The academic word in question. Notes for a meta-critical reflection

Abstract

The following article proposes some considerations on the role of the researcher in the field of literary studies. More precisely, we are interested in recovering and getting in an extensive debate that problematizes the status of the academic discourse, especially, in literary investigations that address problems and build their corpora from the recognition of certain traits of subalternity. In this way, we start from a self-reflexive movement within our own investigations, crossed by questions about ethnic and race issues (in them, the mapuche and the blackness emerge as constitutive marks of the studied phenomena). In this movement, we propose possible lines of answers to some dilemmas faced by that academician who continues to ask herself how to approach alterity properly. The article is divided into two instances of reflection: in the first, we recover and articulate contributions from various authors that help us think about the risks involved in the uncritical use of the academical word. In the second, we propose some considerations around the methodological options that are presented as alternatives when addressing corpus of analyzes crossed by certain brands of subalternity. To this end, we will evaluate the scope and operability of certain categories -race, otherness, whiteness- that are relevant in the analytical development of our corpus. As we will see, the challenge lies in the evaluation of our own standpoint of enunciation, from the verification of the structural racial inequality that crosses academic practices and from the commitment of epistemic surveillance that we decided to assume.