Susana Draper

Position
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature
Office Phone
Office
124 East Pyne
Bio/Description

Office Hours Spring 2024:   Academic Year Leave   

https://outlook.office365.com/owa/calendar/[email protected]/bookings/

This is the Zoom link will use: https://princeton.zoom.us/j/8187632438

Meeting ID: 818 763 2438

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Periods: twentieth century

Languages: Spanish, French, Portuguese

Research Interests: Contemporary Latin American literature, arts, philosophy, and political theory; literature on migration in the Americas; Latin American Marxisms; popular feminisms; memory and social movements.

Susana Draper is the author of Ciudad posletrada y tiempos lúmpenes: crítica cultural y nihilismo en la cultura de fin de siglo(Montevideo, Amuleto 2009), Aferlives of Confinement: Spatial Transitions in Post-Dictatorship Latin America (The University of Pittsburgh Press, Series Illuminations: Cultural Formations in the Americas, 2012), México 1968: experimentos de la libertad, constelaciones de la democracia (México: Siglo XXI Editores, 2018), and 1968 Mexico: Constellations of Freedom and Democracy (Duke University Press, 2018).

1968 Mexico explores various ways of opening ’68 – through words, images, bodies, and voices – and investigate some of the ways in which the emancipation and reconfiguration of the political took place, during and after ’68. This involves bringing the question of emancipation to the realm of memory – a possible emancipation of memories of ’68 – and also to the reconfiguration of a series of movements that express the unique polyphony of the moment. Looking into how the ’68 effect is configured and how it affects certain practices of writing, visualization, and subjectivation, the book analyzes ’68 as a gesture that not only destabilized politics and bodies, but also that instituted different forms of critical language, thought, cinematography, and pedagogy.

She is currently finishing a book manuscript on feminisms from below and questions about justice in the Americas. Más allá de la retórica del poder: horizontes feministas para construir otros sentidos de justicia / Beyond the rhetoric of power: feminist horizons to create other senses of justice.  Inspired by Audre Lorde, the book explores a poetics of justice that involve the configuration of other forms of collectively engaging with imaginaries that do not limit “justice” to the dominant frames and narratives of abusive frames of power. Looking at a historicity of the problem and the key role of language to name and figure other horizons, the book analyzes poems, pamphlets, narratives, and prison writings created by survivors of different imbricated forms of abuse and violence. The goal is to generate a space to listen and take these voices seriously, weaving a more integral sense of justice that does not come from or reproduce the system that generates the chains of violence that they attempt to end.

The other long-term book project focuses on Marxist Women and Philosophies of Liberation. It attempts to reconstruct a history of key figures and moments in women’s critical heterodox expressions of Marxism, mostly focused on Latin America and the United States throughout the 20th century. This project proposes to look at questions and analysis related to care, prison abolition, radical imagination with the goal of looking at instants of interruption and supplementarily of the masculine Marxist canon and look at paths that opened and materialized in different ways throughout the century.

Books

1968 Mexico: Constellations of Freedom and Democracy. Durham: Duke University Press (2018).

México 1968: experimentos de la libertad, constelaciones de la democracia. México: Siglo XXI Editores(2018)

Aferlives of Confinement: Spatial Transitions in Post-Dictatorship Latin America. Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, Series Illuminations: Cultural Formations in the Americas, 2012. 



Ciudad posletrada y tiempos lúmpenes: crítica cultural y políticas del nihilismo en la cultura de fin de siglo. Montevideo: Editorial Amuleto, 2009.

Collaborative projects:

Books

Co-editor with Gavin Arnall, José Aricó, Marxism, Latin America. An Anthology. Under contract with Historical Materialism Book Series – Brill

Digital Archives

With Vicente Rubio-Pueyo. Mexico 1968: modelo para armar. Archivo de memorias desde los márgenes.(link is external) An open and ongoing archive of video-interviews with participants of the student-popular movement of 1968.

Selected most recent Articles

No estamos todas, faltan las presas! Contemporary Feminist Practices Building Paths Toward Prison Abolition.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. Special issue: “The Politics of Social Reproduction” edited by Cinzia Arruzza and Kelly Gawel. Vol 22.2 (2020). <https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.3842>

 “Tejer cuidados entre lo público y lo común,” Cuidado, comunidad y común. Explorando experiencias, ámbitos y vínculos cooperativos en el sostenimiento de la vida en América Latina y el Sur de Europa. Edited by Cristina Vega, Raquel Martínez Buján, and Myriam Paredes. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños.

“Strike as Process: Building the Poetics of a New Feminism,” How would you go on strike? The women’s strike and beyond. South Atlantic Quarterly 117.3 (2018): 682-691.

“El paro como proceso: construyendo poéticas de un nuevo feminismo,” 8M Constelación feminista. ¿Cuál es tu huelga? ¿Cuál es tu lucha? Ed. Verónica Gago. Buenos Aires: Tinta limón, 2018, 49-72.

“¿Dónde están las mujeres del 68?”  Revista Letras Libres.  2018.

“Para imaginar revoluciones del día después: mujeres marxistas y filosofías de la transformación” Cuadernos americanos. Vol. 2, No. 2 (Spring 2017).

“Por una recepción irreverente del materialismo aleatorio en México: Althusser, Navarro y el materialismo del encuentro,” Lecturas de Althusser en América Latina. Edited by Marcelo Rodríguez and Marcelo Starcembaum. Santiago de Chile: Doble Ciencia, 2017.

“Violencia política y género: descentramientos del recuerdo en el Uruguay post-dictatorial” in Poner el cuerpo: rescatar y visibilizar la marcas sexuales y de género de los archivos dictatoriales del Cono Sur. Edited by Ksenija Bibija, Bernardita Llanos and Ana Forcinito. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2017.

 “¿Materialismo dialéctico o materialismo aleatorio? José Revueltas después del acto teórico del 68,” Por otras políticas de la verdad en América Latina. Pittsburgh: Instituto internacional de literatura iberoamericana. Edited by Alejandro Sánchez Lopera, 2017.

“Acts of Opening, Acts of Freedom: Mexico 1968 Other/Wise,” in Reflections on Memory and Democracy, edited by Merilee S. Grindle and Erin E. Goodman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016.

“Cartographies of affects: undoing the prison in collective art by women prisoners” in Historical Geographies of Prisons: Unlocking the Usable Carceral Past. Edited by Karen Morin and Dominque Moran. London: Routledge, 2015; 127-144.

“José Aricó como lector de Gramsci” (co-authored with Gavin Arnall and Ana Sabau), in Gramsci en las orillas, edited by Oscar Ariel Cabezas. Buenos Aires,: La Cebra, 2015; 141- 170.

 “Hegemonía, poder dual, post-hegemonía -las derivas del concepto.” Post-hegemonía. El final de un paradigma político de la filosofía en América Latina.  Edited by Rodrigo Castro Orellana. Madrid: Editorial Biblioteca Nueva, 2015; 93-112.