The goal of this project is to investigate the way in which various representations of Fidel Castro, between the years 1957-1965, have left an indelible mark on Cuba, transforming its landscape, I argue, through gendered means and conscious strategies. Thus it is less concerned with Fidel as an historical person than with examining with a gendered lens the ways in which he has been represented in foundational photographs, interviews, songs, and texts (both narrative and poetry as well as blogs). Drawing from theories of masculinity, which conceive masculinity as both a social construction and material body, my dissertation explores the ways in which these representations make visible a gendered body, mapping definitions of masculinity on Fidel, which are intimately linked to power. These constructions of Fidel’s masculinity, which are portrayed as hegemonic and a legitimating feature of patriarchal control, are a central feature of Fidel’s political authority and the Revolution’s hegemonizing project to shape Revolutionary men and women. I argue that representations of Fidel frequently invite a gendered encounter between the Comandante and his followers, resulting in the production of gendered Revolutionary subjects. The present study adds to current scholarship by shedding light on the ways in which gender foregrounds politics by problematizing the ways in which men are often at the center of political discourse. By decoding the foundations of Fidel’s “gendered” power, we find it to be a construction whose maintenance depends on the body’s ability to conform to hegemonic definitions of masculinity, thus reinforcing rather than Revolutionizing masculine paradigms of authority.

This study examines how the social process of undocumented Mexican migration is interpreted in the chronicle, literature, and film of the post-Gatekeeper period, which is defined here at 1994-2008. Bounded on one side by the Mexican economic crisis of 1994, and increased border security measures begun in that same year, and on the other by the advent of the global economic crisis of 2008, the post-Gatkeeper period represents a time in which undocumented migration through the southern U.S. border reached unprecedented levels. The dramatic, tragic, and compelling stories that emerged from this period have been retold and interpreted from a variety of perspectives that have produced distinct, and often paradoxical, images of the figure of the undocumented migrant. Creative narrative responds to this critical point in the history of Mexican migration to the U.S.by applying the inherently subjective and mediated form of artistic interpretation to a social reality well documented by the media, historians, and social scientists. Throughout the chronicle, literature, and film of this period, migration is understood as a cultural tradition inspired by regional history. These stories place their undocumented protagonists on a narrative trajectory that transforms migration into a heroic quest for personal and community renewal. Such imagery positions the undocumented migrant as an active agent of change and provides discursive visibility to a figure often represented, in media and political rhetoric of the period, as an anonymous, collective Other. Filtered through this creative lens, migration is revealed as a complex social process in which individual experience is informed not only by personal ambition, but also by the expectations of the home community and its culture of migration. The creative works examined here foreground the history, motivation, and experience of their migrant protagonists in relation to the socio-historical context of this period. In doing so, they compose tales of migration in which the figure of the undocumented migrant plays a primary role, one informed not only by the experience of migration, but also by personal and community history.

El agua cántara es una historiografía apócrifa de la literatura. Esta compilación incluye versiones paródicas del realismo, el romanticismo, el costumbrismo y el posthumanismo, entre otros discursos, géneros y movimientos (los cuales, desde la óptica del absurdo, bien pueden ser una misma cosa). Además de realizar un recorrido por algunas de las principales formas textuales de Occidente, esta antología elabora y rastrea su propio mito de origen de la literatura: el sonido como máximo valor estético.

<p>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.</p><p>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.</p> / Dissertation

Breaking the Frames of the Past examines recent visual and literary work about the periods of historical violence in Argentina, Chile, and Peru. In my dissertation, I argue that these cultural productions can challenge the linear conception of historical time, and reveal the existent tensions and blind spots present within the cultural memory realm of each nation. By examining the specificity of the materials and the aesthetic strategies present in the works, I hope to elucidate a necessary introspective turn in memory- what I have nominated metamemory, present in works that not only seek to interrogate official national paradigms, discourses of the past, productions of knowledge, and memorial imperatives, but also works that are profoundly aware of their condition as memory objects within a cultural memory realms. Breaking the Frames of the Past is divided into two parts, Part One: Images, engages with memory at a broader collective level, and analyzes the different ways the photographic medium has been used to represent the past and craft a sense of national belonging. Part Two: Texts is concerned with subjective memory, and the overlap between childhood memories lived simultaneously within the frame of a period of historical violence. I discuss literary work written by those born during these periods of violence in order to see how from their subjective experience and through their works they can assert to the existing tensions within cultural memory paradigms. In examining novels by those who are “the Secondary Characters” of history, I argue that their use of metafictional strategies is able to counter the feeling of displacement and sense of belatedness that is present in postmemory works.

This dissertation examines the practices of leisure and consumption in early twentieth-century Buenos Aires through both intellectual and mass cultural productions. Using works by authors such as Horacio Quiroga and Roberto Arlt together with articles, images, and texts from the Argentine mass media, I examine how national, social and civic identities were intimately tied to, and were constituted through, technologically mediated leisure practices. Sports and film spectatorship, the reception of radio and the reading popular texts were all activities that opened spaces for the rehearsal of forms of citizenship and encouraged the formation of communities and publics both in line with and contrary to the hegemonic and disciplinary mechanisms of the state.

This dissertation examines how contemporary narrative fiction in French and Spanish represents experiences of migration and the circulation of capital and goods in the globalized Atlantic. I argue that the attempt to imagine an increasingly globalized world has been accompanied by a waning interest in character development and an increased interest in what could be characterized as the spatial dimension of literature. Many recent `global fictions' present readers with impenetrable characters whose interiority is inaccessible. The lack of depth is, however, replaced by geographical breadth. As characters move through space, bringing into relation several different geographical locations, authors draw attention to transnational sites of marginalization and imagine alternative power configurations. Several important studies have examined the engagement of Francophone writers with globalization in the late 20th and early 21st century. While these readings are sophisticated and persuasive, they remain confined within the Francophone context, rarely establishing comparisons with the Anglophone and the Hispanophone contexts. We thus end up with somewhat contradictory concepts such as Francophone or Hispanophone transnationalism,`world literature' and globalization. This seems even more paradoxical given that several Francophone writers, including Maryse Condé and Edouard Glissant, have set their novels in non-Francophone countries. My dissertation undertakes translinguistic literary criticism in order to address this gap in critical discourse. I limit my focus to what I term the Atlantic world economy, that is, the countries touched by the Atlantic triangle and marked by a history of population displacement and cultural mixing inaugurated through colonial slavery. The authors I have selected position their work in the Atlantic framework. Some more explicitly, like Fatou Diome whose novel is entitled The belly of the Atlantic. Others, like Maryse Condé and Roberto Bolaño, by moving protagonists between some of the major centers of the Atlantic economy. They all, however, pose the question of a globalized Atlantic, distancing themselves from the Atlantic as a triangular space, and reframing it as a space encompassing many poles. The notion of the globalized Atlantic further underscores the tension between a regional framework and a globalized world within which these authors are operating. At the turn of the 21st century movements resisting the effects of global capitalism have come into existence in several countries, including Egypt, Chile, the United States, Brazil and Turkey. These modes of activism require us to recalibrate some of our geopolitical categories as a way of thinking about transnational citizenship. The authors in my corpus deploy literary strategies that complement the activism of global socioeconomic and political movements. This dissertation focuses on their imagining of narrative fiction as a space that is both globalized and resistant to the dominant political and economic dimensions of globalization.

This dissertation explores the proliferation of novels written in Latin America over the past quarter century that feature translators as protagonists, asserting that the mobilization of this figure in fiction allows contemporary writers a means to reflect on the place and shape of literature in the context of shifting paradigms of cultural production and consumption, to address the uneven distribution of cultural capital still prevalent in discussions of World Literature, and to present dynamic, reciprocal notions of creativity over and against hierarchical models of intellectual influence. In my analysis of the metaphorical weight of the literary figure of the translator, I examine the engagement of three central tropes of translation theory in contemporary fiction, setting close readings of the corpus in the context of both the region's longstanding tradition of translation--epitomized in the last century by, but not limited to, the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Haroldo de Campos--and theories of translation and cultural exchange presented by Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, Lawrence Venuti, and Silviano Santiago, among others. Following an introduction that situates my dissertation within the broader discussion of World Literature and early reflections on the literary representation of translators in the field of translation studies, the study's second chapter explores the metaphor of translation as reproduction in both a biological sense, as seen in Luis Fernando Verissimo's Borges e os orangotangos eternos (2000), and a biogenetic one, in the form of the conflation of cloning and translation in César Aira's El congreso de literatura (1999), to explore the extent to which these works go beyond the simple inversion of the discursive hierarchy inherent to the notion of influence to posit a non-linear model of cultural exchange. The third chapter defends what I describe as translation's right to untranslatability--a mode of translational reading grounded in the recognition of cultural specificity--as it appears in narratives centered on translation failure at the level of the cognate, those terms in which two languages would appear to be at their closest; in this analysis, I focus on Salvador Benesdra's El traductor (1998) and Alan Pauls's El Pasado (2003). The fourth chapter looks at the mobilization of the textual space of the translator's footnote in Mario Bellatin's El jardí­n de la señora Murakami (2000), in relation to precursors such as the writings of Rodolfo Walsh and Moacyr Scliar, to argue that Bellatin adopts the persona of the translator as a means of destabilizing traditional notions of authorship and originality. Finally, a coda proposes two avenues for future research: one based on an extended analysis of the topographical space occupied by the translator in these narratives, and another on the alignment of translation with new models of authorship and creativity that have emerged in the digital age. In this way, the study both establishes a connection between Latin American cultural studies and translation theory, and expands the "fictional turn" of translation studies--which tends to analyze the narrative representation of translators in relation to the concrete realities of the practice--to include the symbolic mobilization of translation as a commentary on broader cultural dynamics.

The Conservative party ruled Colombia from 1886 to 1930. During this period, a coterie of grammarians, poets, and theologians consolidated political power by appealing to literature as a form of rhetorical expertise. The Liberal party took power in 1930 and would hold it until 1946. Recent scholarship has argued that during this period Liberal intellectuals defended the political authority of literary expertise even as they endorsed a modernizing program. Although these charges of hypocrisy are well founded, they tell a limited version of the history of the so-called Liberal Republic, failing to take into full account the work of intellectuals at the edges of the Liberal party’s patronage network. This dissertation considers a series of writer-journalists—including Luis Vidales, Luis Tejada, José Antonio Osorio Lizarazo, José Joaquín Jiménez, and Arnoldo Palacios—who were active in Bogotá between 1920 and 1950. It examines their essays, chronicles, novels, and poems in newspapers and magazines, and less often in books, to argue that they elaborated a new function for literature in Colombia, appealing to the genres of urban journalism and the emerging discipline of urban sociology in order to transform literature into a form of social investigation.

This project follows a thread of citations of the work of Brazilian author Clarice Lispector found in the philosophical feminist texts of four European thinkers: Hélène Cixous, Luisa Muraro, Adriana Cavarero, and Rosi Braidotti. I explore the intersection of material feminisms, Latin American decolonial feminism, and sexual difference theory differentially and multiply across contexts. I revisit histories of women and texts - French, Italian and Brazilian - that are multiply and differentially marginalized in the current Western feminist narrative framework - in order to create sources of alternative knowledge and create an opportunity for something new to emerge symbio-creatively from these points of contact. Chapter One covers the genesis of European feminist approaches to Lispector’s oeuvre in France, the impassioned reading by Hélène Cixous of Lispector’s work, and also provides vital counter-memory, decolonial feminist stories on Brazilian and Latin American feminisms which have been left out of the dominant Anglo-American/Western feminist historical narrative. Chapter Two will focus on the arrival in Italy of Lispector’s texts, Luisa Muraro and the Diotima women’s feminist philosophy group’s readings. Chapter Three then covers Adriana Cavarero, as well as her split from said Diotima group. Finally, Chapter Four brings us to Rosi Braidotti, from her early texts on Lispector to present theoretical horizons. My concluding discussion stems from the idea of connections as posited by Sonia Alvarez: “a translocal feminist politics of translation is crucial to the decolonial turn and a key strategy in building ‘connectant epistemologies’ in order to confront the equivocations or mistranslations that hinder feminist alliances, even among women who share the same language and culture.” I expand on my theory of points of contact and explore possibilities of symbiosis and non-deterministic evolution as a theoretical tool.