UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation explores the concept of the body in fictional representations within the context of repression and forced migration in literature and visual arts. My analysis focuses on the aesthetic proposals of Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay, 1941), Daniel Moyano (Argentina, 1930 – Spain, 1992), and José Balmes (Spain, 1927 – Chile, 2016), banned in their home countries and forced into exile by military dictatorships during the 1970s and 1980s. The study draws from contemporary discussions on nomadism, Borderlands theory, feminist critiques of modern understandings of the body—especially in the context of repression and violence—and Latin American visual arts and literary theory in relation to exile and memory. Drawing from Gloria Anzaldúa’s insightful understanding of the body as a porous borderland that dwells in liminality and intersectionality, I argue that the close interrelation and interdependence between embodiment and space become highly legible in the condition of physical displacement. This is why I examine the somatic and discursive constructions of migrant embodiment—particularly in the situation of forced displacement—in different characters in Peri Rossi’s poetry, Moyano’s fiction and Balmes’s art.

Bodies in Transit is composed of three chapters. Chapter 1 is titled “The Body in Fluid Stages: Negotiating Exile in Descripción de un Naufragio, by Cristina Peri Rossi” (1975, Description of a Shipwreck). In this poetry collection, the free expression of eroticism and passion constitutes an irreverent and eloquent perspective on banishment (Butler, 1993; Grosz, 1994; Sandoval, 2000). The characters relearn their corporeal language as part of both a migratory dynamic of traveling by ship, and a hybrid reality of living in between worlds. In Chapter 2, “Going into Exile: Rethinking the Body in Libro de Navíos y Borrascas by Daniel Moyano” (1983, The Book of Vessels and Tempests), I explore the journey into forced displacement (also sailing across the open ocean), the somatic experiences of the main characters and their exposure to sexual violence, forced disappearance, and prison (Arendt, 1963; Butler, Bodies, 1993; Scarry, 1985; R. Segato, Guerra, 2018). The various literary voices in this novel search for ways of coping with the complex experience of banishment; they find havens in memory (personal and collective), in art, and in the representation of non-official historical episodes. Finally, in the third chapter, “Mapping Memory and Trauma: Exile in José Balmes’s artwork,” I examine bodies that revisit trauma in the artist’s output relating to his recollections of his own journeys as a Spanish refugee in 1939 and as a Chilean exile in 1973 (Johnson, 2007; Lazzara, 2006; McCloskey, 2005; Nochlin, 1996; Richard, 2007; Taylor, 2007). In Balmes’s paintings, the human body performs a testimony and is represented as an important component of an alternative historical discourse.

A comparative look at these three experiences of migratory flows is important since the journey into exile has an effect on the literary and visual representations of these authors. Specifically, I analyze how the body is limited and violented by discourses deploying a modern concept of embodiment, and how, at the same time, going into exile presents opportunities for becoming aware of the embodied border-location. I am interested in the analysis of power structures and in their intersection with alternative cultural representations—literary works, visual and plastic artworks—that represent a “material site of struggle in which active links are made between signifying practices and social structure” (Lowe 22). I explore a striking reiteration of topics in the outputs of the three creators, specifically related to the terms absence and presence, memory and violence, and body and trauma. These are recurrent concepts that acquire a particular nuance from the creators’ shared experience as exiled subjects.

Although much research has already been done into Southern Cone literary and artistic exile, my work looks at significant connections in multiple intersecting fields and responds to the contemporary complexities of migration. My study broadens the discussion about the connections between embodiment and dominant discourses on citizenship and exile in the Americas. It also expands our understanding of how the vibrant and diverse cultural production of Latin American spaces is constantly threatened by repressive discourses that persist, even after the end of dictatorship, naturalizing violence and silencing dissident writers and artists.