The narrative of filiation is a literary form in which an author investigates the lives of one or more ancestors to reconstruct their history and situate it within the broader history of the author’s country. Such narratives centre on memory, transmission, and inheritance in both their families and more broadly in culture, which become embodied in the narrators’ sensory experience as they interrogate the past to better understand their present. An increasingly prominent literary form, Hispanic American narratives of filiation engage with a range of cultural wounds, including colonisation and the marginalisation of Indigenous peoples, recent dictatorships, and violence associated with drug trafficking, political corruption, and machismo. While most of these wounds are irreparable, this project argues that narratives of filiation can nevertheless contribute to forms of symbolic reparation by reshaping cultural memory through affects such as shame and pride. Cultural memory is understood here as the way a society constructs, revises, and transmits representations of its past through the social frameworks of its present. Thus, certain values that were once sources of pride – such as machismo – have now come to be associated with a shameful legacy. Conversely, what previous generations may have regarded as a shameful legacy – Indigenous ancestry, for example – is now embraced by descendants as a source of pride.
DR. NICOLAS LICATA
CURRICULUM VITAE
Nicolas Licata holds a doctorate in languages, literatures, and translation studies from the University of Liège, where he served as a lecturer from 2023 to 2026 teaching Spanish, as well as the history, literature, and culture of Hispanic America. In his academic career, he has also held visiting research positions at the University of Buenos Aires; the University of California, Los Angeles; the College of Mexico; and the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where he was also a postdoctoral researcher from 2021 to 2023. His research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Hispanic American literature, especially forms of self-writing and genres of the imagination, and the intersections between them. After publishing a monograph on the autofictions of Argentine writer César Aira, which he examined in the context of the 1976–1983 dictatorship, he broadened his research to explore autofiction in the work of several Mexican writers through the lenses of the body, gender, and affect. His current work focuses on narratives of filiation, examining representations of affect and their role in reshaping cultural memory.