UC Irvine

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.