My study consists of a reading of José María Arguedas’s narrative, from the perspective of Ecocriticism. Whereas indigenista writers such as Enrique López Albújar, Clorinda Matto de Turner and Ciro Alegría represent the Andean world based on the binary civilización/barbarie, Arguedas opts for creating a subjectivity that problematizes what has been named as the historization and normalization of the Andean world. Indeed, Arguedas’s narrative contains traces of what I call the Andean consubstantiality, whose rhizomatic configuration is at odds with the hegemonic project of the literary indigenismo and the Peruvian state. In my opinion, Arguedas’ Los ríos profundos underlines and makes us aware of the destruction of the complex and diverse Andean ecosystems, long before his posthumous work, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo.

This dissertation explores Mexican science fiction under the lens of posthuman studies. It contributes to the nascent scholarship of the genre by analizing its inherent counterdiscourse in questioning the legacy of state sponsored positivism from 19th century and its effects on contemporary Mexican modernity. A close study of Mexican avant-garde texts written by the Estridentistas during the postrevolutionary years reveals utopian politics and aesthetics, which allow the dissertation to contrast their work with the dystopian discourse of postmodern Mexican cyberpunk. In reavealing a common technological genealogy between the avant-gardes and Mexican science fiction, the dissertation resorts to the invention of a new concept called, Neurotextuality. The remaining chapters focus on the themes of time and space travel; as a deconstructive historiography, the apocalypse; as a posthuman aesthetic, and the allegorical representation of subalternity in science fiction. These mediums provide the dissertation with critical assessments of positivistic thought.

The dictatorships of the Southern Cone implemented egregious neoliberal states in the late 20th century; the military regimes resorted to practices of torture, disappearance, and death to eliminate the political opposition. Drawing from Michel Foucault’s definition of biopolitics which establishes that modernity places the biological at the center of the political realm, I analyze how the new modalities of power excluded political activists, women, indigenous, and the indigent. Through the dissertation I demonstrate that the dictatorships and post-dictatorships were both guided by the same principles of biopolitics. An important element in the development of biopolitics was the deployment of sexuality; therefore I explore the relationship of patriarchy and authoritarianism in an effort to find forms of resistance. I develop my analysis through the works of Damiela Eltit, Luisa Valenzuela, Marco Bechis, Alonso Cueto, and Claudia Llosa; their representations trespass the boundaries of normative behaviors providing new forms of subjectivity.

Care increasingly appears on incurable horizons in 20th and 21st-century Latin American and Caribbean literature. This care is uniquely versed in late modernity in Latin America and the Caribbean and decentres largely Anglo/Eurocentric philosophies of care. Each dissertation chapter explores care for histories of insubordination that do not align with a progressive narrative. This care, like the quintessentially baroque ethos of Latin American modernity, is neither linear nor assimilative, but rather returns, remains, renews. By positing a baroque care alongside an ethos, I trace the disruptive and rhythmically pacing powers of baroque language throughout Latin American and Caribbean modernity—first and foremost in a communal and propertyless language encompassing orality, literature, and the arts. Although I accept care’s temporalizing powers from European philosophy, my dissertation shows that a baroque care is technical, and therefore non-anthropocentric, multilingual, diverse, and dissident. This way, a baroque care repeats and keeps custody of modernity’s remainders in language, while returning their oftentimes repressed futurity.In Chapter 1, I study the neobaroque literature of Severo Sarduy and Haroldo de Campos to debunk Martin Heidegger’s hierarchy of “good” care and “bad” care/curiosity. In José Lezama Lima’s tradition, Sarduy’s and de Campos’ neobaroque curiosity contests the Heideggerian hierarchy of curiosity: (1) They explore a baroque aesthetics of ambiguity, idleness, and curiosity, reproached by Heidegger but pointing towards a care beyond national origins and destiny; (2) Although the (neo)baroque is often misread as apolitical, Sarduy and de Campos derive neobaroque curiosity from popular culture. In this light, Heidegger’s “bad” care turns out to be baroque and popular. In Chapter 2, I take baroque care/curiosity to Afro-Caribbean poetry in English and Creole of the 1980s and 1990s. Critics starkly divide that body of poetry based on authors’ alignment with Black Power movements of the time. I push beyond that division by showing that it relies on a simplified or representational idea of blackness. In popular dialogues traversing Derek Walcott’s and Kamau E. Brathwaite’s poetry, by contrast, blackness is baroque: theatrical, ambiguous, secretive, curious. Not a thing, being, or inheritance, the popular scenes of blackness present it as a temporal problem. The re-inheritance of futurity is belaboured particularly in M. NourbeSe Philip’s and Kamau E. Brathwaite’s care under the sign of Sycorax, the silenced slave’s mother who cares and bonds despite natal alienation. In Chapter 3, I move towards a long-scorned, feminized curiosity in a femme baroque tradition from Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s 17th-century poetry to Chilean post-dictatorship literature by Diamela Eltit, Nadia Prado, and Guadalupe Santa Cruz. This genealogy makes visible an aural, oral, and written archive of the anasemic and anarchic forces of history. Once we reject the reduction of women, especially mothers, to demure containers of national origins, we see how these Chilean post-dictatorship texts imagine mothers and mothering as a corporeal archive of history’s anasemia and anarchism. Baroque care beyond cure demonstrates the need for a theory of appearance and secrecy beyond revelation and discovery. In each chapter, I point to the baroque directions of such a theory, making the larger case that the baroque provides an abiding theory of the untimeliness of Latin American and Caribbean modernity, modernity at large, and showing how this baroque theory speaks back to Eurocentric philosophies of care.

"Fissures of modernity: labor force, gender, and (in)migration in Chicano and Mexican cinema and literature of the 20th century” analyzes how the narratives of the beginning of the century created work models adjusted to modern biopolitical governmentality. These narratives problematized the relation of workers to their workplace; and, in the case of women, perpetuated the ideals of the patriarchal system. Narratives adjusted to the expectations of capitalist accumulation fostered anxiety and ambiguous behaviors in workers who tried to comply with the narrative of the “worker-citizen.” The dissertations examine the experiences of (in)migrant workers across three chapters: “The Mexican labor imaginary in the United States” “Cinema and work: women in the workplace,” and “Labor crisis and fragmentation of the self.” The goal of the dissertation is to gain a more profound understanding of how labor practices intersect with gender discourses to produce divergent experiences for workers. This analysis can also help to shed light on the unique challenges and obstacles faced by (in)migrant workers and facilitate efforts to address and mitigate issues where marginalized working-class subjects are directly affected.

Deregulated Cinema: Post-Dictatorship Film and the Neoliberal Transition in Chile and Argentina offers a selective reading of neoliberal era Chilean and Argentine films and texts to suggest how Southern Cone cinema has responded to the transformation of modes of production and organizations of power imbricated with the transition. Part one of Deregulated Cinema illustrates the emergence of neoliberal spatial arrangements through the films of Patricio Guzmán to suggest the scale by which the sensorium has been altered and interpolated to work by transformations in visuality because, as Guzmán’s films indicate, such transformations have important implications not only for cinema but concepts like history and nostalgia. Similarly, I propose that the films of the Nuevo Cine Argentino (NCA), which have tended to be read as anti-allegorical, respond to the conditions of expropriation that defined the neoliberal period in Argentina, with images that underline the relations of labor and looking. In this way, Deregulated Cinema contributes to contemporary debates about post-dictatorship Latin American cultural studies as well as film and media theory.

This project proposes that, in the context of the Anthropocene and the increased awareness of human-caused ecological crisis in western, scientific epistemology, a novel form of subjectivity is called into existence. The “ecological subject” is defined by a double understanding of the self. On the one hand, it is an individuated being, with a personal history, life experience and singular body, and, on the other, an open and permeable entity in constant constitutive exchange with the ecologies of which it is part. Inspired by the work of artist Tomás Saraceno, this project conceptualizes the ecologies we inhabit as “hybrid webs” composed of interconnected and interdependent spheres and networks. The consequence of accepting this understanding of the self and the webs we inhabit is the embodied realization as, Gregory Bateson suggested, that the organism that destroys its environment destroys itself.

The discursive field, as part of the hybrid web, has figured this growing realization through a variety of literary mechanisms and narrative play, which I call “ecopoetics”, thus providing an entrance into the analysis of the formation of this subjectivity. I begin with the activist ecopoetics of the end of the 20th century, with a focus on the work of Eduardo Galeano. I then turn to El viento que arrasa, by Selva Almada, and Falsa calma, by María Sonia Cristoff, to analyze the emergence of an ecopoetics of home that thinks how the webs we inhabit and the structures of power that traverse them manifest in our intimate spheres. Though Distancia de rescate, by Samanta Schweblin, and Fruta podrida, by Lina Meruane, the final chapter focuses on molecular ecopoetics, bringing the analysis to the sphere of the body. The conclusion is that the inherent vulnerability of the subject constituted in exchange with the ecologies it inhabits is exacerbated in today’s differentially toxic hybrid webs.

Fernando Alegría's trio of Chile's dictatorship novels are blistering amalgams of literary imaginative prose, memoir and political history, unprecedented in Latin American fiction.

The tragic and untimely death of Salvador Allende during a Sept. 11th, 1973 military strike intended to end his presidency weighed heavily on Alegría, stimulating my inquiry into his dictatorship novels to understand their ontological, cultural, political and theoretical significance in relation to our basic human rights.

In Una especie de memoria, El paso de los gansos, and Coral de guerra, Alegría speaks for Chile's less fortunate, insisting on addressing the tortured and the aggrieved, the victims of political persecution and the "disappeared" at the hands of the dictatorship personified by General Augusto Pinochet. Inviting these Chileans to center stage, Alegría ensured the downtrodden and dismissed—those who had pinned all their hopes for a more just society on Allende—would not be relegated to invisibility merely because they had been born poor and had idealistically come to believe change could be made at the ballot box.

The legal and philosophical notion of sovereignty, as well as its literary theoretical dimension needs renewal. Alegría's three novels provide a key to creating a safe resistance through a revolutionary recalibration of insilio or "internal exile" of the individual, who—under Pinochet—becomes an object of contempt, of rejection and violent reprisal. Consequently, this study includes perspectives on power, sovereignty and human rights by a number of thinkers from antiquity to the present.

The meaning of "sovereignty" has evolved under their watch. Individual worth diminished when dissident colonists wrote "We the People...," thus galvanizing the power of military and civilian dictatorships, reason enough to re-articulate and renew our belief in sovereignty of the self as the fundamental basis for all social contracts. Would that governments and corporate entities be sublimated to the concept of sovereignty in its purest state; the truest expression of sovereignty burnished into the Zeitgeist as an expression of literary theory. Fernando Alegría's fictional truth has been midwifed and all ontologies, tautologies, languages and relationships can finally be unshackled.

Key terms: sovereignty, rights, violence, literature.