The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts THE STUDENTS OF HUMAN RIGHTS: LITERATURE, PEDAGOGY, AND THE LONG SIXTIES IN THE AMERICAS A Dissertation in Comparative Literature by Molly Appel © 2018 Molly Appel Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2018 ii The dissertation of Molly Appel was reviewed and approved* by the following: Rosemary Jolly Weiss Chair of the Humanities in Literature and Human Rights Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee Thomas O. Beebee Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature and German Charlotte Eubanks Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Japanese, and Asian Studies Director of Graduate Studies John Ochoa Associate Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature Sarah J. Townsend Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Robert R. Edwards Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Comparative Literature Head of the Department of Comparative Literature *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School. iii ABSTRACT In The Students of Human Rights, I propose that the role of the cultural figure of the American student activist of the Long Sixties in human rights literature enables us to identify a pedagogy of deficit and indebtedness at work within human rights discourse. My central argument is that a close and comparative reading of the role of this cultural figure in the American context, anchored in three representative cases from Argentina—a dictatorship, Mexico—a nominal democracy, and Puerto Rico—a colonially-occupied and minoritized community within the United States, reveals that the liberal idealization of the subject of human rights relies upon the implicit pedagogical regulation of an educable subject of human rights. I further argue that decolonial and feminist artists have turned to cultural work as a praxis of re-mapping and re-imagining the terms of liberal educability, and in doing so have created their own aesthetic pedagogies of human rights. I proceed by examining four cultural texts of distinct media that feature this Long Sixties student. In my first chapter on Argentina, I analyze the role of willful learning Alicia Partnoy’s testimonial narrative, The Little School (1986; trans. La Escuelita, 2006) and the film La historia oficial (1985; trans. The Official Story, dir. Luis Puenzo). In the second chapter on Mexico, I re-examine the canon of Tlatelolco memorial literature by way of Roberto Bolaño’s novella Amuleto (1999; trans. Amulet). In my final chapter on Puerto Rico and its New York City diaspora, I read Pedro Pietri’s poetry collection Puerto Rican Obituary (1971) alongside documents from his contemporaneous involvement with the radical teaching organization, the Teachers and Writers Collaborative. I draw from pedagogical and feminist theorists including Sara Ahmed, iv Paulo Freire, Gloria Anzaldúa, and bell hooks in order to show how these works of literature model and make space for non-co-optable resilience within the colonial legacy of dehumanizing and passively-oriented pedagogy. By comparatively juxtaposing these three regionally, historically, and culturally emblematic cases of human rights cultural pedagogy, I illustrate the impact that these students of the Long Sixties in the Americas—more effectively and inclusively recognized as learners, both within and without institutions—have had on human rights cultural discourses through the counter-hegemonic pedagogical paradigms they both enacted and inspired. Through these cases, scholars can develop a more robust lexicon for identifying the specific form of educability upon which the liberal subject of human rights relies. In turn, scholars and educators can better recognize how alternative claims to educability resist and revise a liberal framework of human rights recognition that enables racialized state capitalism. v TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures.......................................................................................................... vi Machete (Preface)..................................................................................................... vii Acknowledgements................................................................................................... xiii Introduction The Ayotzinapa 43…................................................................................... 1 The Legacy of the Long Sixties in the Americas........................................ 9 Literature and the Educable Subjects of Human Rights.............................. 15 Chapter 1. “A WHIRLWIND AND, PERHAPS, A SEEDBED”: THE AESTHETICS OF WILLFUL LEARNING IN POST-PROCESO ARGENTINA “Que los lápices sigan escribiendo”……………………………………... 37 The Bad Students of the Long Sixties in Argentina.................................... 53 Learning in and with The Little School........................................................ 67 The Lessons of La historia oficial............................................................... 88 Staying Willful............................................................................................. 107 Chapter 2. PALIMPSESTIC PEDAGOGY: ROBERTO BOLAÑO AND THE MEXICAN AMULET OF HUMAN RIGHTS Traces and Tracings..................................................................................... 112 The Pedagogy of Tlatelolco Remembrance................................................. 117 Myth and Masculinity.................................................................................. 127 Auxilio Lacouture: The New Mestiza.......................................................... 141 Auxilio for the Pedagogy of Witness........................................................... 171 Chapter 3. WRITING OUT OF THE OBITUARY: PUERTO RICAN INDEBTEDNESS AND POETIC LEARNING On Tatas and Teachings.............................................................................. 175 Between Puerto Rican “Self-Determination” and Human Rights............... 183 A Cultural Pedagogy of Indebtedness......................................................... 192 Poetic Learning Against Becoming “Blind in the Mind”............................ 110 The Ethics of Accountability....................................................................... 223 Conclusion An Aesthetic Curriculum for Willful Learning........................................... 226 Works Cited............................................................................................................. 242 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 0-1: “Text as Matter, Concept, and Action.” Page 39………………….. 32 Figure 1-1: “Que los lápices sigan escribiendo.” Photo taken by the author; March 24, 2016.................................................................................................... 41 Figure 1-2: Observing the torture. Author’s screenshot...................................... 95 Figure 1-3: A song under the rain. Author’s screenshot...................................... 99 Figure 1-4: Singing the anthem. Author’s screenshot.......................................... 100 Figure 1-5: Slamming the citation. Author’s screenshot...................................... 101 Figure 1-6: Graded. Author’s screenshot.............................................................. 104 Figure 1-7: Ana (on the left) tells her story to Alicia (on the right). Still from Internet Movie Database’s page, “The Official Story”………………………..... 105 Figure 1-8: The sights and sounds of female students playing fill in the gaps between Alicia and Sara. Author’s screenshot..................................................... 106 Figure 2-1: Plaza de las tres culturas. Photo taken by the author, April 8, 2017....................................................................................................................... 112 Figure 2-2: "Ni perdon, ni olvido." Photo taken by the author, April 8, 2017…. 115 Figure 2-3: Birth of the Mestizo Nation. Photo taken by the author, April 8, 2017 ...................................................................................................................... 152 Figure 2-4: Example of student poster that includes the book trope. Scanned from Imágenes y símbolos del 68.......................................................................... 167 Figure 2-5: Example of student protest poster with dove image. Scanned from Imágenes y símbolos del 68…………………………………………………….. 168 Figure 3-1: Student Drawing. Box 69, Folder 9, Series VI: Subject Files. The Pedro Pietri Papers, Archives of Puerto Rican Diaspora. Author’s scan of photocopy made by the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños............................... 220 Figure 3-2: Figure 2: Student Drawing. Box 69, Folder 9, Series VI: Subject Files. The Pedro Pietri Papers, Archives of Puerto Rican Diaspora. Author’s scan of photocopy made by the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños................... 222 vii MACHETE (PREFACE) As I was taking a break from writing my lofty draft of a dissertation prospectus on human rights and literature, an article posted by my former student on Facebook pulled me back into what felt like a past life. Five and a half years earlier, Boubacar had walked into my high school classroom and insisted that I allow him to join my English Language Arts (ELA) Regents Exam intensive preparatory class. He was among the top academically performing seniors in his class, but the ELA exam had always been a challenge because he had only begun to develop his knowledge of academic English after he and his family arrived in the United States,