Art of Transition

Masiello Francine Masiello

Description

The Art of Transition addresses the problems defined by writers and artists during the postdictatorship years in Argentina and Chile, years in which both countries aggressively adopted neoliberal market-driven economies. Delving into the conflicting efforts of intellectuals to name and speak to what is real, Francine Masiello interprets the culture of this period as an art of transition, referring to both the political transition to democracy and the formal strategies of wrestling with this change that are found in the aesthetic realm.Masiello views representation as both a political and artistic device, concerned with the tensions between truth and lies, experience and language, and intellectuals and the marginal subjects they study and claim to defend. These often contentious negotiations, she argues, are most provocatively displayed through the spectacle of difference, which constantly crosses the literary stage, the market, and the North/South divide. While forcefully defending the ability of literature and art to advance ethical positions and to foster a critical view of neoliberalism, Masiello especially shows how issues of gender and sexuality function as integrating threads throughout this cultural project. Through discussions of visual art as well as literary work by prominent novelists and poets, Masiello sketches a broad landscape of vivid intellectual debate in the Southern Cone of Latin America. The Art of Transition will interest Latin Americanists,literary and political theorists, art critics and historians, and those involved with the study of postmodernism and globalization.

Sujets

• The arts
• Cultural studies
• Latin America
• History of the Americas

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 21 septembre 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822381389
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

T H E A R T O F T R A N S I T I O N

A book in the series

Latin America Otherwise:

Languages, Empires, Nations

Series editors:

Walter D. Mignolo, Duke University

Irene Silverblatt, Duke University

Sonia Sald´ıvar-Hull, University of

California at Los Angeles

T H E

A R T

O F

T R A N S I T I O N

Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis

Francine Masiello

                  

Durham / London

Duke University Press

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Typeset in Monotype Garamond by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear

on the last printed page of this book.

A B O U T T H E S E R I E S

Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nationsis a critical series. It aims to explore the emergence and consequences of concepts used to define ‘‘ Latin America’’ while at the same time exploring the broad interplay of political, economic, and cultural practices that have shaped Latin Ameri- can worlds. Latin America, at the crossroads of competing imperial designs and local responses, has been construed as a geocultural and geopolitical entity since the nineteenth century. This series provides a starting point to redefine Latin America as a configuration of political, linguistic, cultural, and economic intersections that demands a continuous process of global- ization and the relocation of people and cultures that have characterized Latin America’s experience.Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nationsis a forum that confronts established geocultural constructions, that rethinks area studies and disciplinary boundaries, that assesses con- victions of the academy and of public policy, and that, correspondingly, de- mands that the practices through which we produce knowledge and under- standing about and from Latin America be subject to rigorous critical scrutiny. Francine Masiello’s title,The Art of Transition, embodies an ambiguity that defines the frame of her book. The ‘‘art’’ of transition refers simulta-

neously to artistic production after the dictatorships in Argentina and Chile and to the sociohistorical conditions and the search for democratic transformations that, in both countries, followed the end of dictatorial re- gimes. As in her previous book,Civilization and Barabarism, Masiello makes gender a pivotal category of her analysis. But also, as in her previous book, Masiello transcends the dichotomy between the Northern understanding subject and the Southern object to be understood. In fact, the cultural his- tory of the Southern is the background for a critical reflection on gender ‘‘as a guiding trope to affirm the powers of the margin.’’ Masiello’s compel- ling argument directly and indirectly shows that ‘‘gender’’ is not a universal category and cannot be theorized and understood beyond the conditions in which ‘‘gender’’ becomes a category sociohistorically ingrained. Fur- thermore, Masiello constantly keeps in her analytical horizon the fact that regions geopolitically defined need to be linked to the neoliberal imaginary that nourishes globalization today.

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

ix

xi



P A R T I . M A S K S

. In Search of a Subject: Latin American Intellectuals at Century’s End

. The Spectacle of ‘‘ Difference’’



P A R T I I . M A P S

. Gender Traffic on the North/South Horizon

. Bodies in Transit: Travel, Translation, and Sexuality

P A R T I I I . M A R K E T S

. The Politics of the Text: Experience, Representation, and the Return oflo popular

. From Museum to Street: Poetry for the New Millennium

Notes

Works Cited

Index







C O N T E N T S

. Guillermo Kuitca, Untitled(two views), 

. Juan Dávila,The Liberator SimónBolı ´ var, 

. Liliana Porter,Mutaciones con platito del Ché, 

,anlzoGDoı ´ .azQuadrivium (two views), 

. Catalina Parra, Diariamente, 

. Catalina Parra, Walter Benjamin, 

. Catalina Parra,The Human Touch: The Final Edge II, 

. Catalina Parra, What’s It To You?, 

I L L U S T R A T I O N S