Browsing by Subject "Latin American literature"

This thesis explores the confluence and clashes between local and global cultural flows in Latin America through the multiple literary movements and tendencies for which the Colombian author, Fernando Vallejo, acts as a unifying agent. My analysis pulls from Decolonial, Aesthetic and World Literary theories, in order to analyze how cosmopolitanism and globalization resonate in contemporary Latin American letters through a survey of three geocultural categories: the Colombian local, the Latin American regional, and the literary global. My analysis of the local tracks the formal evolution of the Colombian Novela de la Violencia into the contemporary Novela Urbana and the parallel political challenge to the conventional Lettered City in Colombia after the Violencia. In terms of the regional, I critique the idea of a positive and universally stabilizing cosmopolitanism through a collective analysis of a generation of Latin American writers that were forced to travel to the cosmopolitan center through exile rather than as an act of freewill, a generation that I refer to in this project as the Generation of '72. And my evaluation of the global considers how a singular World Literary aesthetics and political economy of prestige weights negatively on contemporary Latin American authors. Through a survey of the roughly fifty novels and short stories that fall under the purview of both the Colombian Urban Novel and the Generation of `72, I conclude that aesthetic borders - the places where multiple forms of perception converge- open up spaces and forums of critique of rigid cultural models and century old aesthetic formulae, a tendency that I refer to as a poetics of globalism.

Art in the Interregnum: The Aesthetics of Transition, 1973-Present adopts the interregnum, a concept imported into critical usage by Antonio Gramsci, as a periodizing framework for understanding cultural production today. While incarcerated in Turin during the early 1930s, Gramsci wrote: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Adapting this formulation to the era of neoliberal globalization, I argue for reading contemporary works of art in relation to the long crisis of the 1970s, examining how writers, photographers and filmmakers encode the “morbid symptoms” of the contemporary, which include the erosion of liberal democracy, the rise of mass migration, and the exhaustion of modernization. I devote three chapters to the phenomena enumerated above, analyzing, respectively, Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile (2000) and Pablo Larraín’s Tony Manero (2009) as a return to the primal scene of neoliberalism—the 1973 U.S. backed Chilean coup; the photography Harry Gamboa Jr. and Anthony Hernandez as competing representations on the mobility of labor; and the recent fixation with landscape in recent photography and fiction as an aesthetic challenge to the expansive logic of economic development. What brings these works together is a commitment to what I call the “aesthetics of transition,” a mode of representation that attempts to make visible the interregnum between the failure of existing political structures and emerging social forms, bringing the post-1970s into view as an historical period.

This dissertation deals with Cuban art criticism and other written texts related to Abstract Art. From a critical perspective that relates art to society and political and institutional practices, all of the above texts are interpreted as bearers of aesthetic ideologies, which are expressed in the paradigms from which Art Criticism attempted to validate Abstraction. This study further demonstrates that the dominant discourses in the realm of Art Criticism are strongly related to Ideological State Apparatuses. Art Criticism not only mediates between the artwork and the spectator, but also between artistic acts of provocation and the establishment.

Abstraction in Cuba constituted an important axis in the polemic between autonomous art and socially committed art, but the debates themselves were subsumed in ideological and even political battlefields. Art Criticism oriented these debates, by emphasizing certain problems, and diminishing the importance of other ones.

This dissertation is organized in function of the dominant questions that Cuban Art Criticism addressed. The first chapter accordingly deals with definitions of abstract art that were prevalent in art writing and publications from 1948 to 1957, a period in which Art Criticism is mostly concerned with the autonomy of art. The second chapter follows the debates about the social commitment of abstract art, which became predominant during the first years of a Marxist-oriented Revolution. This polemic is implicit in the emergence of an Anti-Academic movement in the visual arts, and it began to lose its strength once the Cuban Avant-Garde started to gain institutional recognition. After being relegated to a peripheral position, the question concerning the social commitment of Abstract Art became crucial after the triumph of the Revolution. The final chapter deals with the relations between Abstract Art and the diverse documents that embodied and defined the Cultural Policy during the Cuban Revolution.

Throughout, this study strives to establish the place of Abstract Art in the Institutional, and discursive practices from 1959 onwards. This place is defined by its instability, as it is constituted through intermittencies and steps backwards on the path towards the institutional consecration of non-figurative tendencies.

I study three contemporary Chilean works of visual culture that appropriate and re-assemble visual material, discourse, and atmosphere from the bureaucracy of the military state. I examine Diamela Eltit’s textual performance of legal discourse in Puño y letra (2005); Guillermo Núñez’s testimonial art Libertad Condicional (1979-1982) based on the documents pertaining to his imprisonment, parole and forced exile; and Pablo Larraín’s fictional film Post Mortem (2010) inspired by Salvador Allende’s autopsy report. I argue that they employ a framework that exposes both the functional and aesthetic modes of bureaucracy complicit in state terror that operate within the spectacular and the mundane. Furthermore, I trace bureaucracy’s origins from the founding of the nation to its current practices that enabled the societal conditions for dictatorship and continue to uphold dictatorial legacies into the present.

In my analysis, I engage theories from performance, legal and media studies to interpret how Eltit critiques the press coverage of human rights trials, Núñez informs institutionalized preservation of memory, and Larraín demonstrates the power of fiction in our documentary reconstruction of the past. I conclude by arguing that this examination of bureaucracy is imperative because state bureaucracy anchors vestiges of the dictatorship that persist into the present such as the dictatorship-era constitution and the newly revived preventative control of identity documentation law.

El agotamiento de la Izquierda: subalternidad y soberanía is a comparative project that examines the concept of political sovereignty in a variety of cultural texts in Latin America, including novels, essays and film. The dissertation defines sovereignty as an antagonistic space where the institution of nation-states and the development of capitalist modernization coincide. The dissertation examines basically four cases of social conflict in recent Latin American history where the concept of sovereignty is called into question: the Mexican Revolution (1910-20), the Cuban Revolution (1953-59), national populism in Argentina (1946-55) and the Popular Unity government in Chile (1970-73). The thesis argues for a new understanding of the relation between sovereignty and subalternity and also the relationship between literature and speculative late capitalism as an effect of the exhaustion of the interstate notion of sovereignty.

My dissertation, “Fictional Timing: Neoliberalism and Time in the Contemporary Latin American Novel”, studies recent developments in the Latin American novel to better understand the relation between economics and time in contemporary Latin America. I analyze Alberto Fuguet’s Las películas de mi vida (2002) Jorge Volpi’s No sera la Tierra (2006), Pedro Mairal’s El año del desierto (2005), Diamela Eltit’s Los trabajadores de la muerte (1998) and Mano de obra (2002), as well as Barataria (volume 1 published in 2012, volume 2 published in 2013) by Juan López Bauzá, to argue that at the heart of the Latin American novel’s examination of the shifting signifier that is “neoliberalism” (Brown 20), we find a return to matters of time and temporality. Since the early 1970s, Latin America has provided a site for political experiments in reshaping the dynamics between the social and economic spheres, thus between citizens and the market. The region became the third great stage for the neoliberal model, as well as the first systematic experiment of neoliberal reforms during Pinochet’s dictatorship (Valencia 478). It has become all but commonplace to credit changes in technology, debt reforms, privatization, austerity, and global markets for a distinctively contemporary experience of time as the acceleration and compression of lived experience that ensures a predictable future (Harvey 1989; Lazzarato 2012). While taking this now commonplace view into account, I conclude that contemporary Latin American novels insist on the heterogeneity of temporal experiences. Each chapter explores these diverse times at work within neoliberal rationality, discourses, practices, and subjectivities.

Colombia has historically been known as a fragmented country because of its poor territorial integration. This dissertation intends to transcend the traditional way in which this (dis)integration process has been studied, principally linked to geographical determinism. Based on the theories developed by Henry Lefebvre, David Harvey and Milton Santos regarding the production of space, geographical determinism is confronted in two ways: on one hand Colombian spatial problematic is inserted within a global context, which highlights that the production of space is dependent in peripheral areas, and on the other hand, the role of the symbolic field in the production of space is studied through the conformation of a genealogy of Colombian geographical imaginaries.

This is a restricted genealogy in the sense that it focuses only on three historical periods: the nation-state building process in the nineteenth century, the period known as La Violencia (1948-1965), and the "triple war" that has been active since the seventies. The sources studied for each respective period are: travel literature and travel illustrations, testimonial novels, and testimonies. Chapter one focuses on the production of the national space, and through an inter-artistic approach of the textual and visual components of the Comisión Corográfica (1850-1859), it highlights this project's influence on the construction of the country as a regionalized country. Chapters two and three focus on how different types of violence have emerged as agents of deep spatial transformations, and highlight that the cultural field not only constructs discursively the "spaces of terror" produced by violence, but by doing so, it contributes to the inclusion of those spaces in the nation's geographical imaginaries. Finally, the conclusion comprises the spatial transformations brought about by the Constitution of 1991, which inevitably refer to the first chapter's view on how national space was constructed in the nineteenth century. This genealogy highlights both the role of the cultural field in the production of space, and in the diffusion of "alternative spaces" (Lefebvre), as it contributes to insert them within the geographical imaginaries.

Resumen

Colombia se ha caracterizado históricamente por ser un país fragmentado a raíz de su reducida cohesión territorial. Esta tesis se propone trascender la forma tradicional en la que se ha abordado el proceso de (des)integración nacional, caracterizada por estar fuertemente anclada en el determinismo geográfico. Partiendo de las teorías de Henry Lefebvre, David Harvey y Milton Santos acerca de la producción del espacio, se confronta el determinismo geográfico por dos vías: por un lado se inserta la problemática espacial colombiana dentro de un marco global, con lo cual se resalta el carácter dependiente de la producción del espacio en la periferia, y por el otro, se estudia el papel de lo simbólico en la producción del espacio, mediante la construcción de una genealogía de imaginarios geográficos colombianos.

Esta es una genealogía restringida en la medida en que sólo se enfoca en tres periodos: la construcción del Estado-nación en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX, el periodo de La Violencia (1948-1965), y la "triple guerra" que viene sucediendo desde finales de los setentas. El tipo de fuentes que se estudian en cada periodo son libros e imágenes de viaje, novelas testimoniales y testimonios respectivamente. En el primer capítulo se estudia la forma en que se construyó el espacio nacional, y mediante el estudio inter-artístico tanto del producto textual como visual de la Comisión Corográfica (1850-1859), se resalta la importancia de este proyecto en la construcción del país como un país de regiones. Luego, en el segundo y el tercer capítulo se aborda la forma en que diferentes tipos de violencia se convierten en agentes de profundas transformaciones espaciales, y se resalta que el campo cultural no sólo construye discursivamente los "espacios del terror" generados a raíz de la violencia, sino que al hacerlo contribuye a insertarlos dentro del imaginario geográfico de la nación. Finalmente en la conclusión se abordan las transformaciones espaciales suscitadas por la Constitución de 1991, lo cual inevitablemente conlleva a retomar las reflexiones planteadas en el primer capítulo con respecto a la forma en se construyó el espacio nacional en el siglo XIX. A través de esta se resalta el papel activo que ha cumplido el campo cultural tanto en la producción del espacio, como en la difusión de "espacios alternativos" (Lefebvre), al contribuir a insertarlos dentro del imaginario geográfico nacional.

In my dissertation I propose that Álvaro Bisama's Caja negra is a book that both continues and defies the interventions in the field of culture articulated in Alberto Fuguet's Por favor, rebobinar and other texts associated with the McOndo approach to culture in Latin America; an approach that includes urban metropolitan spaces as well as mass-produced cultural products in the range of possible representations of daily life experiences in Latin America. I argue that, in order to do so, Bisama performs an oppositional, counterfactual and cultist appropriation of the history of the Chilean written, audiovisual and musical media productions of the 20th century, considering Chilean both the media productions that were made in Chile and the media productions that were consumed in the Chilean context even if they were made somewhere else. In Caja negra, the appropriation of such a wide catalogue of productions is achieved by inoculating the text with a significant amount of apocryphal films, books, authors, filmmakers, musicians, records and other data related to these productions and their producers. I show that the saturation of apocryphal data in Caja negra aims to create an alternate history of Chile through the construction of an alternate cultural field. However, the historical fact of Augusto Pinochet's coup d'état in 1973 remains unchanged. I argue that Bisama's display of apocrypha in Caja negra is a way of responding to the lack of reliability of the accounts of history, especially, the history of media productions in Chile, as a consequence of the actions taken by the military. Therefore, I propose that Bisama's approach to the genre of alternate history is political and consists of proposing the conjectural as a strategy to overcome the gaps and untrustworthiness of the accounts of history in a way that provides an alternative to the search for truth. Finally, I propose that Caja negra engages with popular and alternative cultures in a double edged way: On the one hand, it builds on the changes in the field of culture that were either observed, proposed or performed by the productions associated to McOndo, in a time that coincided with the dawn of both the democratic transition and the popularization of new technologies that promised to democratize the access to culture. On the other hand, it shows that active consumption and fanatic appropriation are deliberate and personal acts that, as such, depend more on those who perform them than on the products that are being appropriated. Popular culture is treated as a plurality of cultures, and the text is not a place to display it or fictionalize it, as it happens in Por favor, rebobinar. In Caja negra the codes of these pop cultures are shown yet remain veiled. Their apocryphal nature and the complex processes of fictionalization serve to protect them from overexposure and loss of their subcultural capital. In my dissertation, I observe that Por favor, rebobinar articulates a principle that rules the relationships between characters and between the characters and the reader, and I call it aesthetic empathy. I recognize this principle as fundamental in Fuguet's writing in the nineties. Also; I read in Por favor, rebobinar an apology of active and public critical consumption of cultural products. In my comparative reading of Por favor, rebobinar and Caja negra, I find that in the latter there is a shift in the perception of culture and its representation that functions as a response to the principle of aesthetic empathy and to the apology of critical consumption articulated in Por favor, rebobinar. I argue that this contestation to Por favor, rebobinar and McOndo is achieved by a process of adoption and experimentation with the limits of the more provocative traits of Por favor, rebobinar's content and composition, such as the presentation of a cultural field, the saturation of data related to popular cultures, the fragmentary structure, the inclusion of metatextual interventions, and the emphasis in the specific nature of each fragment of writing through its structure and mediations. In sum, I present a reading of Caja negra as a text engaged in the intervention on the field of culture in Chile, articulated in continuity and contrast to its predecessors in the nineties.

Este trabajo estudia el proceso de invención del espacio en el México colonial durante el siglo XVI y XVII, entendiendo la invención del espacio como la inserción de una conceptualización del entorno ajena a la experiencia de las comunidades indígenas nahuas. Primero se define la idea particular de cosmos, territorio y tierra manejada por los nahuas previo a la llegada española entendida como tlacauhtli, y su conformación mediante los principios de cahuitl (tiempo), ollin (movimiento), nepantla (equilibrio), y tonalli (fuerza) por medio del análisis de documentos prehispánicos y coloniales concernientes a la cosmología nahua. Luego, utilizando la propuesta de Aníbal Quijano sobre la implementación de la matriz colonial de poder en América, se analizan los aspectos de esta matriz en su relación con los procesos de dominación del territorio, motor de la creación del espacio en el México colonial, mediante los procesos de estructuración de los pueblos indígenas coloniales, la economía y el trabajo de la tierra, la deshumanización del espacio mexicano y la cartografía novohispana. Finalmente, se desarrolla la idea de subsistencia de los principios fundamentales del tlacauhtli a pesar de la implementación del concepto de espacio y de la dominación del territorio mexicano por parte de la corona española. En cada ámbito de la matriz, se develan resistencias de la antigua percepción del entorno nahua frente a los cambios impulsados por el proceso colonial.

This dissertation examines how fiction from the 1950s to the present exposes the historical functioning of Caribbean territories as laboratories for political, economic, and scientific experimentation. Through close-readings of Puerto Rican and Cuban literary texts, I argue that the laboratory, as a biopolitical system of power legitimation, operates on the levels of knowledge, affect, and subjectivities. First, the authors I study denounce how medical and literary discourse intersect to create eugenic, homophobic, and patriarchal diagnoses, proposing instead counter-hegemonic forms of imagining (and experiencing) mental and physical health, corporeal difference, and healing processes. Second, the diverse works of fiction I examine revolve around the shared affect of fear, which is heightened through the anticipation of further testing. Ultimately, I show how the laboratory produces paradoxical forms of alterity for the test subjects—a method of trial and error relies on an othered subject who, at the same time, must be sufficiently similar to the experimenter in order to function as a reliable testing object. This investigation contributes to and opens up new interpretative frameworks for the fields of Caribbean and postcolonial studies by examining an understudied form of subalternity—i.e., the test subject—through a connection between literary genres, geographies, and historical periods, which are often explored in isolation. Chapters 2 and 3 identify several forms of monstrosity and illness in the narrative fictions of Virgilio Piñera and José Lezama Lima. I show how these authors foreground the monstrous body in order to problematize the cycles of political experimentation in Cuba, as well as the medical nature of the US occupation and interventionism in the first decades of the 20th century. Chapter 4 explores the narrative work of Puerto Rican-Dominican author Pedro Cabiya, proposing the category of “hypochondriac fiction,” which names an aesthetic space for the destabilization of biopolitics in the context of repeated medical experimentation on human beings in Puerto Rico. Chapter 5 looks into the work of Rafael Acevedo, José (Pepe) Liboy, and Jorge Enrique Lage. I address the role of paranoia in Cuban and Puerto Rican novels by revealing the counterintuitive transformation of science fiction—in many senses, the epitome of fantastic fabrications—into the ultimate guarantor of credibility. In the epilogue I explore the representation of healing processes in Mayra Santos Febres’ La amante de Gardel (2015).

In this dissertation, Poetics of Revelation: Communities of the Literary Oracular in Transatlantic Modernism, I study practices of cultural mediation in “visionary” poetics from Mexico (Octavio Paz), Spain (María Zambrano), and Bolivia (Jaime Saenz). I set forth a theoretical model (“the literary oracular”) which permits the conflict of poetic revelation to articulate its unity in literary modernism through a critique of instrumental reason leveled by cultural mediators who refused to accept the disintegration of tradition, which they thought had to pass through them if it was to survive. Revelation and discipleship were effects of these authors’ earlier disenchantment with revolutionary platforms that relied on mass culture constructed as a people. Their new concern that “national energy” was so volatile it could turn assemblies into mobs, convinced them of the need for a conduit through which a new transcendence could be discovered and instituted, and to believe that they had to become its custodian if a new community was to be imagined in the wake of revolutionary fatigue. As these authors were poets, they set out to imagine a new language with which to name that transcendence, one which would remain unassailable by the vociferous chatter of the political rally and the marketplace. This poetics of revelation invites us to ask how these modernist mediating agents – working as they did in vernacularizing print cultures which threatened their elite minority status – came to imagine community as a transhistorical colloquium among like-minded interpreters after the failure of politically left-leaning notions of communitarianism.

“South as Method: From the ‘Southern Question’ to the ‘Southern Thoughts’” examines the emergence of narrative and rhetoric patterns within the context of the unclear and unstable meaning of race and nation-building discourses in Italy, Spain, Peru, and Argentina. My methodology combines a close reading of late nineteenth-century novels and short stories published in these countries with an analysis of the ways that the global editorial market and local sociological essays influenced the creation of local ‘social types’ in these texts. Bridging intersectional literary analysis with post- and decolonial theories, this study analyzes writers’ definitions of their novels rather than what critics or theorists have called ‘naturalist’ or ‘realist’ novels. It is an invitation to look inside the writers’ peculiar ways of producing novels in this style while prioritizing national concerns. The literary corpus analyzed spans from essays—Luigi Capuana’s L’isola del sole, Antonio Gramsci’s Quaderni del carcere, Cesare Lombroso’s L’uomo delinquente, José Carlos Mariátegui’s Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana, Ezequiel Martinez Estrada’s Radiografia de la pampa, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Civilización y barbarie—to novels and short stories—Emilia Pardo Bazán’s La tribuna, Mercedes Cabello’s Blanca Sol, Eugenio Cambaceres’s En la sangre, Clorinda Matto’s Herencia, Luigi Pirandello’s “L’altro figlio,” Benito Pérez Galdós’s Lo prohibido and Tormento, Giovanni Verga’s “Rosso Malpelo” and “L’amante di Gramigna.” In my analysis of these nineteenth-century texts, the concept of ‘social type’ is highlighted as a key framework and a descriptive tool that responds to the growing need for orientation within the unsteady national borders. In this sense, I analyze the osmotic relationship between social science and literature, which culminates in the responses articulated by Marxist theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, Ezequiel Martinez Estrada, and José Carlos Mariátegui, in the 1930s, through their original articulation of the south as a method rather than an object of study.

This dissertation analyzes how Colombian criollos – people of real or imagined European origins – dealt with the problem of representing value as part of their efforts to build a “civilized” nation during the nineteenth century (1822-1903). It researches capitalist development from the perspective of the symbolic structure that makes the accumulation of capital possible. It emphasizes the role of finance in the historical process through which Colombia’s territory and people were imagined and organized around a core principle: the pursuit of profit. As the affective and discursive center of profit-making, money is the most important pivot of liberal governmentality. This study thus takes as its main object what Mary Poovey has called “monetary genres” (e.g., bonds, stocks, paper money) as well as a variety of texts (e.g., political economy, literature, statistical accounts, press advertisements, conduct manuals, investment prospectuses) that criollos consumed and produced to understand and manage the relation of money to value. The anxiety produced by the difficulties of locating value in an “economy” based on speculation shaped not only political economy, but virtually all spheres of life. The project argues that capitalist development in Colombia involved new modes of representation that secured the trust required by financial instruments – essentially promises to pay – while simultaneously making the economy vulnerable to cyclical crises of credibility. These authorial modes of representation have been largely produced in the country by an exclusive, white, male elite. The research thus underlines the continuing reliance of capitalism on colonial structures of power and reveals how the symbolic architecture of the financial system has historically played an important role in the reproduction of gender, race, and class hierarchies.

My dissertation, <“>Transcending Borders: The Transnational Construction of Mexicanness, 1920-1935,<”> examines the conflicting attitudes towards "Mexicanness" or mexicanidad both in Mexico and the United States, an area that, Jos<é> Lim<ó>n, conceptualizes as "Greater Mexico." Beginning with an analysis of the Mexican postrevolutionary state's construction of nationalist culture, I argue that the transnational invention of Mexicanness through the circulation of the Aztec artifact reveals the possibilities for people of Mexican descent to reclaim public space and cultural citizenship on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. I examine the construction of Mexicanness through an analysis of the limitations of Mexican post-revolutionary literary production in generating a clear vision of Mexican nationhood as well as the possibilities for nation building offered by public spaces such as the museum and the monument (an outdoor museum). Tracing the cultural manifestations of Mexican nationhood as expressed by the state and by people of Mexican descent is essential to understanding how the nation is practiced and thus intimately intertwined with the practice of citizenship. Through an interdisciplinary analysis of the Aztec artifact's various incarnations as an archaeological artifact, created artifact, and spurious artifact, I contend that the artifact represents an alternative text for the study of nationalism in its ability to narrate a national identity ultimately shaped beyond Mexico's geographical borders.