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

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. The aim is to generate a new cross-cultural conceptual reflection on how to view the problem of social and institutional violence in Latin America and how to use literature to resist new forms of racial and social discrimination. The project will be developed in collaboration with Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

1. Balam Rodrigo: "Libro centroamericano de los muertos", Mexico 2018. This book investigates the violence suffered by Central American migrants going to the US by formally articulating poetry as a palimpsest of colonial chronicles
2. Jacqueline Goldberg: "Nosotros los salvados", Venezuela 2013. This work creates poems from the archive testimonies of Jewish refugees survivors to the Holocaust
3. Viviana Ayilef: "Cautivos", Argentina 2013. This book discusses institutional violence against citizens by creating a complex intertextual network of articles from the news and products of social mobilisation
4. Estefanía Ciro Rodríguez: "Artefactos explosivos inmateriales", Colombia 2018. This work comes from the author’s ethnographic studies about the resistance history of cocaleras (women working in the Colombian coca fields)
5. Cristina Rivera Garza: "La imaginación pública", Mexico 2015. In this work, the author discusses violence against women using a collective work (Wikipedia pages) to describe her physical illnesses

6. Luis Felipe Fabre: "La sodomía en la Nueva España", Mexico 2010. This book creates a relationship between the voice of the poems and some extracts of the Colonial Inquisition documents about tortures and executions against homosexuals
7. Hugo García Manríquez: "Anti-Humboldt. Una Lectura del Tratado de Libre Comercio de América del Norte", Mexico 2014. In this book, the author tackles the problem of the social violent impact of NAFTA by using the text of the law to create a poetical counter-text, which questions the legal text by using its own language
8. Paul Guillén: “Sisma: Poema documental”, Perú 2022. Starting with the Pisco earthquake that occurred in 2007 as a point of departure, in this experimental book, the author creates a complex relationship with the poem and a variety of documents (press release, testimony, pictures) to explore Peruvian identity and history, with a specific focus on Fujimori dictatorship as well as violence against migrant and indigenous people