Abject Comportments: Artistic Forms and Financial Experiments in Contemporary Central America Josue Chavez

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Chavez, Josue, author.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania. Spanish and Portuguese Studies., degree granting institution.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Latin American studies.

Comparative literature.

Literature.

0550.

0295.

0509.

0401.

Local Subjects:

Latin American studies.

Comparative literature.

Literature.

0550.

0295.

0509.

0401.

Physical Description:

1 electronic resource (190 pages)

Contained In:

Dissertations Abstracts International 86-12A

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, 2025

Language Note:

English

Summary:

This dissertation elaborates how novels and contemporary works of art from Central America have interpreted since the 1970s the rise of financial experiments, such as tax havens in Panama, dollar remittances in El Salvador and free trade zones in Honduras, as part of a series of transformations in the world-system that impelled the reordering of the region's 20th-century structures of dependency. Through a scrutiny of novels by Central American authors, such as Gloria Guardia, Horacio Castellanos Moya and Julio Escoto, as well as artworks from contemporary artists, such as Adan Vallecillo, Mauricio Esquivel and Donna Conlon, this dissertation elaborates the medium-specific, historicizing strategies that literary and visual compositions develop to map totality at a new conjuncture marked by financial counterrevolution in the aftermath of the armed conflicts. Intervening in humanistic and social sciences debates on the questions of form and class as analytics, my argument seeks to expand current methods of interpreting the relation between art and society that tend to presume a model of interpellation. By offering a reading of my corpus as abject comportments, I put forth an interpretative paradigm of mediation, one that, unlike interpellation, can elaborate in detail how literary and visual compositions make visible, either the transformation of ruling class structures, or the connective tissue of its horizons. Doing so demonstrates that artistic forms represent in themselves modes of cognition, but pose no guarantees their insights on social structures will be acknowledge or even elaborated. This leads me to argue that we need to see more clearly the historical contexts of the world's subordinated majority, and the structural violence that reproduces it into economic peripheries and semi- peripheries. There is no better site for this kind of investigation than the arts, precisely because it is the realm of the relation between individual experience and abstract but sensual structures

Notes:

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 86-12, Section: A.

Advisors: Beckman, Ericka Committee members: Brock, Ashley; Cornejo, Kency

Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania 2025

Local Notes:

School code: 0175

ISBN:

9798280756984

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license