Abstract

River Plate authors Cristina Peri Rossi and Belén Gache, both currently based in Spain, reconfigure poetry as a vehicle for democratic citizenry and for engaging the creative word in cyberspace(s). Rather than positioning their writing from a stance of victimhood or division, they reclaim the sensorial pleasures and “in-between positions” (Bloodsworth 2007, 2) of gender and socio-political relations to reconfigure the repression of marginalized world views into new plural expressions vis-à-vis cyberspace. In “Playstation” (2009), Peri Rossi reveals concern with the explosion of hypermedia in our daily lives and explores how to reimagine and reposition the negative valences of hyper-reality through poetry. Gaché’s “Radikal Karaoke” is a “reading of ‘Ex Africa semper aliquid novi’ recorded in Madrid in June 2013” as a series of poems in video. The interplay between the post-postmodern, transnational word channeled in visual, performative, cybernetic and non-linear expression mediated by digital technologies expand the reach of the poetry beyond a specifically-bound sites; how are these transferred and how can they reach various audiences across Latin America and the globe? As per Judith Butler, it is “to think about the relational self, understood as plurality” (in Butler and Athanasiou 2014, 123). How is this experienced via a networked reality such as the World Wide Web? As we examine these works’ counterhegemonic agency from their globalized Latin American perspective, hypertext theory comes into play for fashioning ways to consider the connections between literary practice, theory and computer technology.