Justifying Democracy: Between Celan’s Nichts and Arguedas’s kachkaniraqkun
Image Credit: Artwork by Ñawi K. Flores, 2024, used with permission.
Why democracy? This talk follows in the dust of this recently unsettled question to raise it anew via the poetry of Paul Celan and José María Arguedas. It argues for a two-pronged critique of this issue via a comparative approach to poetry, positing that at stake is the notion of justice and its possible reconceptualization.
Vanessa Gubbins is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell. She writes and teaches about Latin American literature and film of the Andean Region and the Southern Cone, critical theory in the Global South, Andean philosophy, Latin American Marxisms and feminist theories, as well as their conversations with European literature and theory—especially German. Her work has appeared in edited volumes and various journals, including MLN and Res Publica. She is currently writing a monograph, provisionally titled Democracy’s Medium: Poems Critique the Rule of the People in Peru and Germany.
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