"What is an author?"... In light of the poetics of the subaltern

Abstract

Taking as a base some of Michel Foucault's theses sustained in his 1969 conference "What is an author?", on this occasion we make a theoretical effort to elucidate the pertinence of the question and its possible responses in the context of literatures written from the situation of subaleternity, answered, precisely, through the literary practice. One of the theses sustained here is that the "author" is a term that alludes to the person who constructs a discursive subject from the realities of a subject-body as well as the work itself that summons the silenced voices of a concrete historical community.