ABSTRACT Title of Document: ARTELETRA: THE POLITICS OF GOING UNNOTICED IN THE LATIN AMERICAN SIXTIES. Jason A. Bartles, Doctor of Philosophy, 2014 Directed By: Professor Laura Demaría Department of Spanish and Portuguese This dissertation focuses on the long 1960s in Latin America to ask about forms of political and ethical interventions that went unnoticed in the cultural debates of the era. Within the vast Latin American cultural markets of the sixties, I study four authors who works were overlooked both critically and popularly at the time. Calvert Casey (1924–1969), a gay Cuban-American writer, worked and published in Havana from 1958 to 1965 when he went into self-exile. Juan Filloy (1894–2000), the Argentine “writer from three centuries,” returned from a thirty year editorial silence in the sixties. Héctor Manjarrez (1945) returned to Mexico City from London and began to publish only after the massacre at Tlatelolco. Armonía Somers (1914–1994), a female, Uruguayan writer of dark and erotic tales, was originally dismissed by many of her contemporaries for her provocative themes. What unites these diverse authors is a common problematic, unique to them, which appears throughout their works—a practice I call “the politics of going unnoticed.” Political philosophy from Plato to Rancière highlights the process of passing from invisibility to visibility within the public sphere. However, these authors imagine subjects who purposefully avoid the spotlight and still engage in dissensus. While reading the Latin American cultural archive against the grain, my analysis is guided by three questions: (1) How can a seemingly unimportant subject enact a radical critique while, paradoxically, going unnoticed by dominant institutions? (2) How do these authors promote an ethics that open dialogues among political adversaries in a democratic framework without relying on exclusive categories? And (3), what are the formal strategies they employ to reflect the politics and ethics of going unnoticed? I contend that these authors imagine new possibilities for political action far from entrenched ideologies (e.g., Peronism, the Cuban Revolution) and violent acts of aggression or repression (e.g., the Tupamaros, the massacre at Tlatelolco). Moreover, they generate the conditions of possibility for agonistic, democratizing transformations of existing institutions and epistemologies that exceed exclusive national and identitarian boundaries. ARTELETRA: THE POLITICS OF GOING UNNOTICED IN THE LATIN AMERICAN SIXTIES. By Jason A. Bartles. Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2014 Advisory Committee: Professor Laura Demaría, Chair Professor Ryan Long Professor Mehl Penrose Professor Juan Carlos Quintero-Herencia Professor Ernesto Calvo, Dean’s Representative © Copyright by Jason A. Bartles 2014 Acknowledgments It is difficult to express gratitude, but I hope that these few words will suffice. There are so many people who deserve recognition for being a part of this journey with me. Nancy Ryan must be credited with setting me on the path that led me to write this dissertation. In West Virginia, she was my first Spanish teacher, and I had the pleasure of being in her classroom for the first year and the last two years of high school. She taught me how to say “me llamo Jason,” how to conjugate every verb tense, and that it is possible to write a three page essay in Spanish—a seemingly monumental task when I was seventeen. During my senior year, she organized fundraisers so that I could accompany her on a service-learning trip to Nogales that straddles Arizona and Northern Mexico. This was my first time on an airplane, my first trip abroad—just barely over the U.S.-Mexico border—and the one that inspired so many future excursions, both real and imaginary, to Latin America. Thank you, Nancy, for being one of the few lights I could see swirling among the shadows. Currie K. Thompson was the professor in my very first class at Gettysburg College, Spanish 301: Advanced Grammar, Composition and Conversation at 8:00 a.m. The first few weeks were an incredible shock, in a positive way, that demanded better work of me, and the two classes I took with him during my first year are the reason I continued on as a Spanish major. He also had the good sense to get me to study abroad in Argentina, a country I had barely even heard of ten years ago. While living for six months in Mendoza, in addition to having to speak Spanish all the time, I remember realizing how much I loved to read literature and how fascinating it was ii to read in Spanish texts written about the places I was visiting. Since graduating from Gettysburg, he has continued to be a great mentor. Thank you, Kerr, for pointing me toward options I did not know existed. Juan Carlos Quintero-Herencia was the first professor I met at the University of Maryland, College Park. I am indebted to him for seeing some sort of potential in my graduate school application materials and convincing me to come to UMD. His seminar on literatures and politics in the Hispanic Caribbean was another eye-opening moment in my academic career. I naively choose to present on Lezama Lima, having no idea who he was, and I came out on the other side of that presentation, and of Juan Carlos’s class, with a much better appreciation for the phrase “sólo lo difícil es estimulante.” Juan Carlos is also the one who introduced me to Calvert Casey; like so many others, I thought Casey was fairly unimportant in my first reading of him, but Juan Carlos helped reorient my gaze. In general, thank you, Juan Carlos, for showing me how important it is to “masticar” texts and ideas with less haste and with more care. Over the past years, Laura Demaría, my dissertation director, taught me nothing less than how to write. Laura has suffered through the absolute worst of my work. She witnessed my first conference presentation, which in retrospect seems like a complete disaster today. She has carefully read graduate exams and a number of early drafts of papers, articles, and chapters that had to be completely rewritten. Yet she has a way of focusing her attention on the bits of ideas that were only beginning to emerge; she has been a guide and a constant source of inspiration to develop those fragments into more coherent ideas and to do so in dialogue with others. For me, it is iii this last point that has been the most important. Laura has shown me the value of writing in my own voice without speaking over others. I could say that she has taught me how to carry out research without creating a monodiálogo, and I will carry this lesson with me throughout my career. Again and again, thank you, Laura. Thanks to Sandra Cypess who has offered unwavering support for my work and gave me the confidence to find my own voice. Thanks to Mehl Penrose for making Romanticism not only accessible but enjoyable and for always being so generous with his time. Thanks to Ryan Long for his advice for the job market and serving on my dissertation committee; I look forward to having more opportunities to work together in the future, since we only coincided at College Park for one year. Thanks to Ernesto Calvo for serving as the Dean’s Representative and agreeing to read my work. Thanks to Eyda Merediz, our unflagging Director of Graduate Studies, for keeping us all afloat. I would like to thank my professors and colleagues while at the University of Maryland, College Park: Jorge Aguilar Mora, Peter Beicken, Carmen Benito-Vessels, Sergio Chejfec, Lauretta Clough, Regina Harrison, Karen Krausen, Manel Lacorte, José María Naharro-Calderón, Ana Patricia Rodríguez, Ivette Rodríguez-Santana, Hernán Sánchez de Pinillos, and Saúl Sosnowski. While at Gettysburg College, so many excellent professors inspired me to follow in their footsteps; for encouraging me to speak when I thought I had nothing to say, I would like to thank: Gitte Butin, Nancy Cushing-Daniels, who will be missed, Steve Gimbel, Eleanor Hogan, Mónica Morales, Paula Olinger, Alicia Rolón, Jack Ryan, and Miguel Viñuela. iv For welcoming me into the Southern Cone Studies section of LASA, thanks to Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante, Leila Gómez, and Gloria Medina-Sancho. For inviting me to her personal library in Córdoba, Argentina, and sharing resources and anecdotes on Armonía Somers, thanks to Cristina Dalmagro. For the motivation to finish this dissertation, thanks to my future colleagues at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. A number of fellowships and grants from the University of Maryland, College Park supported my graduate studies and doctoral dissertation research. I would like to thank the Graduate School for an incredibly generous Flagship Fellowship that supported me for the first five years. The Graduate School also provided me with a Summer Research Fellowship to finish my dissertation prospectus. The Latin American Studies Center awarded me a grant to travel to Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile in 2012. They also provided a grant with which my colleagues and I established a year-long working group, “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies in Latin America: A Crossroads,” where I first read and debated a number of the texts quoted below with many of the people named here. The Department of Spanish and Portuguese, my second home for the past seven years, provided me with a scholarship for my first two years and, in the final year, with the Ángel Rama Post-Proposal Fellowship that allowed me the time and resources to finish this dissertation. I am grateful for all of these resources and opportunities and to all of those who wrote letters of recommendation and took the time to evaluate my applications.