About the seminar
Neoliberalism and its Discontents: Three Decades of Chilean Women’s Poetry (1980-2010)
By Dr Bárbara Fernández Melleda:
The present work studies how Chilean women’s poetry reacts to the imposition, development and consolidation of neoliberalism in Chile between 1980 and 2010. The first stage explores poems 'Bobby Sands desfallece en el muro' (1983) by Carmen Berenguer and 'La bandera de Chile' (1981) by Elvira Hernández. These works signpost the main ideological purpose of the dictatorship: the imposition of neoliberalism through the privatisation of state-owned institutions and services.
The second stage studies 'Escrito en Braille' (1999) by Alejandra Del Río and 'Uranio' (1999) by Marina Arrate. The 1990s are characterised by utter disillusion and a recent past still haunts Chilean society. The hopelessness expressed in the poems studied signals the impossibility to escape neoliberal rule. Finally, '©Copyright' (2003) by Nadia Prado and 'Bracea' (2007) by Malú Urriola as texts that are even more explicit in developing a neoliberal critique. The 2000s would encompass the consolidation of neoliberalism and the texts studied certainly refer to its discontents. This presentation seeks to shed light on the way in which the poems studied react against neoliberalism, which also emphasise these poets’ concern for Chilean society and its future.
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Dr Bárbara Fernández Melleda arrived in Edinburgh in 2014 after completing a Master of Arts in Literature at Universidad de Chile (2013), and after having worked for five years as an academic in various Chilean universities. Her research focuses on female contemporary Chilean poetry, from the 1980s until our times. Her interests go from intersections between articulations of the female psyche and the criticism of neoliberal principles, to the role of pornography and eroticism in contemporary poetry. She undertook doctoral studies at the University of Edinburgh, supervised by Dr Fiona Mackintosh (Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies) and Professor Peter Davies (German). She successfully passed her viva in September 2018 and is currently working as a Teaching Fellow in Spanish in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures (LLC). She is also the co-founder of the Connecting Memories Research Initiative based in Edinburgh and works as a prologist for La Joyita Cartonera in Santiago de Chile.
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Celebrating the centenary of Spanish being taught at Edinburgh in 2019, we offer a range of undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies (SPLAS). We also teach courses in Basque and Catalan.
