active research projects

Florecimiento Colectivo: Toward a Literary History of Indigenous Literatures in Abiayala

Florecimiento Colectivo offers a comparative literary history of three concurrent waves of 20th and 21st century Indigenous literary production as they give rise to the current “florecimiento” [flourishing or “boom”] in the lenguas originarias of Abiayala, or the hemispheric Americas. I focus on how, despite the particularities & irreducible differences of these native languages, works written by them and in diaspora tend to share a relational poetics that conceives of the earth as a living being and, therefore, part of the community. Focusing on major bilingual works written in Náhuatl, Quechua, Guaraní and Mapundungun, this study periodizes the "florecimiento" in relation to a watershed moment in contemporary Indigenous cultural production: the 1994 Zapatista Uprising. The book's chapters explore how Zapatista discourse, and cultural production associated with other key struggles for Indigenous rights, involved a wide range of literary responses, in diverse languages, inspired by an insurgent emphasis on "la flor de la palabra."  Along the way, the project documents the networks that writers weave between peoples and territories across national and linguistic borders through the publishing houses, journals, workshops, institutions, and organizations that have been fundamental circuits for fostering the flourishing of literatures in Indigenous languages. 

Pluriversal Poetics: How Literatures in Indigenous Languages are Transforming World Literary Space

Authors who have achieved world literary status within a capitalist literary market dominated by English-language editorial networks have done so, as Pascale Casanova argues, by getting their texts to circulate within metropolitan centers. This book puts forth an alternate view of world literatures, one engendered by the efforts of authors writing in lenguas originarias who are relatively unconcerned with gaining access to the global market. Instead, they focus on the wider circulation of lenguas originarias within comunidades originarias and greater Abiayala. I argue that such linguistic activism offers us a model in which literary status is determined not by the entrance into Anglophone or European markets, but by the creation of new networks that allow for the increased engagement of local communities in both situated and transnational struggles, not least against linguicide and the constant threat extracivism poses to Indigenous territories. This vantage, in turn, invites a reconsideration of the task of the translator: the ultimate goal is not to bring authors into world literary space, nor to reveal "pure language," but to contribute in situated ways to revitalizing language health, exposing new audiences to non-dominant ontologies, strengthening communitarian relations, and defending claims to cultural, linguistic, and territorial autonomy.