abstract: Esta tesis doctoral examina la prevalencia del discurso racial y hegemónico que sigue siendo una barrera para el ejercicio de los derechos fundamentales de ciudadanía y la búsqueda de la justicia social en América Latina, el Caribe y en todo el continente americano. Entre 1840 y 1960, la ideología del mestizaje, o mezcla de razas, fue el elemento constitutivo en estructurar el discurso de la formación de la nación de escritores muy diversos como José Antonio Saco, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, José Martí, Fernando Ortiz y Alejo Carpentier, entre otros. La ideología mantenía—ante la evidencia de una división profundamente arraigada en consideraciones raciales—que el mestizaje, un proceso a la vez biológico y cultural, sentó las bases para la unificación de la nacionalidad cubana frente al primer dominio colonial español y luego al poder imperial de los Estados Unidos. El estudio se vertebra de la teoría cultural poscolonial de Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha y Edward Said para analizar y cuestionar la perspectiva eurocéntrica de Alejo Carpentier en sus novelas Écue-Yamba-Ó (1933) y El reino de este mundo (1949). Aunque estas novelas parecen proponer el reconocimiento y reivindicación de la imaginada y oprimida población afrocaribeña, se observa que Carpentier termina por respaldar las imágenes estereotipadas en el discurso racial y colonial por su formación europea. La tesis, por lo tanto, resalta los elementos de resistencia que los afrocaribeños han desarrollado en un intento por aumentar su visibilidad en el Caribe y crear la conciencia de su aporte a la cultura caribeña híbrida, sincrética y transculturada. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Spanish 2019

acase@tulane.edu / 1 / Joseph E Hiller

The dissertation “Ambigüedades éticas y estéticas: La narrativa peruana contemporánea y la violencia política” explores the complex relationship of literature and the recent history of Peru by analyzing ideological positions expressed in three novels, Alonso Cueto’s La hora azul (2005), Santiago Roncagliolo’s Abril rojo (2006), and Daniel Alarcón’s Radio Ciudad Perdida (2007), and in a collection of short stories, Jorge Eduardo Benavides’ La noche de Morgana (2005). This dissertation discusses how these authors employ different literary discourses (detective fiction, literature of the fantastic and the dystopian novel) to recreate artistically the period of internal conflict, as well as the ethical perspectives that each artistic option entails. The analysis continues a long tradition of scholarship in Latin American Literary Studies that examines the way in which history is (re)presented and questioned in literature. By comparing the writings of Peruvian authors based in different cultural areas (Peru, Spain and the United States), this study proposes an original approach to these works which also considers the concept of ‘Peruvian Literature’ (‘National Literature’) in this age of globalization and the ever-expanding Andean diaspora.

El propósito del ensayo siguiente será analizar el contraste entre Jorge Luis Borges y Roberto Arlt en cuanto a sus distintos construcciones literarias del mundo porteño por medio de un estudio cuidadoso de sus varios textos. Después de un poco de contexto histórico y biográfico sobre los dos autores examinados, la comparación entre ellos se centra primero en la obra temprana de Borges (la poesía, unos ensayos) y las crónicas y obras teatrales de Arlt (sus Aguafuertes porteñas, Trescientos millones). Luego, se examina los cuentos de ambos autores y como reflejan sus perspectivas diferentes de Buenos Aires durante la época tumultuosa de los años veinte y treinta.

My thesis is a creative expression in poetry about my study abroad experience in Chile. During my time in Chile I traveled all over the country and tried to experience as much of the culture as possible. These poems speak of different parts of the country that I visited and different cultural aspects to which I was exposed. The work also includes photos from my travels to accompany several of my poems. This thesis was written with the hope that others might be able to better understand my semester in Chile.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI/Dissertation Abstracts International.

The Paris-based literary magazine Mundo Nuevo disseminated some of the most original and experimental Latin American writing from 1966--the date of its founding--to 1968, the year its editor-in-chief resigned and the magazine moved to Buenos Aires. Despite its fame, the magazine's role in the Boom and the cultural Cold War has been misunderstood by critics, who have either viewed Mundo Nuevo as a tool for CIA propaganda (it was recipient of CIA funds for two years) or non-political, avant-garde magazine. Mundo Nuevo's founding editor, Emir Rodríguez Monegal, saw the magazine as an outlet for turning Latin American literature in world literature. Mundo Nuevo published essays, interviews and fiction from such writers as Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Because its funding has been traced back to the CIA-sponsored Congress for Cultural Freedom, Mundo Nuevo has also been a lightning rod for political controversy. Since the magazine's inception, Cuban intellectuals denounced Mundo Nuevo as "imperialist propaganda" for the U.S. government. Although Monegal insisted on calling Mundo Nuevo "a magazine of dialogue," it was both financially and ideologically linked to European and American liberalism, which sought, in Arthur Schlesinger's words, to assert "the ultimate integrity, of the individual." Mundo Nuevo's stance toward Cuba became evident in editorials against the repression of artists in Cuba, as well as in the publishing of works by writers who found themselves at odds with the cultural politics of the new regime and in the publication of feature articles highlighting the economic failures of the Revolution. I argue that Mundo Nuevo was neither an instrument of "Yankee imperialism"--as Roberto Fernández Retamar called it in Casa de las Américas--nor a disinterested, politically non-committed "magazine of dialogue," as the journal's editor often claimed. As much of the material from the archives in the Congress for Cultural Freedom demonstrates, Mundo Nuevo was set up by the Congress as a bulwark against the Cuban Revolution, and used the rhetoric of disinterested, cosmopolitan literature to counter the Revolution's model of literature engagée.e / text

<p> "Find Yourself Here" argues that since transmigrants often form profound connections to place, we can develop a nuanced account of transmigrant subjectivity through innovative fiction by migrants who describe their own neighborhoods. The authors studied use their own hometowns as both setting and stylistic inspiration, deploying various formal techniques to mirror the fictional location to the real one, thus literarily enacting the neighborhood. I construct a neighborhood geography from each work, by traveling on foot, interviewing the neighbors and local historians, mapping the text&rsquo;s fictional setting upon the actual spaces it references, and teasing out connections between place, narrative form, and migrancy, to demonstrate how excavating the locale illuminates the text. My methodology is interdisciplinary: it incorporates recent sociological studies of transnationalism by Linda Basch, Patricia Pessar, and Jorge Duany, tenets of Human Geography, and the work of Latino literary theorists including Ra&uacute;l Homero Villa and Mary Pat Bray on space in narrative. My literary neighborhood geographies&mdash;of Salvador Plascencia&rsquo;s El Monte barrio, Junot D&iacute;az&rsquo;s New Jersey housing development, Sandra Cisneros&rsquo; Westside Chicago, and Helena Mar&iacute;a Viramontes&rsquo; East Los Angeles&mdash;sharpen Latino literary criticism&rsquo;s long-standing focus on urban and regional spaces in narrative by zooming in on neighborhood streets, while building on contemporary theories of transnationalism to analyze the broader cultural implications of local migrancy. By grounding the effects of transmigrancy in concrete locations, &ldquo;Find Yourself Here&rdquo; presents a comprehensive vision of the US Latino immigrant experience without generalizing from its myriad versions and numerous sites.</p>

With the arrival of the Europeans, the dressed body became a discursive forum upon which to negotiate the possession of land and the legitimate right to govern in Latin America. In conquest chronicles, the Aristotelian notion that mother nature marked the bodies of those she destined for slavedom came to be applied as a primary discursive tool to justify Spain’s claim to sovereignty. Amerindian forms of dress (or lack thereof) served as visual markers of mental and moral inferiority, lack of civic principles, and an inability of indigenous peoples to self-govern. This study examines the persistence of these impressions of inferiority in modern day body politics. It also questions the applicability of concepts imported from Europe that are involved in the configuration of sovereignty as its formulation changed from something imposed by the conquest to a political principle upon which Latin America’s political communities defined themselves. I analyze the representation of politically charged bodies in four 20th century narratives that dialogue with three crucial moments in the evolution of sovereignty in Latin America (the conquest, the independence movements, and modern-day popular revolutions). Drawing from recent political theory, which views sovereignty as a continually evolving multifaceted social practice involving a wide variety of cultural and legal practices, this dissertation examines the complex processes by which bodies, both physical and symbolic, become vested with political significance. In response to Moira Gatens’s work, which argues that just as theory has abandoned neutral and abstract conceptualizations of material bodies, bodies politic should similarly be examined as historically situated practices determined by specific power relations (gender, class, race, etc.); I propose that we, scholars of Latin American Studies, must find the equivalent of what Luce Irigaray, referring to women’s bodies, calls ‘our body’s language.’ This dissertation observes that the link between sovereignty and the dressed body in Latin America begs further examination, and that we must develop a set of terms and concepts that capture the specific cultural, political and ideological circumstances behind how the body performs at a material and symbolic level in Latin America’s quest toward sovereignty. / Romance Languages and Literatures

<p> The question at the root of this study is why the political formation of state power in Latin America always seems to be accompanied by violence against women. Two threads run throughout: an analysis of the relation between image, violence, and subject formation; and the application of this theory to the political violence exerted upon feminine subjectivity in relation to state formation in Latin America. I trace the marginalization of women through experimental dictatorial fiction of the Southern Cone up to the crisis of femicide that has emerged alongside the so-called narco-state in Mexico in the wake of NAFTA. I argue that Latin American feminist thought has sought to articulate itself as a post-hegemonic force of interruption from <i> within</i> the dominant order, a project that is problematized in the face of the perverse seriality of the femicide crimes and the intolerable yet enigmatic power of which they become a forced representation.</p><p> The first chapter stages a close reading of Salvador Elizondo&rsquo;s <i> Farabeuf</i> (1965), locating in the novel&rsquo;s engagement with a photograph of the Chinese <i>Leng Tch&rsquo;&eacute;</i> execution a theory of the relation between cut, image, and the female body that understands the subtraction of the feminine as the foundation of the political. The second chapter turns to the structure of dictatorial violence in Argentina, looking at Alejandra Pizarnik&rsquo;s <i>La condesa sangrienta</i> (1965) and Luisa Valenzuela&rsquo;s &ldquo;Cambio de armas&rdquo; (1982) alongside the Argentine Revolution and the Dirty War, respectively. Pizarnik&rsquo;s meditation on Elizabeth Bathory&rsquo;s crimes highlights both the fetishization of the subversive body and the inevitable failure of sovereign power to designate itself. Valenzuela&rsquo;s fragmentary story deconstructs the notion of erasure at the heart of the regime&rsquo;s use of forced disappearance by staging a perverse sexual relation within an environment of domestic confinement. The third chapter examines Diamela Eltit&rsquo;s critique of neoliberalism during the Pinochet regime in Chile through her cinematographic novel <i> Lump&eacute;rica</i> (1983) before following this economic trail northward to the femicide crisis that has ravaged the Mexican-U.S. border since 1993. I demonstrate that both oppressive power structures&mdash;official and unofficial&mdash;are founded on the fusion of economic and gender violence. A reading of Roberto Bola&ntilde;o&rsquo;s <i>2666</i> through the notion of the exquisite corpse situates this urgent crisis in relation to globalization and the postmodern world of images, technology, efficiency, and instantaneity for which it becomes a disturbing emblem.</p>