Browsing by Subject "Latin American studies"

Background: Primary care sensitive conditions (PCSC), a classification of illnesses that includes noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) and maternal health complications, are considered preventable through appropriate care management and interventions at the primary care (PC) level. Consistent with trends in global disease burden, PCSC are a significant contributor to avoidable hospitalizations in low and middle income countries (LMIC), which carries profound social and economic consequences. Rates of hospitalizations for primary care sensitive conditions (HPCSC) have been found to be associated with the level of infrastructure of health services delivery, health system, and socioeconomic context. This study concentrates on the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais to evaluate the current profile of HPCSC and their predictors under the universal PC program, the Family Health Strategy (FHS).

Methods: This is an ecological study based on: 1) data of PC infrastructure from 560 municipalities, collected from 2012-2013 through the Programa Nacional de Melhoria do Acesso e da Qualidade da Atenção Básica (PMAQ-AB), 2) data on rates of HPCSC available in the Hospital Information System of the Unified Health System, and 3) data on health system and socioeconomic indicators from the Brazilian Ministry of Health and the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics, respectively. For the analysis, 7 groups of PCSC specifically targeted under the FHS were considered. 24 structure and process indicators were selected from the PMAQ-AB database and a principal component analysis with factor interpretability was performed, utilizing the theoretical rationale of the Starfield Model of Primary Care, to reduce and describe data dimensionality. Principal component scores were averaged by municipality, and assessed as predictors of HPCSC across municipalities in multiple regression models both individually and progressively adjusting for health system and socioeconomic variables as groups.

Results: From January-December 2012, municipalities in our sample experienced 12,078 HPCSC due to the 7 conditions chosen, with an aggregate age-adjusted rate of 112.15 per 10,000 inhabitants. The NCDs of congestive heart failure, cerebrovascular diseases, and diabetes mellitus collectively accounted for 87.56% of all hospitalizations. The best-fitting principal component model of infrastructure data consisted of 3 components that corresponded to the level of adequacy of care comprehensiveness, continuity, and coordination. In the fully-adjusted models, the strongest predictors of HPCSC per 10,000 were continuity (β= 12.44) for heart failure, comprehensiveness (β= -3.09) for cerebrovascular diseases, continuity (β= 1.45) for diabetes, continuity (β= .92) for skin and subcutaneous tissue infections, comprehensives e (β=.99) for female pelvic inflammatory diseases, and continuity (β=.74) for prenatal and postpartum conditions.

Conclusions: NCDs heavily influence incidences of avoidable hospitalizations in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Yet, our findings suggest that the community-based care models of the FHS may have the potential to mitigate the role of social vulnerability in influencing health outcomes. This project offers a model for quantifying the quality of PC infrastructure and more research is needed to validate its use in LMIC, as well as to further understand the strength and directionality of the relationship between health center, health system, and socioeconomic predictors of HPCSC.

Background: This thesis describes the perceived delays faced by patients and providers in Amazonas, Brazil while seeking or providing snakebite envenoming care in the region. Additionally, we compare the delays described by indigenous and non-indigenous patients while seeking care. Methods: This study analyzed previously recorded data from snakebite envenoming (SBE) patients and indigenous health care providers with intent to discuss their experiences. In-depth interviews and focus group transcripts were analyzed using the Three Delay Model. This model groups data into three separate delays; deciding to seek care, arriving to care, and receiving adequate care. Results: From this analysis we found that patients described many different themes for their decisions to seek care including choosing alternative methods, cultural restrictions, refusing traditional medicines and many more. The reasons behind the decisions to seek care or not were different between indigenous and non-indigenous patients. While travelling to care both study groups described the need to use multiple means of travel to arrive to distribution hospitals and the unavailability of transportation and emergency services which caused delays. Finally, once they arrived to health care facility delays were again presented by the need for multiple facilities to receive adequate care. Conclusion: The findings of this study support public health researchers push for the decentralization of antivenom. Both survivors of SBE and health care providers in the region have expressed the need for treatment to be available in their region. Due to the population of the region, any interventions whether education or political will need to consider the culture of the indigenous people to ensure positive uptake.

This dissertation explores the influence of anarchism on the development of modern art in Mexico and the Americas from 1910 to 1950. It argues that art was an integral component of anarchist movements and that the philosophy and politics of anarchism guided major aesthetic debates about modern art in Mexico. Two key figures anchor this study: Ricardo Flores Magón (1874-1922) was an anarchist writer, activist, and head of the Junta Organizadora del Partido Liberal Mexicano, an anarcho-communist group of exiled Mexican anarchists living in the U.S. Dr. Atl (1875-1964) was a landscape painter, early proponent of muralism, and promoter of Mexican folk art. These figures are a starting point for unveiling a wide network of well-known and marginalized artists, writers, and intellectuals who engaged with anarchist philosophies. Using previously unexplored archival sources, correspondence, and unpublished manuscripts, this study examines a range of different artistic works—paintings and murals, cartoons and drawings, correspondence and book illustrations—that ranged in form and style from realism to impressionism and expressionism. By examining the reproduction and translation of these works throughout Mexico, the U.S., and South America, this dissertation also shows how anarchist art production transcended linguistic and cultural divides and furthered efforts to construct a hemispheric network of transborder solidarity.

As one of the windiest places in the world, it is no surprise that companies have flocked to Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a narrow neck of land connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Primarily foreign corporations have installed more than1500 wind turbines in less than ten years' time. While wind energy appears an ethereal, amorphous, and limitless resource, the wind can only become electricity through turbines that require vast tracts of land. The question of land ownership — a historical flashpoint in the region — has amplified tensions between residents, straining the already frayed web of social relations that have long bound this indigenous Zapotec community to one another.

Many of the indigenous Zapotec residents are thrilled these once bothersome winds are becoming productive — as profits, job security, and perhaps their shot at progress. Landowners are among the most ardent supporters of wind energy development, tending their livestock in the morning, leveraging their land in exchange for more favorable lease agreements with executives in the afternoon. Opponents of the industry liken their boosters to an earlier colonial power, asking, "What are we going to eat if you turn everything into gold?" – depicting wind energy as merely the latest in a long history of dispossessions. For them, the wind has always been productive, an actor in their everyday lives: it awakens the fruits of the sea, sustaining fishermen and feeding their families; it causes illness and destroys property, and it conjures residents to recall the joys of living in this place. What Istmeños are aware of are the stark geopolitical realities that have brought wind turbines to their doorstep.

In a moment when Mexico's oil reserves are dwindling and the state searches for alternative revenues, the case of wind energy development on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec complicates the utopian narrative that industry and government advocates recount regarding the so-called win-win possibilities for green energy development across the global South. What happens when the wind is transformed from its unruly natural state into a natural resource? Far from an isolated case, this dissertation draws upon broader theories of power, both electrical and economic, to show how individuals, institutions, and experts are laying claim to nature's force. Neither the fable of green techno-optimism nor a return to some mythical nature adequately explains the messiness of the everyday realities I observed. Based on more than 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I trace the generative possibilities of the wind, reconfiguring social relations through technological change. Ultimately, however, it is the imponderability of the natural world, its scale and power, and the very real consequences that efforts to mitigate global climate change are having in one particular place that I hope to convey in this work.

Background: Indigenous People around the world experience inequalities in health care. In Brazil, Indigenous inequalities in health are exacerbated by the poor system of health care delivery. The aim of this study is to understand barriers to care as defined from the Indigenous perspective.

Methods: This study was conducted on three Indigenous reserves of the Xavante people in Mato Grosso, Brazil. We utilized a mixed methods approach. In the quantitative portion of the study, we surveyed 50 individuals using an adapted version of the World Health Organization 2002 World Health Survey. Participants for the quantitative survey were recruited from a randomized list of prospective patients for a medical outreach mission. In the qualitative portion of the study, we interviewed 37 individuals, including patients, health care providers, and village chiefs, about their experiences with health care. Participants for the qualitative interviews were recruited randomly from a medical outreach patient listing (Expedicionários da Saúde).

Results: Overall, participants reported dissatisfaction with health-seeking experiences. We identified five barriers to obtaining satisfactory care: lack of transportation, lack of health care services and medication, attitudes of health care workers, lack of culturally appropriate services, and social determinants.

Conclusions: Given an overall sense of dissatisfaction with health care use among indigenous people, future research should focus on identifying interventions to help overcome key barriers to accessing care. Private-public partnerships and other innovative health systems models should be explored to meet the needs of underserved indigenous communities.

Because identity is a continuously evolving process, it is important to question whether and how immigrant groups contend with U.S.-based ideas about race. This is especially the case for Afro-Latinxs, who sit at the intersection of two identities, Blackness and Latinidad, that are constructed as mutually exclusive. This dissertation uses Dominicans in the U.S. as an empirical case for understanding how Afro-Latinx groups think about their racial identity and create racial meaning around labels like “Latinx” and “Black.” I also theorize the concept of ethnoracial authenticity and explore how this group navigates normative constructions of Blackness and Latinidad that situate them outside of these identities. Finally, I discuss how Dominicans engage with transnational racial justice movements that create space for Dominicans both in the Dominican Republic and in the diaspora to challenge Dominican xenophobia and anti-Blackness. This work contributes to a broader conversation about the future of Black and Latinx politics and intergroup coalition building and offers insight into how Black Latinxs perceive the benefits of social and political alignment with these larger groups. Understanding the intersections of ethnicity and racial identity and the ways in which these groups overlap is ultimately important for considering what Black, Latinx, and Black Latinx coalition-building will look like in the future and could help us better understand and appreciate the role that these communities could play in global efforts for racial justice.

Caribbean Iconographies of Cultural Nationalism: Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico traces a chronological evolution of images circulating between the Caribbean and the United States demonstrating the intersection of religion and politics. I argue that these representations constitute prime examples of the Caribbean struggle for decolonization and self-determination. I focus my investigation on select examples from three Antillian nations to theorize the iconophilic and affective dimensions of their corresponding cultural nationalisms, especially in relation to resisting colonialism and imperialism. From the Haitian Revolution to the first US occupation of Cuba to the current aftermath of Hurricane María in Puerto Rico, I examine the mechanisms of power relations at play in the region as understood through the lens of iconography and Caribbean thought. I accomplish this through an analysis of particular images and related texts, a foundational novel, a painting, a series of photographs and postcards, and contemporary public murals with the use of methodologies related to cultural and visual studies, Caribbean and decolonial thought, theories of affect and iconography, historical and archival analysis, and theologies of Afro-Caribbean religions.

“Even Christ the Redeemer has turned his back to us” a young, Black female resident of the Baixada Fluminense told me. The 13 municipalities that make up this suburban periphery of Rio de Janeiro have suffered for decades from stigmatizing media narratives that cast the region as pathologically violent and culturally devoid due to its Blacker, poorer inhabitants. This has helped perpetuate government neglect, exacerbated by Rio’s hosting of the 2016 Olympic Games, through clientelist politics that thrive off the lack of jobs and basic public services in the region. My dissertation is an auto-ethnographic analysis of my three years of participatory action research with Black and brown youth in Rio de Janeiro’s stigmatized Baixada Fluminense. I argue that the music, films, social media driven journalism, and scholarly production of these youth contest the ways in which race, class, and place of origin often overlap through segregationist practices that attempt to maintain racial, socio-geographic hierarchies by relegating Black, brown, and poor bodies to the social and geographic periphery of a country than once proclaimed itself a “racial democracy.” Through transnational partnerships, these youth employ diasporic cultural forms and digital media to re-configure the Baixada and its 13 municipalities as a “Black place” that is inherently intersectional in its claims to collective access to urban and social mobility within this urban periphery.

My dissertation, “Coloring the Sacred: Visions of Devotional Kinship in Colonial Peru and Brazil,” spans disciplinary, linguistic, and imperial bounds to explore how local devotion to saints expressed through visual media informed broader debates on the enslavement and the spiritual conquest of “New” world populations in colonial Brazil and Peru. Specifically, I explore a range of social actors—African slaves, indigenous muleteers, Portuguese merchants, and Spanish clergymen—who contributed to the multi-directional process of “coloring the sacred” by producing, consuming, and circulating images of saints. Juxtaposing an iconographic analysis of sacred image-objects (paintings, prints, sculptures, crucifixes, and oratories) alongside textual sources, I historicize how lay devotion to saints and their images could simultaneously bridge and mark ethnic divides, thus contributing to rich theoretical debates on hybridity, religion, and the construction of race in the Iberian Atlantic world.

The literature on clientelism has extensively covered the direct exchange of private goods for political support between voters and politicians. Yet, patronage does not end with the distribution of food, medicine or public employment. In poor informal settlements, access to a sanitation system or clean drinking water is often mediated by local politicians.Therefore, the interaction between slum politics and the provision of Local Public Goods (LPG) is quite relevant and requires further study.

This dissertation explains the variation in infrastructure and public services in shantytowns as a function of social capital. Well-connected communities --with stronger ties among its members-- solve collective action problems, improving slum dwellers' quality of life. The linking mechanism between social capital and LPG is electoral coordination (bloc-voting). Neighbors agree for a common electoral strategy at the slum-level, which translates into an effective mechanism to demand for improvements in their locality (``good-type partisan homogeneity'').

Alternatively, isolation among slum dwellers deteriorate their access to and quality of LPG. Under the absence of social capital, when slum-level electoral behavior appears to be homogenous, it is likely signaling political clientelism and not community-led coordination. Ultimately the ``bad-type partisan homogeneity'' represents the inability of slum dwellers to enforce electoral accountability and sanction unresponsive governments. I test my hypotheses with survey data from Udaipur (India) and eight provinces in Argentina.

This dissertation explores the quotidian experience of economic development by studying both the material realities and discursive worlds of 1960s Argentina. I reveal the gendered relationship between economic development and an expanding consumer culture by analyzing the use, circulation, and meanings attributed to household appliances by journalists and public intellectuals. In the late 1950s, many economists, politicians, and intellectuals fervently believed they had found an economic model -- developmentalism -- that would finally provide the means of raising Argentines' standard of living and make the Argentine economy as robust as those of the United States and Northern European countries. Household appliances played a key role because they achieved both those goals, (supposedly) improving women's lives in the process by in part facilitating their increased participation in the workforce. Developmentalists believed their economic model to exist independently of ideology and cultural influences, but their model encountered cultural realities that limited its success. Consumerism--the way through which Argentines interacted with development--and its effects on family and gender relationships complicated the process. Both supporters and critics of developmentalism attacked women's roles as consumers to articulate many of their protestations against changes in women's status and to express anxieties about seemingly unrelated social and cultural changes. I argue that through the course of the 1960s the discussion about consumerism increasingly became a way through which different groups offered distinct visions of how "Argentine society" ought to be transformed.

This study draws on a broad array of written and oral sources. To trace the connection between economic development and consumer society, I interweave an analysis of economic and infrastructural data - such as production statistics or the availability of gas, water - with a study of socio-cultural discourses found in a wide variety of magazines, essays, films, and interviews. I juxtapose these sources in unusual ways to demonstrate two things. First, the cross-referencing of disparate sources to reveals a fuller, more complete picture of economic development and its effects--transcending macro-structural phenomenon to offer a view of quotidian change. And, two, this more complete pictures details how a narrative of hope and idealism evolved into one of anxiety and vitriol as the decade progressed.

This thesis examines how the recent discovery of massive oil reserves off the coast of Cuba has driven a resurgence of Cuban-Russian relations in the 21st century. The first chapter demonstrates how the Russian government came to conceptualize the export of hydrocarbons as integral to the nation's development. It also examines the internal situation in Cuba after the fall of the Soviet Union to explain what initiated shifts in domestic policy that allowed for greater external investment. The second chapter discusses the effect of the discovery of these oil reserves, and how the Russians and the Cubans have come together over this issue against the backdrop of larger anti-American tendencies in Latin America. The first chapter relies more on secondary analyses of trends in both nations to help familiarize the reader with key concepts, such as the idea of Russia's energy weapon and Cuba's impetus for change. The second chapter heavily uses newspaper articles and speeches to demonstrate the visible shift in Russian attitude towards Cuba.

This thesis shows that the oil reserves have stimulated both countries to work closely together, though each has their respective reasons.

There is a growing number of people going through deconstructive faith experiences in Latin American Pentecostal churches. Factors like globalization, individualism, high educational rates, the post-colonial experience of the Latin American church, fundamentalism, connectivity, and others contribute to accelerate this trend and shape the environment of faith communities that find themselves amongst increasingly postmodern tendencies. Most pastors are either ignoring the situation, rejecting deconstruction all together, or embracing it blindly. I propose a pastoral response from a distinctively Pentecostal perspective that engages deconstruction of faith critically, while staying open to conceive it as a tool for Spirit-led discipleship that can produce a more mature faith.I examine six affirmations made by Jacques Derrida that explain deconstruction as something that happens, happens from the inside, is not a method, is call, is a yes to the other, and is affirmative of institutions. Each of these is contrasted with specific examples of cultural changes in Costa Rica, Peter’s experience at the house of Cornelius, and a Latin American Pentecostal perspective. By exploring a variety of authors, I have identified different tools that can help Latin American Pentecostal pastors to better engage in discipleship practices that can produce mature believers in a postmodern era.

This dissertation examines everyday life and storytelling in Peru's Huaylas Valley: a transnational mining hub beneath melting Andean glaciers. During one year of ethnographic fieldwork, I listened to citydwellers and villagers narrate personal stories, gory rumors, and mythic tales: of a ruined Inca city that glows at night, a disappearing water devil, wild lakes turning tame, a Christ whose powers are shrinking. Rather than evincing ontological alterity, Huaylas stories reveal distinctive capitalist imaginaries and their ancient genealogies. They convey a popular sense of marginalization at a time of rapid, mineral-fueled growth, along with high hopes for a wealthy, developed future. And, their motifs and imagery attest to centuries of intercultural exchange, showing how capitalism took root in the Andes through indigenous cosmology, even as it developed through American colonization. Today, storytellers imagine and relate to their once-animate landscape as a banal means of accumulation, enlivening it through modern dreams that herald this future by banishing the superfluous—fantastic beings, and even themselves— from their Valley. If only by aspiration, then, storytellers in the Huaylas Valley form part of a planetary capitalist culture that accelerates global warming, raises mass living standards, and circulates fantasies of material redemption. While climate change is typically construed as a problem for scientists and consumers to solve, this dissertation shows instead that global warming is a historical, cultural problem about the ends that more and more of humankind imagines, and strives to achieve.

This dissertation revisits a neglected archive of avant-garde Cold War-era Latin American and Spanish films which use baroque, excessive aesthetic strategies inspired by popular religious ritual: the experimental documentaries and expanded cinema inventions of Spanish filmmaker-mystic José Val del Omar; the Mexican psychedelic exploitation epics of Chilean polymath Alejandro Jodorowsky; and the Cuban revolutionary films of Manuel Octavio Gómez. This corpus of filmmakers grappled with the problem of cinema’s role within the global system of capitalist media spectacle. Drawing on Guy Debord’s 1967 theorization of spectacle as the culmination of the West’s privileging of vision above all other senses, I contend that the ultimate end of capitalist spectacle’s offer of seemingly limitless pleasure is sensorial numbing. My project tracks a growing recognition during the 1960s that the ubiquity of imported Western media images within the global south doomed subjects to passive consumerism and worse, to the extinction of older epistemologies based in the non-visual senses like touch, hearing, taste, and smell. The films I examine counter ocularcentric rationalism with the sensorial immersion of ecstatic experience. By contrast to the better-known militant anti-colonial films of the period that depict armed struggle, these films experiment with forms of ritual in order to reconstitute the body’s senses as a major ground for decolonial epistemic resistance where the rationality of political discourse fails. In doing so, these filmmakers reconstitute the cinema as a key site for immersive, collective experience.

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.

Dreaming Woman decenters Europeanist histories of psychoanalysis by examining the ways in which forced migration has shaped psychoanalytic theories of sexual difference and evolving modes of feminist practice in Latin America. Home to more psychoanalysts per capita than any other country, Argentina emerged as a site of political asylum during WWII and of exilic dissemination during periods of military dictatorship. Taking Argentina as an exemplary case of psychoanalytic entrenchment that disrupts neat oppositions between Europe and its others, Dreaming Woman reframes the psychoanalytic archive on sexual difference as a discourse on migration. Tracing the coincident rise of psychoanalysis and authoritarianism in Argentina, I examine the role of migrant women, and of discourses on Woman, in establishing new relationships between psychoanalysis and politics.

Through a multimedia archive that includes literature, autobiography, pop culture artifacts, transnational correspondences, clinical case studies, theoretical essays, and artwork, Dreaming Woman approaches psychoanalysis as a heterogeneous set of clinical and cultural practices through which Argentines have articulated distinctive feminist and anti-imperialist projects throughout the twentieth century. These archival materials share a concern for female sexuality as a national problem—that is, a problem tied to national identity and a problem for the nation-state to solve. They also show the transformative impact of clinical encounters with female sexuality, maternal grief, and torture on modern theories of the subject. In view of contemporary anxieties surrounding global migration, the case of Argentina shows that psychoanalysis has always been a political practice forged through exile, one that offers an indispensable conceptual framework for addressing the persistent psychic traces of displacement.

Background: Globally, there is often a gap between medical need and access to care, and this is particularly true for surgical care for children. In Guatemala, for instance, families frequently pursue care outside of the government health system. Using a structured anthropologic approach, we sought to explore the barriers to surgical care for children in Guatemala, suspecting both financial and cultural barriers were the primary obstacles families had to face.

Study design: Twenty-nine parents/guardians of children receiving surgical care at two non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Guatemala and 7 health care providers participated in semi-structured interviews to explore what they believed to be the impediments to care. Transcripts were analyzed using a grounded theory approach. Current models for barriers to care were critiqued and a novel Framework for Barriers to Pediatric Surgery in Guatemala (FBPSG) was developed, which highlights both the existence, and centrality, of fear and mistrust in families' experience.

Results: Families and providers identified financial costs, geography, and systems limitations as the primary barriers to care. Mistrust and fear were also voiced. In addition, health literacy and cultural issues were also thought to be relevant by providers.

Conclusions: Due to biases inherent in this sample, parents/guardians did not necessarily report the same perceived barriers as healthcare providers - e.g., education/health literacy and language - and may have represented a "best case" scenario compared to more disadvantaged populations in this specific Central American context. Nonetheless, financial concerns were some of the most salient barriers for families seeking pediatric surgical care in Guatemala, with systems limitations (waiting time) and geographic factors (distance/transit) also being highlighted. Fear and mistrust were found to be deeper barriers to care and warrant reevaluation of organizational heuristics to date. NGOs can address these worries by working with individuals and organizations already known by and trusted in target communities and by providing good quality medical treatment and interpersonal care.

My dissertation, Fascist Fiction: Inventing the Lesser Evil in Italy and Brazil, accounts for the resilience of fascism by tracing the rhetoric of the “lesser evil”—a discursive practice constitutive of fascism—through contemporary politics and literature in Italy and Brazil. By invoking the looming presence of a graver, more insidious threat the rhetoric of the lesser evil legitimizes fascist violence against dissidents and vulnerable populations. Through an analysis of texts by fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile and his Brazilian counterpart Miguel Reale, I reveal that the rhetoric of the lesser evil is a constitutive part of fascist discourse and that in Italy and Brazil this aspect of fascist doctrine met a favorable combination of subjective and objective conditions which has allowed it to thrive within democratic structures. Finally, I argue that when moral claims such as the lesser evil work to obfuscate the understanding of traumatic and violent events within the public sphere, novels––precisely because of their putative fictionality––can offer persuasive counter-histories that re-contextualize fascist crimes and sometimes provoke acts of reparative justice by the State. My dissertation advances scholarship on the transcultural reach of fascist ideology: it contributes to an understanding of fascism’s place within a broader tradition of right-wing thought that continues to shape present-day politics in Europe and the world, and enriches our perception of the powers of literary forms.

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.