In August of 1987 the International Conference on Latin American Women’s Literature was held in Santiago de Chile providing a generation of women writers and academics with a common language, capable of reading literary production across borders and censors, particularly those of the Chilean military dictatorship.
Now, 30 years after, AFEST, a gathering of Latin American Authors in New York, arrives as an homage and reinterpretation of the Chilean’s conference and also as a cognition of a long tradition of feminist literary and critical practice.
The reopening of the byways of fascism, misogyny, and unlimited capitalism; the literary market, which supposedly covers the entire spectrum of poetics produced in Latin America, but which many women writers experience as imposing a narrow order, constructed by a conglomerate of publishers, media, and universities. And the current fight for women’s bodies, which in recent years—and in the wake of a long literary history fascinated with dead women’s bodies—has taken the streets to demand “ni una menos” [“not one less”]. Are some of the issues that will be touch on the dialogues during the week of the A-Fest.
Highlighted AFEST authors include Helena María Viramontes (U.S.A.), Cristina Rivera Garza (Mexico), Carmen Berenguer (Chile), Carmen Olle (Peru), Sara Uribe (Mexico), Mariana Graciano (Argentina), Graciela Huinao (Mapuche Nation / Chile), Javier Guerrero (Venezuela), and Afest founder and novelist Mónica Ríos (Chile) — among many more notable names in the literary world.
The Opening Session will be on March 27th hosted at Instituto Cervantes at 7pm and will run through April 1, 2017 in the cities of New York, New Brunswick, Princeton, and Washington DC, circulating through different literary communities—bookstores, university classrooms, art galleries—in these cities. The week-long discussions will spread from New York University and Princeton University.
For information about the program, please visit: http://www.a-fest-english.org/
