerged from ethno- and sociolinguistics to refer to the visibility of the diverse languages that co-exist in a defined territory and the necessity to map the changing relationship between them. Within the field of Translation Studies, it has been combined with eco-critical approaches to rethink the complex connections between languages, cultures, and territories, always recognising the vulnerability of minority languages in the context of globalization. In this initial contribution, I want to explore the changes in the linguistic landscapes of contemporary Catalan theatre, linking them to the triple crisis — socioeconomic, political, and environmental — which has been experienced with particular intensity between 2008 and 2021. I will look at three aspects of these ecolinguistic changes: 1. The presence and visibility of plurilingual dramaturgies; 2. The treatment and recovery of invisible or marginal figures from Catalan theatrical tradition (above all as relates to dialectal diversity); 3. The role of translation from other traditions (especially as regards the representation of linguistic conflict and minority cultural identities). El concepte de paisatge lingüístic prové de l’etnolingüística i la sociolingüística per referir-se a la visibilitat de les diverses llengües que conviuen en un territori determinat i la necessitat de cartografiar-ne la relació. En el marc dels Estudis de Traducció, s’ha combinat amb qüestions ecològiques per repensar la complexitat de la connexió entre llengües, cultures i territoris, tot reconeixent la vulnerabilitat de les llengües minoritàries dins dels marcs actuals de la globalització. En aquesta primera aproximació, voldria explorar els canvis en els paisatges lingüístics del teatre català contemporani, tot relacionant-los amb la triple crisi —socioeconòmica, política i ecològica— que es va viure amb intensitat entre els anys 2008 i el 2021. Tractaré tres aspectes d’aquests canvis ecolingüístics: 1. La presència i la visibilitat de dramatúrgies plurilingües; 2. El tractament i la recuperació de figures invisibles o marginades del patrimoni teatral (sobretot, pel que fa a la diversitat dialectal); 3. El paper de la traducció d’altres tradicions (especialment pel que fa a la representació de conflictes lingüístics i identitats/cultures minoritàries).