Kipus: Revista Andina de Letras y Estudios Culturales
Kipus: Andean Journal of Literature and Cultural Studies is a biannual publication on literature and cultural studies. Founded in 1993 by the Department of Literature at Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Sede Ecuador, its objective is to contribute to the integration of Latin American consciousness. It highlights and deepens the new evaluations and debates surrounding Ecuadorian, Andean, and Latin American literature and culture.
Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Sede Ecuador
City and Simulacrum: Satirical Devices in the Critique of Social Appearances in the Poems of Gregório de Matos and Juan del Valle y Caviedes
This article proposes a comparative analysis of the satirical works of Juan del Valle y Caviedes and Gregório de Matos, two of the main colonial American poets, who developed their works in Lima (Peru) and Bahia (Brazil) during the 17th century. The study focuses on the critique of social appearances about the city, hierarchies, and monarchical institutions. The main hypothesis of this study is that both authors use satire as a mechanism to dismantle false social representations that use the city as a Baroque stage for imposture. Through a comparative analysis, rhetorical devices are identified that question social performativities within colonial societies. The results show that, despite geographic differences, Valle y Caviedes and Gregório de Matos share a similar approach to criticizing false appearances, which allows for a joint reflection on the colonial literatures of Peru and Brazil.
Copyright (c) 2025 Kipus: Revista Andina de Letras y Estudios Culturales https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
What Place Does Brazilian Literature Hold in Latin America Today?
This article aims to reflect on the position of contemporary Brazilian literature within the current Latin American literary landscape. Drawing on Pascale Casanova’s concept of the “world republic of letters”, it seeks to shed light on the reasons behind the limited presence of Brazilian literature in the broader Latin American literary scene. Although contemporary Brazilian literature has gained some attention due to various sociopolitical events—such as the 2014 World Cup, translation support from the National Library of Brazil, or Brazil’s role as guest country at the 2013 Frankfurt International Book Fair—it is still not widely perceived as part of the Latin American literary whole. This has hindered active exchange between Brazil and Spanish-speaking Latin American countries.
Center and Periphery, Interchangeable Poles: The Transculturation of the Brazilian in Anthropophagy and Bossa Nova
This paper aims to describe the transculturation processes of two pivotal moments in Brazilian art: Anthropophagy and bossa nova, both of which took place during the 20th century. Each, in its own way, was dynamic and disruptive, marking a turning point not only for Brazil but also for Latin America. As case studies, the analysis focuses on singer Carmen Miranda (in relation to Anthropophagy) and the musical productions of bossa nova. Carmen Miranda, “devoured” by the U.S. film industry, opened up that market to Latin American culture. Bossa Nova, on the other hand, represents the fusion of an entirely native rhythm with jazz—an exchange in which center and periphery merge and balance each other. Both moments were profoundly significant in the internationalization and introjection of Brazil and its culture into the Western world.
Caetano Veloso, Verdade Tropical and Intimate Writing
This essay analyzes Caetano Veloso’s autobiographical book, Verdade Tropical (1997), as a construction of the Brazilian musician and composer’s self-image within the context of Tropicalismo, exploring the tension between the presentation of intimacy and the performativity of the “superstar,” as well as the movement’s search for intellectual and political legitimacy amidst the military dictatorship in Brazil.
The Resemantization of the Religious Archive: A Link Between Clarice Lispector and Silvina Ocampo
This article aims to study the meaning-making operations carried out by Clarice Lispector in The Via Crucis of the Body and Silvina Ocampo in The Sibyl, The Mortal Sin, and The Invited Women, through the insertion of various elements from the realm of sexuality into Christian discourse. We explore the idea that the narrative strategies deployed by these authors disrupt the emanations of the religious archive and enable a potential resemantization of words traditionally associated with dogma. First, we examine the implications and components involved in the clash between eroticism and religion. Then, we turn to the issue of naming and the parodic resignifications of the biblical archive. Lastly, focusing on the corporeal sphere, we analyze how the authors connect their characters’ bodies to this thematic framework and what attributes they assign to them.
¿What Is Contemporary About the Contemporary? Metafiction and Nomadism in La hora de la estrella, by Clarice Lispector
This paper analyzes the coordinates of contemporaneity in A Hora da Estrela by Clarice Lispector, as well as the possibility of reading the novel through the lens of Latin American historical and cultural processes. The study involves a detailed examination of how the categories commonly used by literary criticism to define contemporary literature (metafiction, autofiction, intertextuality, etc.) operate within the text. These categories are further expanded and challenged through concepts such as post-autonomy, cosmopolitan literatures, and national literatures, as discussed in Aquí América Latina by Josefina Ludmer. Finally, the article explores how certain current notions from the Humanities and Literary Studies—such as nomadism, geographic representation, and mixed identities—offer productive frameworks for understanding the novel, its characters, and its unique expression of the contemporary.
Prospective Aesthetics, Colonial Tragedy, and Political Imagination: Initial Approaches between Um defeito de cor, by Ana Maria Gonçalves, and Changó, el gran putas, by Manuel Zapata Olivella
This article analyzes Um defeito de cor, by Ana Maria Gonçalves, and Changó, el gran putas by Manuel Zapata Olivella as Afrodiasporic narratives that destabilize the framework of Western history and confront the Colonial Tragic. The aim is to demonstrate how these works reconfigure historical memory through marginalized voices, employing strategies such as critical fabulation, mythopoetics, and spirituality as tools of resistance and emancipation. The methodology is based on a comparative analysis of both works, drawing on concepts such as repression, sublimation, and Prospective Aesthetics, while engaging with theorists like Saidiya Hartman, Walter Mignolo, and Achille Mbembe. The findings reveal that both narratives function as counter-devices, shifting the Eurocentric axis of history and reinscribing Afrodiasporic agency. African spirituality emerges as a central axis—not only as a theme but as a decolonizing practice that envisions alternative futures. The article concludes that by rewriting the past, these works challenge the coloniality of knowledge and open pathways for the construction of emancipatory identities and horizons.
Literature in Pandemic Contexts: Faces of Death, Desires for Life
This article analyzes certain implications that arise in contexts of isolation or the potential for widespread contagion. To this end, it draws upon a corpus of Latin American literary works: La Tierra en pandemia (2020) by Brazilian author Aleilton Fonseca; Mugre Rosa (2022) by Uruguayan writer Fernanda Trías; and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez. The primary focus is to examine the political administration of human life and the strategies of collective survival depicted in these works.
Afro-descendant Social Identity in the 21st Century
The aim of this paper is to identify and compare the conceptual features of the term afro-descendant social identity in the works of three contemporary authors: Brazilian writer Jeferson Tenório, Mexican Afro-Japanese Chicana pocha writer Jumko Ogatta Aguilar, and Ecuadorian poet from Esmeraldas, Yuliana Ortiz Ruano. To achieve this, a corpus was formed using literary excerpts from each author’s work in which the process of awareness or understanding of identity is described, either by the author or through their characters. The theoretical-methodological framework of the study is ethnographic in nature and was approached as a comparative analysis exercise. This allows for an exploration of the ways in which identity is named, sought, or demanded in the 21st century. The paper assumes that afro-descendant social identities are constructed based on characteristics unique to the 21st century, such as transmigration, superdiversity, racialization, empowerment, and the gaze of the Other. However, it also emphasizes that in the Global South, historical processes of colonization, slavery, and decolonization are the result of social struggles, intellectual movements of resistance, and new narratives of defiance that expose various forms of violence—both physical and symbolic.
Coined in “Imaginative Molds”: Ahab’s Ecuadorian Doubloon and the Power of the Middle of the World in Moby Dick
In Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, Captain Ahab promises a gold doubloon to the first sailor who spots the white whale. The coin, which is from Ecuador, functions as a miraculous object that triggers passions and interpretations. Why does this particular doubloon hold such power? To answer this question, the present essay explores the history of the doubloon and the representations of the equatorial and the Ecuadorian in the novel. It also delves into the mythical thinking surrounding the “middle of the world” and includes an analysis of Melville’s short story “The Veranda”.
Las relaciones literarias entre Brasil y la Comunidad Andina empiezan un nuevo período tras el inicio, en 2022, del Programa Leitorados Guimarães Rosa, del Instituto Guimarães Rosa de la Embajada de Brasil en Quito, programa que mantiene la Cátedra Brasil-Comunidad Andina, que tiene su sede en la Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar. Desde la fecha mencionada, se han ofrecido cursos de literatura y cultura brasileña, ampliando los proyectos ya existentes en la institución dedicados a los vínculos con Ecuador. Ha sido una grata oportunidad poder compartir textos literarios y no literarios con participantes de distintas nacionalidades. Hasta la presente fecha, escritores, profesores universitarios y estudiantes de pregrado y posgrado de Argentina, Brasil, Colombia, Ecuador y México han asistido a dichas actividades.
Ruben Astudillo y Astudillo... Wrath, Silence and Return
The poetry of Rubén Astudillo y Astudillo, one of the key authors in Ecuadorian poetry of the second half of the twentieth century, can be read from the postulates of existentialism, especially in dialogue with the thought of Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, in the first instance and attending to his first collections of poems (from the late 1950s until the end of the 1979s). From the 1980s onwards, his work can be read from the ideas of mysticism, in dialogue with Russel and Paz, and from the ideas of memory and childhood, taking up Bachelard’s concepts. This article proposes this reading for the work of the poet from Cuenca.
Copyright (c) 2025 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Memory and Identity in Lo que aprendí en la peluquería by María Fernanda Ampuero
Lo que aprendí en la peluquería (2010), by María Fernanda Ampuero, is a chronicle work in which the author constructs a physiognomy of memory and identity from her condition as a testifying migrant. This early text by Ampuero allows us to identify a conventional and traditionalist discourse of memory and identity, categories that constantly evolve throughout her narrative, since in other publications the author recomposes her gaze towards these categories by making it evident that family and collective memory are diluted as well as the rootedness to Ecuador. Thus, in this work an approach is made to the traits that characterize the author’s personal identity through various identity expressions that are integrated with memory within her chronicles. In this way, the crises, thoughts, changes, metamorphoses, misunderstandings, positionings in which the migrant subject of this work of analysis is inserted will be put in dialogue.
Three French-Uruguayan Poets (Ducasse, Laforgue, Supervielle): The Secret Paths of Literature
This article evokes the life and work of two almost adolescent poets, born in Montevideo, who die at a very young age: Ducasse and Laforgue, whose works are banned or very little known by their contemporaries but who, with the passing of time, become the spearhead of avant-garde movements or the inspiration for later movements or poets: the surrealists,T.S. Eliot. The same as that of another poet, Supervielle, also born in Montevideo, of long life, who almost testifies the entire twentieth century, and who also marks important guidelines for the poetry of the world. Friend of the Ecuadorian poet Alfredo Gangotena, to whom he dedicates a long evocation on the day of his death.
Migrating from Violence to Violence in the Novel Ciudad berraca (2018) by Rodrigo Ramos Bañados
In the context of Chilean post-dictatorship narrative, Rodrigo Ramos Bañados takes us to the sociocultural setting of northern Chile, a place that has become the main theme of his literary work. Certainly, as a journalist and writer, he has greater advantages to observe the symptoms of migration and give voice to the protagonists of a dangerous journey in search of safety and work. Through his novel Ciudad berraca (2018) he shows us a form of violence suffered by Colombian citizens at the time of emigrating to Chile, illusioned with the job opportunities offered by this country and also to overcome the suffering left behind, without the threat of guerrillas and drug trafficking.
This article analyzes Juan Montalvo’s national project based on Cervantes’ hypotext, Don Quixote de la Mancha. It takes into account some key concepts of nineteenth-century discourse such as truth and verisimilitude, nature and art, civilization and barbarism, virtue and ethic. Cervantes’ novel serves the Ecuadorian writer to establish his civilizing project and to found a humanist tradition in Latin America.
The Golden Age of Exchanges Between U. S. and Intellectuals: 1940-1945
In the context of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy and the rapprochement promoted by several American institutions at the beginning of World War II, the 1940s were a time of intense exchanges between American and Ecuadorian intellectuals, a fruitful parenthesis after the anti-imperialist stances of the previous decades and before the ideological and political confrontations of the Cold War. The author studies this special moment through the exchanges between four American intellectuals, Albert B. Franklin, Thornton Wilder, Willis Knapp Jones and John Dos Passos, and three members of the Grupo de Guayaquil: Demetrio Aguilera Malta, Alfredo Pareja Diezcanseco and Enrique Gil Gilbert, based on unpublished letters and documents, and with an emphasis on the literary contest of the Pan-American Union (1941).
Linguistic Identity Represented in Testimonies of Ecuadorian Emigrants
The authors propose to interpret and demonstrate the linguistic identity of Ecuadorian emigrants who have gone to more developed countries, especially the United States, Canada, Spain, Germany and Great Britain. For this purpose, they draw on testimonial works written by the protagonists, whose publications range from 1996 to 2015. Following the orientation of theories derived from the social and human sciences, particularly linguistics, after the application of the methodology and techniques of bibliographic-documentary research, the authors conclude that there is a significant representation of four elements linked to the language and dialect used by emigrants while they remain outside Ecuador: problems faced by Ecuadorians due to lack of knowledge of the language used in the countries of arrival; interpersonal communication strategies used by emigrants until they acquire basic notions of the new language; differences in the use of Spanish between Ecuadorians and Spaniards; and assimilation of Spanish as a strategy for the integration of Ecuadorians in Spain.
On The Threshold of “Dialectical Nihilism”
In this article, the author goes through the traces of the modern subject to reflect on the conditions of current society, characterized by the fading of the values of humanism, causing nihilistic positions not necessarily identified with the nietzschean one. On the contrary, he warns about the urgency of proposing a dialectical nihilism that reveals the historicity of principles such as democracy, equality, justice, freedom, respect for nature, peace, animalism, speciesism, among others; and that, at the same time, shows its constant actuality to escape from the petrification caused by the exercise of power. Dialectical nihilism that does not ignore the historical struggles of those condemned by capital, but updates them in the opposite direction to the neoliberal system.
Luis Antonio Aguilar Monsalve, Antología del ensayo breve ecuatoriano actual
La aparición de una antología del ensayo breve en el Ecuador resulta de una relevancia fundamental en el panorama literario contemporáneo. En un país cuya tradición ensayística ha quedado muchas veces eclipsada por la narrativa y la poesía, la compilación de este tipo de trabajos invita a una reflexión urgente y profunda sobre la realidad nacional, el pensamiento crítico y los modos en que los intelectuales ecuatorianos se han vinculado a su tiempo y espacio...
Carolina Andrade, A orillas de un relato
Del cero al diez, ¿cuánto le duele? ... Entre esas dos cifras, entre entregarse a la tragedia o al cinismo, cualquier número cabe, siempre y cuando se sustente en una historia verosímil. Todo dolor exige un buen relato. (13) Así comienza la obra. Con ese dejo de ironía tan propio de la escritura de Carolina Andrade. Pero también se anuncia la motivación que llevará al personaje narrador a contar su historia.
El éxito permitió a Denis Chang ciertos lujos. Pidió locaciones remotas, se expandió en duraciones de tres o cuatro horas para sus películas y exigió un exceso de cámaras para tomas que apenas duraban unos segundos. Los productores tampoco lo limitaban al contratar a actores famosos y expertos en artes marciales...
R E F E R E N C I A S d e p u b l i c a c i o n e s
Kipus Historical Archive: Andean Journal of Letters and Cultural Studies, 1994.
Copyright (c) 1994 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Mario Vargas Llosa y la ética de la ficción
Mempo Giardinelli, el Premio Rómulo Gallegos y Santo Oficio de la Memoria
Tendencia de la poesía ecuatoriana después de 1950
Sobre utopías y modernidad: posiciones y perspectivas
Kipus Historical Archive: Andean Journal of Letters and Cultural Studies, 1995.