This dissertation examines the ways in which torture was imagined and narrated in Guatemalan literature during the Internal Armed Conflict. For nearly four decades, Guatemala suffered one of the longest and most violent wars in Latin America. During that time, it is estimated that more than 100,000 people were tortured at the hands of the Guatemalan military. Torture, as suggested by Ariel Dorman, is most fundamentally “a crime committed against the imagination” (8), disrupting and often dissolving the boundaries between fact and fiction, the real and the unreal. The Introduction and Chapter One of this study explore the destabilization of this boundary by examining the historical and theoretical context for torture in Guatemala. The ubiquity and normality of torture was so terrible that, for many, it became “unspeakable”—an atrocity that defied language. Chapters Two through Four study three different literary modes of countering the state’s rhetoric of torture, probing the possibility of narrating torture despite its seemingly unsayable nature. Examining works by Rigoberta Menchú (chapter two), Marco Antonio Flores and Arturo Arias (chapter three), and Rodrigo Rey Rosa (chapter four), and aided by current theories and studies of torture, this dissertation investigates the ways in which these Guatemalan authors have sought not only to re-present torture, but also to explore and sometimes question the possibility of bearing witness to that torture in literature.

Understanding and defining nation and identity in diaspora has long characterized the cultural production of Caribbean authors. Notwithstanding, Hispanic Caribbean authors that have emigrated to the United States face this question doubly as they form part of what is labeled the Latino community. While much of the Latino Studies groundwork began in Mexican American or Chicano literary circles, whose cultural background is vastly different from that of the Hispanic Caribbean, authors of Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican descent have brought new perspectives to constructions of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation to the broadly named “Latino/a” experience. While much of the early theoretical and literary work was written by men, women writers began to produce prolifically in the late twentieth century. The first voices to be published in mass were primarily those of a privileged existence, coming from families of higher social classes within the Latino community, despite being marginalized within the context of the United States. During the late 1970s to early 1990s, literary production established that being Cuban American, Dominican American, and Puerto Rican in the mainland U.S. meant being light-skinned, heterosexual, and of middle to upper-class economic status. However, during the mid-to-late 1990s and early twenty-first century, new voices came to the forefront to challenge these hegemonic constructions of Caribbean Latina identity that dominated the cultural imaginary and, instead, presented intersectional protagonists who consistently face discrimination based on their gender, sexual orientation, race, and economic class both in and outside of the Latino community. By utilizing diverse strategies of resistance, such as humor, these authors, including Achy Obejas, Jennine Capó-Crucet, Loida Maritza Pérez, Angie Cruz, Giannina Braschi, and Erika López, highlight and satirize the normative aspects of the Hispanic Caribbean diasporic cultural imaginary that marginalizes and/or excludes the voices and experiences of their characters as being representative of Caribbean Latina identity. In this sense, these authors not only represent a marginalized perspective of identity within the Latino community, but they also re-present, as in presenting anew, a more diverse image of Latina identity in the twenty-first century that departs from the homogenous, normative image of Caribbean Latinas played out in earlier narratives of identity from the early-1990s Latina literary boom. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2018. / February 22, 2018. / Diaspora, Hispanic Caribbean, Latina Women, Race, Sexuality, U.S. Latinx Literature / Includes bibliographical references. / Delia Poey, Professor Directing Dissertation; Virgil Suárez, University Representative; José Gomariz, Committee Member; Jeannine Murray-Román, Committee Member; Peggy Sharpe, Committee Member.

This dissertation examines the use of visual media as a means of resistance to oppressive political narratives in five Mexican works from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Included are two novels: Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho: Relatos de la lucha en el Norte de México (1931), on the Mexican Revolution, and Elena Poniatowska’s La noche de Tlatelolco (1971), about the 1968 Mexican student movement and the October 2 massacre. I also analyze three projects, both visual and discursive, related to the 2014 forced disappearance of 43 students of the Ayotzinapa Teacher’s College in Guerrero, Mexico. The three historical moments the five texts explore are marked by particular trends in visual representation as well as by official narratives that manipulate or misrepresent history for political purposes. I analyze Cartucho and La noche de Tlatelolco with regard to their distinctive structures using theories on photography and cinematography, which help to describe the narrative dimensions of the works. The photography theory is primarily drawn from the work of Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, and Roland Barthes, while the cinematographic theory is drawn from Sergei Eisenstein’s work on intellectual montage. I argue that Cartucho functions as a textual “album,” in which each brief text (relato) presents a snapshot of a participant or moment during the Mexican Revolution related to the Villista forces. Campobello’s work responds to the commercial and political uses of photographic images of the time (1916-1920) and was written with the goal of refuting the “black legend,” which characterized the Villistas as criminals. Concerning La noche de Tlatelolco, I analyze the way in which early editions of the book incorporated images of 1968, and argue that the text is best understood as an intellectual montage, which communicates through interactions between the fragmentary and contradictory texts that comprise the book. I analyze the three Ayotzinapa projects, a museum exhibit, an online platform, and the Antimonumento +43, by considering how an audience must interact with each; my goal is to understand the discourse these works generate regarding the Ayotzinapa case, and I explore the problems of historicization and memorialization in relation to ongoing Ayotzinapa activism.

This dissertation examines the co-evolution of consumption and production as competing models of agency in Argentine culture in the era of global consumer capitalism. Tracing the influence of several key political and intellectual developments in Latin America, the US, and Europe on the symbolic language of regional politics, I map out how participation in the global consumer market came to be understood as an expression of power and authority in the context of Argentina's disastrous experiment with neoliberalism in the last three decades of the 20th century. Then, using films and literary texts including works by Lisandro Alonso, Adrián Caetano, and Aníbal Jarkowski together with critical projects by George Yúdice and Josefina Ludmer, I examine how a model of subjectivity that exaggerates the economic, social, and cultural agency of consumers has managed to persist in Argentina's cultural imagination despite growing disillusionment with the neoliberal model and the disenfranchisement of the nation's consumers. Through close readings that reveal work as the site of a restored order that is ultimately incomplete, fantastical, and contradictory, I show how the myth of the consumer dictator perpetuates itself through a system of intellectual values, including abstract, absolutist visions freedom and tolerance, that isolate the subject and divert communication, inscribing an extreme version of consumer agency even upon production itself. Together, these instances of interrupted reform suggest that a model of agency suited to the era of global consumer capitalism must understand production and consumption not as alternative options, but as distinct, integral modes of creativity.

In this dissertation, I argue that the shifts in the terrain of literary criticism in Argentina during the 1950s represent the development of what I call a “critical infrastructure,” whereby criticism came to perform an essential function for the circulation and appropriation of books and literature in a context of major transformations in book publishing and distribution. In doing so, I bring together two phenomena that belong to a single historical shift, which saw the expansion of mass cultural production, and the consequent development of material and discursive practices to distribute them and to allow them to be appropriated. On the one hand, Buenos Aires experienced a rapid expansion in its publishing industry as a consequence of the Civil War’s ravages on Spain, turning Argentina for a brief period into the world’s primary producer and exporter of Spanish language publications. On the other hand, Argentina experienced what is frequently referred to as an “eruption” in literary criticism in the 1950s, propelled by the proliferation of a number of small, independent literary journals headed by young, middle-class writers and critics. These publications represented a critical challenge to the Argentine literary establishment, which was hitherto almost exclusively comprised of intellectuals belonging to the nation’s elite. While there has been considerable academic interest in each of these phenomena, theorizing their relationship to one another offers important insights into the reasons for the increased relevance and visibility of these otherwise marginal publications. Analyzing a variety of heterogeneous periodicals (including major newspapers like La Nación and La Prensa, as well as “little magazines” such as Espiga, Centro, Bibliograma, and Contorno), I discuss the expansion and increasing contentiousness of literary criticism, which became an ever more regular and visible presence in such publications. I trace the transformations in publishing (1899-1953) to show how a process of indifferentiation among printed materials made the intervention of discursive practices —mainly performed by literary reviews— a structural necessity for the distribution and appropriation of books and literature. Drawing from Adolfo Prieto’s seminal Sociología del público argentino (1956) as well as other texts, I discuss the ways in which the presence of a mass public with ostensively heterogenous ways of “consuming” literature posed a challenged to traditional ideas about national literature, the act of reading, the “figure” of the reader, and consequently also about the nature and function of criticism. Finally, I analyze the small avant-garde magazine Letra y Línea (1953-54) to show the empowering effect this transformation had on relatively marginal, middle-class writers, who invested themselves in a radical critical task in order to seize the opportunity offered by this structural discursive need.

“Entertaining Culture: Mass Culture and Consumer Society in Argentina, 1898-1946” is a study of Argentine mass culture in a new consumer society: a new cultural dynamic that emerged around the turn of the century in Buenos Aires. This dynamic entailed a redefinition not only of the relationships between culture, creators, and publics, but also of those categories themselves. Early twentieth-century Argentine mass culture was a heterogeneous realm of cultural production and consumption in which varied and often conflicting ideologies, aesthetic convictions, and class or party allegiances jostled for purchase, creating a constant push and pull of competing desires and values. Within this context, criticism and ambivalence about the effects of cultural modernization was ubiquitous, a byproduct not only of the heterogeneity within mass culture itself, but also of the tension-filled incorporation of culture into the market. By analyzing Argentine mass culture in this light, my dissertation challenges monolithic understandings of mass culture that ignore how it exposed and grappled with the tensions in its own premises. The cultural dynamic of the period collapsed the categories of culture, consumer good, and entertainment and blurred the limits between production and consumption, often provoking dismay from creators, cultural critics, nationalists, and educators, frequently voiced from within mass culture itself. Mass culture adopted variety as a central premise, claiming to offer something for everyone and for every taste, in a business strategy designed to attract as many paying consumers as possible, and to turn them into brand loyalists. Cultural ventures also used a number of other tools, such as novelty, brevity, immediacy, familiarity, levity, and affordability, to expand their market share through entertainment, providing cultural production that fit the bill and encouraging Argentines to demand these qualities of the cultural production they consumed. Mass culture also encouraged Argentines to view the world through the logic of spectacle, according to which anything or anyone, given the mass cultural treatment, could be transformed into entertainment. While the transformation of culture into a for-profit entertainment venture and a consumer good made it possible for more aspiring artists to make a living at writing or performing, it also provoked frequent criticisms of the industrialization of culture, the mercantilism of producers, the quality of cultural works, and the naïveté of audiences and aspiring creators. To better understand the tensions in play in this new cultural dynamic, I advance the concept of “cultured consumption,” a term I use to identify the dominant ideal of consumption in early twentieth-century Buenos Aires. As a loose complex of practices, cultured consumption was characterized by a tension between competing models of social aspiration: one, based on the performance of gentility and refinement, per aristocratic practices; another, founded upon a middle-class ideal of comfortable domesticity and family-centered values. Thus, by participating in cultured consumption, Argentines asserted their ascription to a certain set of potentially competing values and desires, from upward mobility and good taste to economy and family unity. Furthermore, according to the premises of cultured consumption, purchase of certain products and participation in certain activities would mark consumers as authentically and patriotically Argentine. Nevertheless, it was not clear how Argentine culture was to reconcile refinement and moderation, performance and authenticity, and public and private activity. Cultured consumption was, thus, both progressive and conservative, aspirational and protective of the status quo; in it, standards of taste took on moral and even political connotations. Through it, culture was both democratized and limited according to a set of sometimes competing standards and values. In this way, mass culture promised ever broader sectors of the population that by participating fully in it they could satisfy their heterogeneous desires, experience self-actualization, and improve their lot in life. At the same time, mass culture invoked consumption, spectatorship, and artistic aspirations as possible threats to the stability of the family and social structure to limit the expansion of access to culture and cultural production. Mass culture, thus, set itself up as the articulating joint between public and private life in Buenos Aires: a series of practices that increasingly defined participation in, and an interpretative lens that allowed Argentines to make sense of, public and private life—including mass culture and consumption themselves. Against the limited narratives of the period traditionally proposed by literary criticism and cultural history, this dissertation argues that it is precisely this heterogeneous area of mass cultural production that can help us better understand Argentine culture of the period more broadly: it allows us to see how these tensions played out on a massive scale. Considering cross-object study to be essential for understanding the new cultural dynamic, this dissertation recuperates archival materials and understudied genres such as mass-circulation periodicals, advertisements, reviews, advice literature, recitation manuals, celebrity profiles, and popular plays and music, and analyzes both the texts themselves and the interactions, institutions, and practices around them. This methodology allows me to do two things: first, to put disciplines such as consumer history and media studies in dialogue with literary criticism, theater history, and cultural studies; second, to complicate the narratives of the period traditionally espoused by literary critics and cultural historians. While the former, through their focus on aesthetic and political polemics, largely erased an area of cultural production massively consumed in the early twentieth century, the latter, by portraying culture as tangential to a more important political or economic narrative, deny culture its historical agency. My dissertation, in contrast, considers Argentine mass culture of the period to be not only a cultural dynamic that comprised systems of production, practices, and content, but, more broadly, the mouthpiece of a new worldview that redefined all areas of life. This worldview, originating in the cultural realm, would shape the course of Argentine social, economic, and political history to come. In foregrounding mass culture in this way, I propose a new corpus and lens for evaluating modernization in Buenos Aires.

Lydia Cabrera, the acclaimed 20th-century Cuban writer and ethnographer, is widely recognized for her pioneering studies, beginning in the 1920s, of Afro-Cuban religions and cultures. The broad scope of her contribution to Cuban culture, one that encompasses both Cuba’s African and European cultural heritage, however, has been all but overlooked in critical studies. Often categorized as either fiction or ethnography, Cabrera’s work tends to be dismantled and the various pieces, when not altogether ignored, relegated to critical study from distinct academic disciplines (anthropology and literary studies, and to a lesser extent, lexicography and ethnomusicology). In this study I set aside these disciplinary distinctions by viewing the different parts of Cabrera’s career as a coherent whole. In conjunction with her Afro-Cuban story collections and her extensive ethnographic work documenting Afro-Cuban cultures, which produced not only El monte but also dictionaries and glossaries of Afro-Cuban languages and traditions, I examine Cabrera’s lesser known projects related to Cuba’s colonial European cultural foundations, and particularly her work on decorative arts and the restoration and curation of Cuba’s colonial architecture. I argue that these apparently unrelated and even conflicting facets of her career are not only related but in fact indivisible. To bring together her work on Afro-Cuba and her work on Cuba’s Spanish colonial history, I address two physical and conceptual spaces that overlap and intersect in Cabrera’s career as they do in Cuban culture: the vieja casa criolla, or the traditional Cuban home, and the monte—the sacred ancestral forest. Part I of my study centers on the vieja casa criolla, an intimate and majestic space characterized by Spanish colonial architecture, period furniture and decorative arts. I use the concept of the vieja casa criolla broadly to include religious architecture and artistic traditions associated with Cuba’s Spanish colonial influences. I propose that Cabrera’s work to conserve Spanish colonial architecture and antiques beginning in the 1920s and continuing through the 1950s was not an aberration in her career but integral to her effort to create a living archive of Cuba’s cultural history, both African and European. In the same way that she painstakingly documented Afro-Cuban religions, oral traditions, and cultural practices, she worked to conserve, restore and promote Cuba’s European material culture. Part II of my study focuses on the physical and textual spaces of the monte in Cabrera’s work and in Afro-Cuban culture. I explore the monte (the place) in Cabrera’s fiction and ethnographic writing and move into a discussion of El monte (the book). As the home to Afro-Cuban spirits and the source of traditions and ritual objects, I demonstrate that the monte mirrors Cuba’s casa criolla and religious architecture. Accordingly, in El monte and its complementary studies of Afro-Cuban liturgical languages and customs Cabrera curates the plants and mythology of the monte in the same way that she does her art and antique exhibitions. Cabrera’s conservation of colonial architecture and her documentation of Afro-Cuban religions and cultures together represent integral components for understanding and preserving Cuba’s cultural history.

This dissertation argues that the journeys of naturalists, explorers, intellectuals, and engineers through the Amazon in the second half of the nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth century gave rise to perspectives that challenge foundational assumptions about technology in modern metropolitan centers. Chief among these assumptions are the ideas that technology contributes to specialization, the disenchantment of reality, the entrapment of the subject in the logistics of urban labor, and the removal of natural obstacles. The examination of the roles of nature and technology in texts and images of the period shows that travel and exploration were represented as experiences of enchantment and encounters with impassable terrains. The dissertation focuses on three interconnected cases to support its thesis: Euclides da Cunha’s reading of the naturalists in his essays on the Amazon; experiences and practices of exploration on the Madeira and Mamoré Rivers; and the construction of a railroad along these rivers to render the hauling of vessels over land and long voyages unnecessary. Developing a cultural-historical framework that counters narratives of technological domination and failure, the dissertation concludes that the tensions between exploration and engineering in these cases reveal the eschatological facets of the history of technology. The eschatological facets show both how technologies contribute to the construction of the farthest frontiers and how technologies themselves arrive at their final stages.

My dissertation delineates the Dominican intelligentsia’s collecting of unofficial archives from the local bourgeoisie’s emergence after the Restoration of independence from Spain in 1865 through the Dominican State’s consolidation as a sovereign entity in the 1920s. By unofficial archives bourgeois actors meant, from foundational writer Manuel de Jesús Galván and first national historian José Gabriel García to scholars Pedro Henríquez Ureña and Abigaíl Mejía, private or nonofficial repositories, real or metaphoric, containing anything from personal belongings and printed works to unclaimed ruins. In dialogue with Walter Benjamin, Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Pierre Bourdieu, I show how in the Dominican context the use of authorized and state knowledge lagged behind that of informal, object-based knowledge. In doing so, “The Unofficial Archive” questions traditional understandings of the archive in intellectual history—Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault—as well as in Performance, Caribbean, and Latin American studies, reassessing the foundational role that a lack of records played in postcolonial archives during nation-building. Chapter one introduces my reading of “archives.” Because Foucault and Derrida consider physical files and intellectual ideas separately, I contend that their methods account insufficiently for postcolonial archives, where material records and ideas are inextricably intertwined. To trace how the materiality of archives produce national habits and traditions the second chapter centers on the 1877 discovery of Christopher Columbus’s relics. As my close reading of historical works such as historian Emiliano Tejera’s Los restos de Colón en Santo Domingo (1878) shows, this recognition prompted supporters of the relics’ authenticity to create a national narrative describing the pillage and loss of the country’s archives, and to popularize this narrative through reproductions in print, visual, and architectural media like the 1898 Columbus Mausoleum in Santo Domingo’s Cathedral. In my third chapter, I examine how prominent bourgeois actors such as the Sociedad Amigos del País used the tradition about the missing archives to legitimize a national literature and historiography leading nation-building by creating unofficial archives in fiction, nonfiction, and printed ephemera. I read García’s Compendio de la historia de Santo Domingo (1867-1906) together with Galván’s Enriquillo: leyenda histórica dominicana, 1503-1533 (1882) as unofficial archives that meditate upon what it meant to the Dominican nation that its archives remained wanting. My fourth chapter analyzes the nationalization of colonial ruins as unofficial archives by the intellectual bourgeoisie as a means for the group to continue gaining power and to fight U.S. imperialism from the post-Restoration through the U.S. military intervention (1916-1924). I focus on the anti-colonial origins of a national archaeology in the work of Alejandro Llenas Julia, Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s philosophical writings on the ruin in Horas de Estudio (1910), and the use of the edifices by intellectuals such as Max Henríquez Ureña to stir an international cultural debate during the occupation in order to defend the country’s right to sovereignty. I conclude with the government’s gradual appropriation and display of unofficial archives during the 1927 inauguration of the National Museum as described in press articles by Abigail Mejía, which resulted in a political iconography that I call a “bric-à-brac” that officially stages the national archives as half-finished. Under this official lens, a new generation of intellectuals used the lack of records to sustain the hispanicist rule of Rafael L. Trujillo (1930-1961) on the idea that he would be the one to protect the nation’s heritage. This dissertation brings together historical and material culture studies from a hemispheric point of view and bridges critical Caribbean and Latin American studies. From a Caribbean perspective, the project challenges Archival Studies to consider non-Western forms of archive emerging out of colonial contexts that remain unaddressed in scholarship about the origin of modern state archives in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “The Unofficial Archive” brings new insights into transnational debates on cultural heritage, its corruption and plunder, and into the social aftermath of colonial governance and state coercion. It urges scholars to address the long-term effects that conflicts over the inalienability of historical treasures have had in former colonies and Empires, and to ponder the role that advances in technology have had in the democratization of the past and the shaping of race and gender identities from modern times to the present. Ultimately, this research reveals how individual citizens who were ignored by or disagreed with official politics used unconfirmed knowledge and information networks to prevail upon officialdom on matters concerning human rights, universal truth, and the meaning of nationhood.

Dancing a duet with my shadow by integrating dance and digital media in an elaborate and entertaining performance.