Episode 18: Altermundos in the Comics of Chile, Argentina, and Brazil

Posted Date: March 6, 2021

Episode Description: In a conversation with LAC member Camila Gutiérrez (Penn State), Javiera Irribarren (Columbia University) discusses how contemporary graphic narratives from Chile, Argentina and Brazil offer non-western views on the interactions between species, time, and spaces. She argues that South American artists make a decolonial move in these comics; questioning historical and contemporary conflicts. In these materials, Irribarren finds powerful alter-native critiques of the current neoliberal State, which she describes as driven by politics of consumption in the age of the Anthropocene or Capitalocene. Irribarren also talks about her experience using these materials in the Spanish-language classroom at Columbia.

Guest Biography

Javiera Irribarren is a Ph.D. student in Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. She holds an M.A. in Literature and a double Bachelor of Arts in Hispanic Literature and Aesthetics by Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Her main research interests are Graphic and Transmedia Narratives, New Media, and Latin American Speculative Fiction. She has collaborated in chilean Fondecyt research projects such as “Una cartografía de lo audiovisual en la literatura latinoamericana (1915-2015)”, and “Imaginarios sociales en la ciencia ficción latinoamericana reciente: espacio, sujeto-cuerpo y tecnología”. Currently, she teaches the advanced Spanish course “Graphic Narratives of the Southern Cone”. She is also a member of RING, the Network of Researchers of Graphic Narrative in Latin America.

 

Project Description:

Speculative fictions, according to Marek Oziewicz (2017), are stories related to narratives that come from minorities that show alternative perspectives to western hegemonic discourses. This movement shapes possible worlds, in a non-mimetic way and through various media and hybrid formats, and whose narratives have been recently –and extensively– developed in South America. This work aims to map recent Argentinian, Chilean, and Brazilian graphic narratives that offer non-western perspectives through which imagining what Cathryn Merla-Watson (2011; 2017) called ‘altermundos’ –the world-building attempts to create a liminal third space that intends to subvert the past, rethink the present, and hopefully face a different future within and from decolonial perspectives. 

Whether by rewriting history to criticize official narratives or engaging with indigenous perspectives whose agency has not been accounted for, these speculative proposals emerge from ‘alter-native’ societies (Gaspar de Alba, 1998), where the ingrown necropolitics overshadows non-hegemonic forms of understanding our pasts, presents, and futures. Moreover, these graphic narratives attempt to offer non-western forms of knowledge to comprehend the interaction between species, time, and spaces, engaging in a decolonial effort to show how these ‘third spaces’ question historic and contemporary conflicts. They have embedded a powerful critique of the current neoliberal state driven by the politics of endless consumption in the age of the Anthropocene or Capitalocene, as Jason Moore discusses (2015).

Materials Mentioned in the Episode: 

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