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.

Call for papers:

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, Catalán, Portuguese, and Nahuatl 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