Rereading European Cultural Heritage in Latin American Women Writers’ Travel Literature of the early 20th century: contrasting testimonies to build inclusive historical discourses
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Action Grant Agreement Nº 101063220.
Abstract
Preserving historical memory always results in a particular reading of history. It’s important to deconstruct hegemonic discourses and include different narratives from the perspective of otherness. With the support of Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, REWIND project will study the construction of discourses around European Cultural Heritage, focusing on travel literature written by Latin American women from the early 20th century. As such, non-European women, who are committed to feminist movements and miscegenation, become historical agents and cultural mediators that counteract a Eurocentric and patriarchal discourse. Using an interdisciplinary methodology based on geospatial tools and corpus linguistic analysis combined with gender decolonial approaches, REWIND aims to protect and transfer a cultural legacy that reflects the memories and subjectivities of a diverse society.
Objetives
The main aim of REWIND is to analyse how the narratives around the European cultural heritage have been constructed using Latin American women’s travel literature from the early 20th century. In this way, the unique History model based on androcentric, Eurocentric, and patriarchal discourses will be counteracted, showing that the European cultural heritage is a multivocal and diverse sociocultural construction. This project uses an interdisciplinary methodology based on Digital Humanities and gender decolonial approaches, and it is structured into specific research and innovation objectives:
- To reconstruct the travellers’ itineraries.
- To connect the information using Linked Open Data.
- To recognise impressions associated with the European cultural heritage.
- To determine the relationship between European cultural heritage and otherness processes.
Methodology
The innovation of this proposal lies in applying ground-breaking methodology from Digital Humanities that combines History, Geography and Literature with Computer Science to study narrative constructions about European cultural heritage from the perspective of the otherness. REWIND will use Latin American women’s travel books from the early 20th century, an underutilised source, to analyse historical discourses. Besides, REWIND will focus on marginalised perspectives because History is multivocal. Therefore, the proposal explores the authors’ projections on European cultural heritageusing gender decolonial approaches because Latin American women have agency as cultural mediators. So, REWIND analyses their perception of the European cultural heritagemapping not only their travels, but also their impressions. Furthermore, the extracted information from the selected book will be link with different Open GLAM collections data to promote new ways of interacting with the past.