Restless Bodies, Unquiet Minds: Poetry, Performance, and Power in the Andean Avant-Gardes By Tara Ann Daly A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Hispanic Languages and Literatures in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Estelle Tarica, Chair Professor José Rabasa Professor Nelson Maldonado-Torres Fall 2010 Abstract Restless Bodies, Unquiet Minds: Poetry, Performance, and Power in the Andean Avant-Gardes by Tara Ann Daly Doctor of Philosophy in Hispanic Languages and Literatures University of California, Berkeley Professor Estelle Tarica, Chair In my project “Restless Bodies, Unquiet Minds: Poetry, Performance, and Power in the Andean Avant-Gardes” I argue that the avant-garde is not a discrete historical moment that has passed but rather a rhizomatic response to colonial legacies that have turned complex human beings into legible political subjects. Said transformation is part of an exclusionary method that privileges an enlightened, male criollo subject while depriving indigenous, poor, female, or queer persons of discursive agency. I examine how marginalized artists transgress normative conventions by incorporating embodied sentiments into their work, considering both the performative interruptions of avant-garde poetry and the linguistic disruptions of public stagings and installation art. Situating myself theoretically between a vitalist school that might conceive of the body as a source of limitless agency and Foucault’s constructivist reading of it as a passive inscriptive surface, I first look at the 1930s work of Peruvian poet César Vallejo, who uses neologisms to make visible the vulnerability of indigenous and working class bodies in Peru and Spain. I then engage José María Arguedas’s work from the 1960s in Peru to explore how his confrontation with the abject aspects to being human calls for a new community through oral tradition and literature. Turning to Bolivia, my latter two chapters consider the performance art, television programs, and poetry of Bolivian feminist Julieta Paredes and the multimedia work of artist Alejandra Dorado. I analyze the way that their anagrams, parody, and laughter reconfigure structures that limit the conditions of gendered and sexual intersubjectivity in the Andes. The work I undertake in the project makes four principal contributions to the study of Latin American literatures and cultures. First, I theorize the avant-gardes as rhizomatic phenomena that continuously engage the theme of community across space, time, and bodies. While the term “avant-garde” is most commonly associated with the 1920s and 1930s in Europe and Latin America and the 1960s and 70s in the Americas, I revise such a linear genealogy to consider rhizo-gardes as part of an underground left that is in a perpetual state of becoming. Second, within my analysis of the rhizo-gardes, I demonstrate the way that the space of art enables the production of a desiring community outside of the “operability” of capitalism. This goal entails undertaking an analysis of how art produces and communicates desires that are aberrant to those of the ideal capitalist sovereign individual. Third, I come to understand the “common” as stemming from a subject’s confrontation with the abject, objective, and finite aspects to being human. I consider the transformative implications of such an encounter on the 1 current emphasis on visuality as it fuels biopolitical distinctions between subjects based on class, race, gender, and sexuality. How might the other senses – touch, taste, smell, and hearing – catalyze community in a different way? Lastly, particularly through my work in Bolivia, I aim to expand the archival corpus of the Andean avant-gardes by looking at understudied female artists as working in alliance with other historical avant-garde artists. Drawing on the Deleuzian concept of repetition, whereby repetition is not mimetic but is a mode of production characterized by difference and transformation, I open up the avant-gardes to a new temporal and spatial configuration. 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii Curriculum Vitae iv Project Map ix Introduction x Chapter One César Vallejo’s Cuerpocentric Poetry 1 Chapter Two The Abject as Capitalist Critique in José María Arguedas’s “El sueño del pongo” and El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo 24 Chapter Three Julieta Paredes behind the Scenes: An Ethics of Intersubjectivity 52 Chapter Four The Art of Alejandra Dorado: Anagrammatic Identity in the Contemporary Andes 80 Conclusion 103 Bibliography 106 i Acknowledgments If I were to name all of the people that inspired and fueled this project, the list would be longer than the pages that follow it. I would not have first considered doing a PhD in Spanish if not for Claudia Ferman and Julie Hayes at the University of Richmond. I would not then have decided that maybe I would not do a PhD, or at least not yet, if not for Jenny Swanson and Juanita Roca, two of the most inspiring and dedicated social scientists I know. I would not have then decided that, in the end, I really did want to do a PhD if not for José Rabasa and Gwen Kirkpatrick who taught me early on that studying “literature” also meant exploring anthropology, visual art, and philosophy. Once I settled on doing a PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at Berkeley, it was José and Estelle Tarica who welcomed me back to the department. Estelle’s dedication to the Andes region and her intellectual rigor have consistently inspired me to be a better writer, thinker, and listener since day one. If she did not demand the precision and thoroughness that she does of her students, this project would not be what it is. That said, if she had not simultaneously enabled me to roam before coaxing me back to “the point,” I would not have stayed as engaged as I have over the last three years. José Rabasa pushes back in a way that makes me question my thinking from top to bottom. If he did not take me seriously from the beginning, I never would have learned to be fearless before ideas themselves. Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship and women of color feminisms has changed Berkeley’s campus in countless ways and I feel extremely fortunate to have gotten to work with him. In addition to my committee, Richard Rosa has informed this project in myriad ways. The stars must have aligned so that I could work with him during his two years at Berkeley. Additional thanks go to Ignacio Navarette, who has been a friend in the department since I got here, Emilie Bergmann, Natalia Brizuela, Dru Dougherty, Julio Ramos, Francine Masiello, Jesús Rodríguez-Velasco and Jim Clifford all of whom helped me in big and small ways during graduate school. This project was largely conceived while in Bolivia, and to that, I owe no small thanks to Alejandra Dorado and Julieta Paredes, both talented and bold women. The energy and life they breathed into this project is indescribable. I feel so lucky to count them as friends. Additional thanks go to Marcelo Paz-Soldán for welcoming me into his family on more than one occasion and to Pachi, Fernando, Ximena, Verónica, and Mariana for teaching me La Paz slang as well as how to get around town. Thanks also must go to Luis Morató, a one of a kind Quechua teacher, who added a dimension to my life that I did not know I was missing. My friends are the glue and they always have been. The Berkeleyites are too many to name, but a special thanks to Sarah Schoellkopf for her laughter and energy and to Sara Brenneis for her steadfast wisdom. Nicole Altamirano, Julia Farmer, Lori Mesrobian, Rakhel Villamil, Chrissy Arce, Anna Deeny, Israel Sanz, Mónica Gonzalez, and Luis Ramos are just a few of the people who have made me laugh throughout this journey. The conversations I have had with Heather Bamford over the last three years have brought me to the edge of language in a way that only the best conversations can. Thank you does not begin to cut it. Natalie Patinella, Liz Simmons and Siobhan Walsh have all known me for too long and, in different ways, remind me of the beautiful dizziness of being me. ii I fly away and my family pulls me back in the way that only family can do. Colin, Kate, Julia, and Trisha – you all teach me how to be a better human being and add so much laughter, music, and beauty to my life. To my Mom and Dad, thank you for understanding why I needed to do this and for all of the incredible sacrifices you made along the way to get me here. You are two of my closest friends as well as my parents. Swim to the wall. Perhaps the longest moments of graduate school were those spent hoping deep in my bones that I could spend a day with Christine Quinan. I would not be the person that I am without her beautiful love and deep intensity. iii Tara A. Daly PhD Candidate • UC Berkeley • Department of Spanish and Portuguese 2249 Derby Street • Berkeley, CA 94705 415.305.6964 • [email protected] EDUCATION University of California, Berkeley - PhD Candidate, Hispanic Languages and Literatures Dissertation: Restless Bodies, Unquiet Minds: Poetry, Performance, and Power in the Andean Avant-Gardes Committee: Professor Estelle Tarica (director), Professor José Rabasa and Professor Nelson Maldonado-Torres File date: August 2010 University of California, Berkeley - M.A. Hispanic Languages and Literatures, 2003 University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia - B.A. Spanish and English, cum laude, 1999 Languages: English (native), Spanish (fluent), Quechua (intermediate), Portuguese (intermediate), French (reading knowledge), Latin (reading knowledge) FELLOWSHIPS and AWARDS Research Spanish and Portuguese Department Research Grant, Summer 2010 Spanish and Portuguese Department Dissertation Year Fellowship, Fall 2009-Spring 2010 Departmental Nomination for UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Fellowship, Spring 2009 Spanish and Portuguese Department Research Grant, Summer 2008 Dean’s Normative Time Grant, Fall 2007 Spanish and Portuguese Department Research Grant, Summer 2007 Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship for Study of Quechua, Summer 2006 Tinker Research Grant, Summer 2006 UC Berkeley Graduate Division Summer Grant, Summer 2006 Conference Grants Center for Latin American Studies Conference Grant, Fall 2007 Spanish and Portuguese Departmental Conference Grant, Spring 2006 Teaching Awards Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Spring 2007 iv PUBLICATIONS “Alejandra Dorado and Julieta Paredes: Queer Art and Human Rights in Contemporary Bolivia” Letras Femeninas. Summer 2010. “The Intersubjective Ethic of Julieta Paredes’s Poetic” in Bolivian Studies Journal. Volume 8: 1. Plural Publishers. Spring 2010. “Clayton Eshleman on Translating César Vallejo, Poetic Creation, and Dreaming Awake” in Lucero. Volume 18/19. Spring 2009. TRANSLATION “Decolonizing the Technologies of Knowledge: Video and Indigenous Epistemology” by Freya Schiwy in Digital Decolonizations/Decolonizing the Digital Dossier, http://trinity.duke.edu/globalstudies/(2009). Spanish to English. Co-translator with Dalida Maria Benfield and Freya Schiwy. “The Notion of ‘Rights’ or the Paradoxes of Postcolonial Modernity: Indigenous and Women in Bolivia” by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui in Qui parle. Volume 19. Number 3. Fall 2009. Spanish to English. Co-translator with Dalida Maria Benfield. CONFERENCES Organized Co-organized “Decolonizing the Nation, (Re)Imagining the City: Indigenous Peoples Mapping New Terrain in Bolivia” May 2008, Northwestern University Papers Presented “César Vallejo at the Limits of Language” American Comparative Literature Association Conference April 2010, New Orleans, Louisiana “The Embodied Poetic of Mujeres Creando” American Comparative Literature Association Conference April 2008, Long Beach, California “The Óptica Indigenista of Alejandro Peralta: Images of a Community in Boletín Titikaka” Latin American Studies Association Conference Fall 2007, Montreal, Canada “The In(ex)terior and the Ex(in)terior Space in Cecilia Valdés” Romance Studies Conference v Fall 2006, University of Oregon “Los hombres zorros vuelven a lo real: José María Arguedas y el Manuscrito Huarochirí” Jornadas Andinas de Literatura Latinoamericana (JALLA) Conference Summer 2006, Bogotá, Colombia Participant University of California, Humanities Research Institute Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory “Cartographies of the Theological-Political” Summer 2007, UC Irvine TEACHING Writing and Research Courses Ethnic Studies 101B: Humanities Methods in Ethnic Studies. Spring 2009. Graduate Student Instructor for Professor Nelson Maldonado-Torres. Comparative Literature R1B, Core Research Writing Class: Memory and the Sorrow Songs. Fall 2008. Co-Instructor; responsible for syllabus design. Spanish 25, Introduction to Spanish Literary Analysis. Spring 2008. Spanish Language Courses Spanish 3, Advanced Spanish Grammar, Spring and Fall 2006 Spanish 2, Intermediate Spanish, Fall 2002 and Spring 2003 Spanish 1, Beginning Spanish, Fall 2001 and Spring 2002 Pedagogical Training Comparative Literature 260, Teaching College Reading and Writing Pedagogy Course, Fall 2008 Course Leader, Spanish 3, Fall 2006 Spanish 301, Teaching a Foreign Language Pedagogy Course, Fall 2001 ADDITIONAL ACADEMIC EXPERIENCE Student Editor, Lucero Graduate Journal of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Berkeley. 2001-2003. vi