Lucero

We invite submissions on literature, language, and revolution for our 2025 edition of Lucero, the Graduate Student Journal in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Berkeley. The deadline for submissions is April 15, 2025. You can find more information on our website. We look forward to reading your submissions.

Call for papers:

Call for Papers in Spanish and Portuguese can be found here.

What does it mean for literature and language to be revolutionary? When César Vallejo published his poetry collection, Trilce, in 1922, it was poorly received by the critical reading public and dismissed as incomprehensible. However, this apparent “incomprehensibility” was evidence of what would come to be recognized as a defiant break with past literary traditions. Through formal and semantic experimentation and a radical engagement with social issues, Trilce revolutionized the possibilities of what poetry could be and do in Latin America and in the world.

In this issue of Lucero, we invite publications in the fields of linguistic and literary/cultural studies that explore the concept of revolution, understood in its broadest sense. Reading revolution as formal experimentation, we ask how revolutionary literature, art and cinema reconfigure the traditional idea of the “canon” and forge new and emancipatory forms of artistic expression. Considering revolution as social phenomenon, we turn to the rich corpus of Hispanic and Lusophone cultural production serving and responding to revolutionary moments in history. We invite submissions that interrogate the ways that art and revolution intersect, come into conflict, and ultimately create each other. Methodologically, we ask what it means to approach humanities scholarship from a revolutionary vantage point, looking at innovative ways to study minoritized languages and the new and different questions that must be asked of and against the archive.

We welcome submissions in English, Spanish, and Portuguese around the theme of revolution. Submissions can take many forms, including but not limited to visual art, critical essays, research articles, fiction, poetry, translations, videography, photography, songs or pieces of music, and new or hybrid genres.

Topics can include, but are not limited to:

Literary/cultural studies:

- Revolution of forms, concepts, and canons

- Media, cinema, art, and literary forms in revolution

- Revolution as cycle and/or rupture

- Revolutionary approaches to the archive

- Revolution and subaltern studies

- Translation

- Methodologies and histories of linguistic study

Please send submissions and inquiries to uclucero@berkeley.edu by April 15, 2025. For more information on formatting your manuscript, see below:

- Scholarly articles should be between 5,000-7,000 words in length, including references and endnotes.

- If sending an article, please include an abstract of 400 words or less; 5-10 keywords for your article.

- Poetry submissions should include up to 5 original poems, and short stories should be no longer than 5,000 words.

- All entries should be double spaced, font Times New Roman 12, and follow MLA Style Manual format.

- The submission should be in native document format, preferably Microsoft Word. Please DO NOT include any identifying information in the Word document itself. All articles are subject to a blind review process.

- We welcome all forms of art, photography, and media.

In the body of your email, please mention:

- The article’s title

- Your name and affiliation