Book Description

This dissertation focuses on cultural texts produced in Latin America that relate to the imaginaries of crisis in the region. The works that I study thematize the shift from a period of euphoria and optimism regarding the democratic transition in Latin America during the 1990s, in which the region played a crucial role in legitimizing the implementation of the neoliberal world order, to one marked by the spread of narratives of an endemic crisis of liberal democracy. The central question of my dissertation is to explore what is at stake, politically and aesthetically, when the concept of crisis is used to name these instances. My dissertation problematizes the discursive practices that come into play when socially undesirable occurrences, from criminal violence to statehood collapse in the region, are seen through the concept of crisis. I question the modern concept of crisis as a set of objective conditions that marks a turning point for either a subjective political action or for history to follow a teleological course. I argue that the ending of the revolutionary projects of the twentieth century has rendered this concept politically sterile. I argue that globalization and mediatization have emptied this concept. Instead of a crisis of the political or the social, we now face a multiplicity of crises, environmental, humanitarian, or otherwise, that are ceaselessly spectacularized. This dissertation argues that these works portray an aesthetic of crisis, which has been theorized as “the contemporary.” I posit that contrary to the understanding of traditional aesthetics that claimed that artistic movements depended on a leading style, which political action mimicked, the convergence of various temporalities characterizes the contemporary. Crisis, much like leading styles, appears futile because of the total subsumption of the market; the minor voices and temporalization that rise from this structure allow for a different understanding of the political beyond the teleology determined by the concept of crisis as a placeholder for decisive historical and political action.