La Puta Esperanza

Essay Dec 17, 2020

Un ensayo lírico-crítico sobre recordar, resistir y esperar (y un cortometraje muy bello) publicada en la primera edición en español de The College Hill Independent.

Léelo aquí: https://www.theindy.org/2192

The article’s cover art by Mara Jovanović is a scene from Viento Sur where a silhouette walks by the shore of a river, which the artist has rendered in grayscale, adding a grainy texture and some splotches of color to the lower left.

A critical lyric essay about remembering, resisting, and waiting (and a very beautiful short film) published in the first Spanish edition of The College Hill Independent.

I wrote this in one of my final classes, Environmental Humanities of Latin America with Prof. Nicolás Campisi. We watched the Paraguayan short film Viento Sur just as many of us were waiting (whether we wanted to or not) for the presidential election results in the US, a bit over a week after the long-awaited constitutional plebiscite in Chile. I wanted to think more deeply about the political uses of waiting, both as a form of resistance to capitalist logics of urgency and scarcity, and as a "condition of coercion" imposed by the state, particularly in the postcolony. For insight on this second form of waiting, I drew on Prof. Vazira Zamindar's talk "Waiting," delivered in the context of the (excellent) 2019 Political Concepts conference.