FELLOW 2021-2022 ALEJANDRA BOTTINELLI
Term: 03/2021 – 02/2022
Alejandra Bottinelli Wolleter holds a PhD and Master in Latin American Studies from the University of Chile. She is Assistant Professor at the Department of Literature of said university and is coordinator of Latin American and Chilean Literature and founder of the Diploma World Literatures: current problems. Her research and teaching work addresses the figurations of the body in the current narratives of Chile, Argentina, and Peru, and the modalizations of modernity and modernisms in the discourses and intellectual writings of the late 19th century in Latin America. She has directed, as primary director, more than forty undergraduate theses; related to Chilean and Latin American Contemporary Writings. Among her most recent works, published in specialized magazines and books, are:
- Imaginar las Postrimerías: escrituras chilenas de los confines (Aisthesis, 2020).
- Il futuro che già siamo: 2666 di Roberto Bolaño como frontera del nostro tempo (UZAK, 2020).
- Intellectual Discourse and the Failed Nation in Mexico and Peru in The Routledge Companion to Inter-American Studies (London/New York, 2017).
- Narrar (en) la 'Post': La escritura de Álvaro Bisama, Alejandra Costamagna y Alejandro Zambra (Revista Chilena de Literatura, 2016).
Two books currently under her authorship are awaiting publication:
- González Prada: una intelectualidad radical, (Mansalva Editorial from Buenos Aires).
- Nación y cultura en el Brasil finisecular. La Troya de barro contra la república: Os Sertões, de Euclides da Cunha, (Editorial Cuarto Propio from Santiago).
Likewise, in 2020 she was awarded the prize of the Rector Juvenal Hernández Jaque's Fund, of the University of Chile for the book Retóricas de la violencia y ficciones del cuerpo: ensayos sobre literatura y arte latinoamericanos, that she made and coedited with Valeska Solar and Andrés Soto, and that will be published by Editorial Universitaria, Santiago-Chile in 2021.
INTERVIEW WITH CAPAS FELLOW ALEJANDRA BOTTINELLI
The Body at the Boundaries of the End of Time
The research will address the ways in which contemporary fictions of the last decade, staged in the boundaries of time and peripherical territories, imagine the end of the known world and their afterlife from their bodies and affections. We will need to delve into how these fictions jeopardize the body in crisis, faced against the imminence of the end or the decay of the body itself, and the threats of its biomedical and psycho-political control in the context of the limit of experience. At the inception stage, we will think about the affective relationships with the environment in the context of the pandemic threat in the limited spaces of the “confines” (boundaries), of the province, and the periphery of the modern system. At the second stage, we will approach the affective paths proposed by these fictions relating to the boundaries of the end (specifically Latin America and Chilean) in order to face the crises of the models of life, of sensitivity, and of social relations (Guattari 2006) that are imposed by the diverse contemporary threats to life and how they produce, through the apocalyptic genre “masked, encrypted” (Derrida 1994), another imagination of the present; a political critique that shows the present crisis as a crisis of imagination as well as the future.