ABSTRACT
Within Latin America, there is a long tradition of an elite group of cultural actors who have served as a protective ring for power, hegemonically directing society at the service of a particular political project. This chapter asks a simple question: What happened to these cultural agents of the middle and upper classes as a result of the social explosion, as a result of those events that effectively delegitimized their cultural hegemony? To answer this question, this chapter examines the recent poetry of Manuel Sanfuentes. Although Sanfuentes works with a poetics inherited from this elite tradition, in December 2019, he published a poem, “Paraman” [“Stop-man”], in which he uses typical ‘high-culture’ keystones—free-verse poetry, references to Greek and Roman heroes, and so on—in order to represent a folk hero of the social explosion: pareman (stop-man). An anonymous hooded protestor who used a stop-sign as a shield to protect his body against the violent advances of police, pareman was a symbolic embodiment of protestors’ demand that the Chilean state “stop” abusing the subaltern. In this poem, Sanfuentes puts the culture of the middle and upper classes into relation with the subaltern culture of the social explosion that I explore in the previous chapters.
