Person:

Sommer, Doris

Meditating on works of fiction such as Crosthwaite’s El gran preténder (1992) and Laviera’s AmeRican (1985), this article proposes bi-musicality (Hood 1960) as both a link between sociolinguistics and literary aesthetics and as a corrective challenge to the positivism of ethnic, demographic, and geographic labeling. From Dell Hymes to Norma Mendoza-Denton in applied linguistics and from Friedrich Schiller to Emmanuel Levinas in aesthetics, Sommer and Wald consider what they call the “pride of interstitial place” in multilingual, crossborder writing and music. The article takes cues from sociolinguistics, dance, and musicology, as it advances a wager about the embodied movements of multilingual poetics.

This article tries to prove how present historical and literary discourses are recyclable materials, as the framework of Argentina’s Bicentennial Independence official celebrations shows. The work done by Washington Cucurto in his Eloisa Cartonera’s press (editing texts from recyclable materials, acquired from the Buenos Aires’ cardboards), his sharp view on the migratory processes from different places of Latin America toward Argentina and his particular way of thinking the re-writing of literature contribute to prove the recyclable character of these discourses.