Luis Medina Cordova (Birmingham, Languages) "The Andes beyond the Andean: Mangrove Networks in Contemporary Ecuadorian Literature"
| Dates: | 3 February 2027 |
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| Times: | 17:00 - 19:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | Faculty of Humanities |
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| Speaker: | Luis Medina Cordova |
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This talk is part of the seminar series of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
Wed 3 Feb 2027, 5pm (UK time). This event will be in person and online. You can follow it online here: https://tinyurl.com/yzm5d7k2
Abstract: The 2010s and 2020s have been a history-making period for Ecuadorian literature, marked by the growing translation and international circulation of Ecuadorian women authors. Mónica Ojeda has emerged as a leading Latin American writer, often associated with an “Andean Gothic” (Ramos, 2023; Vera Tudela, 2025). Through what Pollack (2013) calls “the synecdoche of literary commodification”, in which the singular signifies the plural, other Ecuadorian authors risk being —and have been— grouped as representatives of “Andean” writing, as if each added a piece to a neatly organised continental picture of Latin America. This presentation turns to writing that unsettles the equation of the Ecuadorian with the Andean. Focusing on Yuliana Ortiz’s novel Fiebre de carnaval (2022) and short story collection Litorales (2023), I read coastal imagery to foreground the image of the mangrove for rethinking the networks that connect literatures across Latin America. I argue that mapping literary relations onto the way mangroves propagate, through seeds carried on ocean currents, allows us to reinvent the groupings that organise Latin American literature. Doing so challenges generic bonds between dominant national discourses and literature —going beyond “andinocentrismo”, in the Ecuadorian case— while bringing into view new formations that shape world literature in and beyond the region.
Luis Medina Cordova is Lecturer in Modern Languages (Spanish) at the University of Birmingham.
Speaker
Luis Medina Cordova
Organisation: University of Birmingham
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A202
Samuel Alexander Building
Manchester
