Improvisational Oral Poetry as an Antagonistic Political Practice. Notes on the Contemporary Reinscription of the Regueifa in the Galician Cultural Field

Notas sobre a reinscrição contemporânea da regueifa no campo cultural galego.

Abstract

The article develops a panoramic approach to improvised oral poetry in Galician language and its uses and social functions today. It includes a review of the theoretical and methodological frameworks usually applied to improvised oral poetry, while promoting the inclusion of transdisciplinary methodologies to study these practices in their aesthetic, sociocultural and political dimensions. It reconstructs the social history of the emblematic genre of Galician improvised poetry, the regueifa , which throughout the 20th century lost its function in the context of epithalamic rituals to become an artistic spectacle subject to both folkloric appropriation and sociocultural demands. In the last part, the uses of regueifa in the context of critical social movements are studied. The practices developed by feminism for the reinsertion of regueifa in a critical social intervention program against patriarchal hegemony are dealt with in a specific way.