Research

Las aventuras de la China Iron is a feminist, queer and postcolonial re-telling of the epic 19th century Argentinian poem El Gaucho Martín Fierro. It was originally written in Spanish by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara and published in 2017. Beginning in 2018, the book was translated into English by Iona Macintyre and Fiona Mackintosh, and published by Charco Press in 2019 as The Adventures of China Iron. The following year, this translation was one of six books shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020.

The project to bring the novel to English-speaking audiences exemplifies how translation is often both critical research and original creative practice. Successfully engaging with an original text steeped in Argentinian history and culture relied heavily on the researchers’ expertise in nineteenth-, twentieth century and contemporary literature from Argentina. In addition to capturing the quality, tone and sensorial richness of Cabezón Cámara’s writing, additional challenges included translating passages of metrical poetry. In shortlisting the title, the International Booker Prize judges drew attention to its demonstration of translation as iterative collaboration, which they felt made it exceptional linguistically.

Latin American Indigenous filmmaking is often deemed too artisan, unrefined and difficult for 'global' audiences to grasp. Building on existing work with the Latin American Coordinating Council for Indigenous Film and Media (CLACPI), Indigenous Cinematics brings together diverse disciplines and communities of practice to recentre its significance. The project engages with issues of authorship, language diversity, audiovisual translation and ownership. Through the production of new work on the art and act of making film in Indigenous Latin America, it aims to influence perceptions of film's role in reflecting cultural diversity, and facilitate access to a more mixed ecology of film form.

In 2020, four films were translated, subtitled and screened at the Smithsonian Institution's Mother Tongue Film Festival in Washington DC. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the project supported four Indigenous filmmakers and producers in virtual residencies - a way for them to share, exchange, debate, build and develop new film projects. The Edinburgh-based screenwriter and filmmaker Armando Bautista García produced resources exploring the art of creative production in the Mixtec language, with his text translated into English by Gustavo Herrera Taboada (PhD candidate in Film Studies). In 2023, the project entered a new phase with the support of the British Academy, involving a series of podcasts to accompany and enrich a book by Charlotte Gleghorn.

Rural and Indigenous communities living in Guatemala’s volcanic arc and southern highlands have an extraordinarily high level of exposure to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, and landslides. Their experiences are exacerbated by long histories of landlessness, state-led violence and genocide that today manifest in colonial and discriminatory attitudes. Effectively analysing how to understand the intersectional risks of living in this part of Guatemala requires sustained collaboration across the sciences, arts and humanities, academia and the community. The £3.75 million Ixchel project facilited such a collaboration over a period of four years, with researchers in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies (SPLAS) among its 40-strong interdisciplinary team.

Dr Charlotte Gleghorn’s particular input to Ixchel was on the project’s main cultural output, the film Cordillera de Fuego (Mountains of Fire), produced in collaboration with La Casa de Producción. This feature-length drama draws on the testimonies of Indigenous Guatemalans who lived first-hand the eruption of Fuego volcano (2018), among other disasters prompted by a complex range of factors, including living with and adjacent to volcanoes. Charlotte is also collaborating on the research, writing and publication of a report on responses to the 2005 landslide in Panabaj, aimed at systematizing the community mechanisms and knowledges deployed in that context for future generations and similar disasters. Together with conference presentations and other outreach activities, these cultural assets should provoke high levels of engagement and debate in questions of Indigenous knowledges, (in)adequate state response to disasters, and the ways in which volcanoes and their risks are imagined, negotiated and incorporated into daily life.

Funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Global Challenges Research Funding: January 2021 to December 2025.

LLC team: Dr Charlotte Gleghorn, Dr Raquel Ribeiro (until 31 December 2021; now at Universidade NOVA de Lisboa)

Nicolás Guillén Landrián was one of only three Afro-Cuban directors active at the Cuban national film institute (ICAIC) in its first decade. Nephew of a revolutionary poet, and son on an attorney who advocated for Camagüey sugar workers, his 35mm film classics include the notoriously-censored Coffea arábiga (1968), which ironized the Havana greenbelt urban agricultural project, unearthing its racialized undertones. After leaving Cuba for the US, Guillén Landrián filmed his final and only audiovisual work in exile, Inside Downtown (2001), a portrait of artists and poets of his generation, including the cult Afro-Cuban poet, Esteban Luis Cárdenas.

In 2020, in conjunction with the Havana Glasgow and Africa in Motion film festivals, Dr Jessica Gordon-Burroughs and Dr Raquel Ribeiro screened these two works together with a 2013 film by Julio Ramos and Raydel Araoz featuring extensive interviews with Guillén Landrián’s widow, the painter Gretel Alfonso. The accompanying panel discussion, streamed live online, featured the researchers in conversation with Julio Ramos. The Memory in Progress project also created a video archive of testimonials from Cuban intellectuals, curators and artists on the meaning of Nicolás Guillén Landrián for the history of Cuban film and future generations of Cuban filmmakers. In 2021, Jessica Gordon-Burroughs was awarded Best Essay in Latin American Visual Culture Studies by the Latin American Studies Association for “The Pixelated Afterlife of Nicolás Guillén Landrián” which looks in particular at Inside Downtown.

Funded by the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures (LLC) Impact Fund

LLC Team: Dr Jessica Gordon-Burroughs, Dr Raquel Ribeiro

Since the mid-20th century, Peruvian women nonfiction filmmakers have been giving voice to the country's disenfranchised populations in documentaries that entwine individual and collective traumas. Currently, they are fostering a thriving nonfiction audio-visual scene with transmedia characteristics and global linkages. Despite the artistic and social impact of this body of work, it has hovered under the historiographic radar. By applying feminist and decolonising frameworks and methodologies to the study of Women’s Nonfiction Filmmaking in Peru, this project seeks to foreground women’s work and resignify Peruvian – and Latin American – film history.

Using active research tools, Dr Isabel Seguí combines oral histories, personal archives and interviews to uncover the hidden and complex scenarios of Peruvian women’s filmmaking and complete a picture of women’s creative involvement in filmmaking at different stages. The project’s interconnected outputs include an academic publication, public engagement, and archive digitalisation, the latter involving the development of an online hub of primary and secondary source documents.