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<p>In my dissertation I propose that Álvaro Bisama's <italic>Caja negra</italic> is
a book that both continues and defies the interventions in the field of culture articulated
in Alberto Fuguet's <italic>Por favor, rebobinar</italic> 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 <italic>Caja negra</italic>, 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 <italic>Caja negra</italic> aims to create an alternate history
of Chile through the construction of an alternate cultural field. However, the historical
fact of Augusto Pinochet's <italic>coup d'état</italic> in 1973 remains unchanged.
I argue that Bisama's display of apocrypha in <italic>Caja negra</italic> 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 <italic>Caja negra</italic> 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 <italic>Por favor, rebobinar</italic>. In
<italic>Caja negra</italic> 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 <italic>Por favor, rebobinar</italic> 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 <italic>Por favor, rebobinar</italic> an
apology of active and public critical consumption of cultural products. In my comparative
reading of <italic>Por favor, rebobinar</italic> and <italic>Caja negra</italic>,
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 <italic>Por favor, rebobinar</italic>. I argue
that this contestation to <italic>Por favor, rebobinar</italic> and McOndo is achieved
by a process of adoption and experimentation with the limits of the more provocative
traits of <italic>Por favor, rebobinar</italic>'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 <italic>Caja negra</italic> 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.</p>
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