La aporía postnacional: identidades posthumanas y espectrales en la literatura y las artes latinoamericanas contemporáneas
Embargo Date
2026-06-27
OA Version
Citation
Abstract
This dissertation explores the configuration of individual identities that have been redefined in terms of adversity, specifically within the context of globalization that characterizes late modernity, focusing on Latin America. My research focuses on the postnational moment that results from the erosion of the nation-state, the expansion of the global market, and the proliferation of global risks. It also considers aporia as an impasse to thought, reason, and discourse, but also, in a contemporary critical perspective, as a way for transgressing the perplexity caused by adversity. I analyze the new forms of late capitalism, its implementation of biopolitics and necropolitics, defined as the exercise of power and administration of life and death, and the extractive forces that appropriate and instrumentalize human and non-human bodies as well as natural ones. I analyze this context as a scenario for the emergence of new post-traditional or postnational identities, as a process of “mutation” or, in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s terms, “becoming” — in particular becoming spectral and posthuman. Spectral identities imply a condition of erasure and defacement of the subject imposed by structural violence and adversity, and the posthuman identities results from the alteration or reconfiguration of the individual, for instance by technological implementations over the physical body. For this line of inquiry, I analyze contemporary Latin American and Latinx literature, graphic novels, films, virtual reality productions, and visual arts to evidence the regional implications of a global phenomenon. I approach these aesthetic works and these identities in a transversal way centering on three key aspects: labor, violence, and migration. The First Part discusses a new world-wide setting formed in the last decades by the postnational, neoliberal, and globalized conditions and their impact on Latin American cultures and arts. The Second Part addresses the new forms of labor shaped by the posthuman condition in the region and the depiction of new posthuman identities. Here I study the work of the filmmakers Sebastian Hoffman and Alex Rivera, literary works by Pepe Rojo, and a graphic novel created by Diego Agrimbau and Gabriel Ippólit. The Third Part explores violence and the emergence of spectral identities and spectral artistic practices in Latin American art. The artists I study include Teresa Margolles, Lorena Wolffer, Coco Fusco, Regina José Galindo, Rosângela Rennó, Oscar Muñoz, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Adriana Varejão. I also examine the virtual reality films by Alejandro González Iñárritu and Alfredo Salazar-Caro. The aesthetics that I investigate illuminate a moment of global crisis as it pertains to Latin America but also generate possibilities of struggle and allow individuals to deterritorialize themselves from a precarious cartography.