Ocean matters: image and artifact in Adalber Salas Hernández’s "Nuevas cartas náuticas" (2022)
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Elvira Blanco [1]
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[1] Columbia University
Columbia University
Estados Unidos
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- Localización: CiberLetras: revista de crítica literaria y de cultura, ISSN-e 1523-1720, Nº. 50, 2024
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
Nuevas cartas náuticas by the Venezuelan poet Adalber Salas Hernández (Pretextos, 2022) is a collection of prose poems related to the ocean. The author approaches this olen-wrimen-about topic experimentally, by blending fact and fiction, original and modified citations, languages, and registers. In this article, I focus on what I identify as an archaeological impulse that runs through Nuevas cartas náuticas. First, I analyze a selection of poems in which Salas draws the reader’s amenkon to material artifacts, often displayed in specific sites of collection and exhibition. I then show how, parallel to these instances of display, Salas connects his museum objects to the marine oral traditions that also populate the book, and I contrast his treatment of antique documents and relics with his approach toward photographic images. Throughout, I argue that the presence of material objects throughout the book allows us to inscribe Nuevas cartas náuticas within the “blue humanities”: an interdisciplinary field of inquiry into the cultural, social, and political dimensions of human interactions with the ocean.
