Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [349]-363).

This dissertation examines how Latin American intellectuals and artists identified with the 1960s and 1970s counterculture engaged with the idea of the "Third World", and incorporated elements usually identified with Africa, Asia and Latin America to their experimental practices in writing, performance and film. Drawing from an archive of experimental films, underground publications, alternative books, independent documentaries in 16mm and Super8, festival and conference documents, personal letters, travel diaries and notebooks, this dissertation analyzes how cultures and ideas from the Third World were depicted, reimagined and experienced by important Latin American countercultural figures from Brazil and Argentina: Miguel Grinberg, Glauber Rocha and a group of filmmakers and artists that visited Afro-Brazilian religious sites alongside the U.S. American group Living Theater in the 1970s. The dissertation examines the engagement of these countercultural intellectuals with three specific transnational political projects in circulation during the Cold War – Inter-American, Tricontinental, and Afro-Asian– as instances of geographic imagination. The dissertation concludes that, in doing so, these Latin American countercultural intellectuals put forth an alternative internationalist vision for Latin America and the Third World, articulating a worldview that went beyond the political frames of the Cold War and the traditional forms of Latin American nationalism.

In this dissertation, I study the corpse as a material in Latin American art at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. On the one hand, I show that this is a social analyzer of the terrible consequences of dictatorships, neoliberal policies, and criminal violence on the continent. On the other hand, applying the theory of new materialism and focusing on the presence of the dead body -human or non-human- in the work of artists such as Nicola Costantino, José Antonio Hernández Díez, Teresa Margolles, María Fernanda Cardoso, Arturo Duclos, or Nicolás Lamas, among others, I develop what I call corpse art. As I argue, the impact of this art consists in challenging the limits of the body and its traditional binomials (surface-depth, organic-inorganic, living-dead) using the material capacities of skin, flesh, and bones. The material deployment of the corpse, as well as the re-appropriation of scientific and commercial techniques, put artistic media, their specificities, and their autonomies in crisis. But in addition, this corpse art allows also us to reflect on the manipulation of bodies and power ties that produce objects and merchandise of desire in the Latin American context.