Luis Alberto Pérez Amezcua is Full-Time Research Professor at the Universidad de Guadalajara, Centro Universitario del Sur (CUSur) in México and Member of the National System of Researchers (SNII), Level I
Duration
5 months, 1 March to 31 July 2027
Host at the University of Passau
Prof. Dr. Susanne Hartwig
(Chair of Romance Literatures and Cultures)
How does literature represent the experience of living with a body that diverges from the norm, and what ethical responsibility does the writer bear when speaking for, or as, someone with a disability? This project examines a transatlantic body of recent novels, poetry, and films from Spain, Latin America, and the German-speaking world that confront these questions, drawing on works by Jorge Comensal, Irene Solà, Lina Meruane, Guadalupe Nettel, Mercedes Halfon, Luis Vicente de Aguinaga, and Stefan Zweig, alongside the 2024 Mexican film adaptation of Las mutaciones [German trans.: Verwandlungen] and the 2025 German film adaptation of Zweig’s Ungeduld des Herzens. Around 85 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean live with disabilities and face systematic exclusion; literature and cinema are spaces where this exclusion can be made visible and contested. The project asks how writers and filmmakers on both sides of the Atlantic navigate the line between empathy and pity, between care and condescension. It draws on foundational frameworks of literary disability studies — Mitchell and Snyder’s account of disability as a recurrent narrative device, Garland-Thomson’s analysis of the normative gaze, and Siebers’ notion of complex embodiment— and articulates them with Susanne Hartwig’s work on the dichotomies and dilemmas of disability representation and Olga Tokarczuk’s Nobel concept of the “tender narrator.” The outcome will be a comparative study (ideally co-authored with the host) of how Ibero American literature contributes a distinctive voice to a conversation so far dominated by Anglo-Saxon and European scholarship, together with an institutional bridge between the University of Guadalajara and the University of Passau.
