The South is a Place in the Totality-World: Relational Criticism and Literature in Latin America

Abstract

The present essay explores the potentialities represented by a relational literature and criticism in Latin America; that is, one committed to multidirectional and dynamic processes not confined by the limits imposed by national, disciplinary, or formal boundaries. To this end, the theoretical foundation was established through the work of Caribbean poet and essayist Édouard Glissant, with an emphasis on the concepts of world-totality, place, diversity, and relation, combined with a decolonial perspective. Glissant’s Poetics of Relation and the contributions of decolonial studies made possible a critique of modern dichotomous structures (such as center and periphery, nature and culture, body and mind), while exploring the perception of non-obvious ethical and aesthetic consonances within contemporary Latin American literature. In this framework, the study sought to identify intercommunicative creative processes developed in Latin American contexts through a comparative analysis of works by Brazilian poet Edimilson de Almeida Pereira and Chilean writer Diamela Eltit. Recognizing that, despite their evident differences, both Pereira and Eltit explore the violence imprinted on the body of language as part of a creative attitude capable of summoning relations, the essay proposes mutilation as an operational concept for the critical reading of works that, like those selected, presuppose place as an element in the enunciation of experience in the Global South. In these terms, mutilation would constitute an aesthetic element connecting literary activities developed through the creative and reflexive appropriation of destructive actions in geopolitical and cultural contexts marked by coloniality. Concurrently, the essay itself seeks to develop as an exercise in relation, transformed into a methodological foundation for literary criticism.