THE GHOST AND THE REVOLUTION: INDIGENOUS SPECTRALITY AND TRAUMA IN CONTEMPORARY LATIN AMERICAN AND LATINO NARRATIVES A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Sebastián Antezana Quiroga August 2019 © 2019 Sebastian Antezana Quiroga ii THE GHOST AND THE REVOLUTION: INDIGENOUS SPECTRALITY AND TRAUMA IN CONTEMPORARY LATIN AMERICAN AND LATINO NARRATIVES Sebastian Antezana Quiroga, Ph. D. Cornell University 2019 This dissertation examines the traumatic and ghostly literary resonances of four contemporary transcultural novels from Bolivia, Mexico, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic/United States, in order to challenge historical representations of indigeneity and the traditional national paradigm. In what follows, I analyze Alison Spedding’s De cuando en cuando Saturnina, Yuri Herrera’a Señales que precederán al fin del mundo, Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Insensatez, and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and concentrate in the ways they depict modes of community-formation across demarcations of race, culture, languages, and literatures. These seminal novels depict compulsive and spectral indigenous imaginaries, and generate disruptive and subversive impulses that prevent the coagulation of traditional sociopolitical paradigms and the neutralization of politics. The four novels show how, throughout Latin America, indigenous voices articulate phantasmal discourses and recover mythical narratives that disjoint the national paradigms they grow out of. On the other hand, these voices also constitute a communitarian compulsive force charged with revolutionary power that acts both as a political instrument with which to read the reemergence of native ideologies in contemporary Latin American literature and as a critical tool that shows the unraveling of specific national models. iii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Sebastián Antezana Quiroga received a BA from the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, where he studied Latin American Literature, and an MA from the University of Leeds, where he studied English Literature. He went on to pursue a doctoral degree at Cornell University, where his research focuses on contemporary Latin American and Latino literature and politics, indigeneity, national and transnational studies, trauma studies, spectrality, and science fiction. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Edmundo Paz Soldán for his guidance, his friendship, and his generosity throughout the years, before and during my time at Cornell. I would also like to express my gratitude to Cathy Caruth and Patty Keller for their help and scholarship, without which I could not have written this dissertation. Thank you to my family, Mauricio, Marisol, and Pablo, always essential, always. Thank you to my Cornell friends, especially to Mario, Liliana, Francisco, Rodrigo H, Janet, Rafa, Gustavo, and Rodrigo F. Thank you to “El Taller,” the Sunday writing workshop. And thank you to Kimmy, for love, for happiness. v TABLE OF CONTENTS BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: DE CUANDO EN CUANDO SATURNINA: BIRTH OF THE TRAUMATIC NATION 10 CHAPTER TWO: SEÑALES QUE PRECEDERÁN AL FIN DEL MUNDO: THE GHOST IN THE MAKINA 51 CHATPER THREE: INSENSATEZ: PARANOID TESTIMONIO 92 CHAPTER FOUR: THE BRIEF WOUNDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO AND THE FACELESS DIASPORA 127 CONCLUSIONS 169 BIBLIOGRAPHY 175 vi INTRODUCTION Since the 1970s until now, several thinkers have critically analyzed the dilemma of identification processes structured by the form of the nation and have argued that the national model is a non-representative mode of community. At the same time, since the end of the twentieth century multiple cultural manifestations coming from multiple places have pointed out, more and less openly although always intermingled with an apocalyptic narrative that speaks of the end of grand narratives, the end of the nation. Thus, the contemporary crisis of national identities and cultures, what Ramachandra Guha calls “the historic failure of the nation to come into its own” (43), implies a necessary rethinking of the links between culture, art, and sociopolitical modes of organization. In other words, the ties and tensions between narration and nation. The Latinamerican Subaltern Studies Group, for example, points out in its Founding Statement that what was clear from the work of the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group is that “the elites represented by the national bourgeoisie and/or the colonial administration are responsible for inventing the ideology and reality of nationalism” (117). That is, while the elites of the continent, represented by the bourgeoisie, command the destinies of the nation with a divisive, exclusionary logic, the nation itself is located at the point of intersection created between the old colonial power and the future postcolonial system in which elites still occupy a hegemonic role. 1 Latin-American critical responses to Benedict Anderson's interpretative framework produced, among other things, the evidence of the nation and the national as products designed by what Ángel Rama calls “letrados,” the lettered men that populated, designed, and conducted the continent’s urban centers in an exclusionary manner. From Mexico, Roger Bartra argues that “los estudios sobre ‘lo mexicano’ constituyen una expresión de la cultura política dominante. Esta cultura política hegemónica se encuentra ceñida por el conjunto de redes imaginarias del poder, que definen las formas de la subjetividad socialmente aceptadas y que suelen ser consideradas como la expresión más elaborada de la cultura nacional” (“studies on 'mexicanness' constitute an expression of the dominant political culture. This hegemonic political culture is undergird by a set of imaginary networks of power which defines the forms of socially accepted subjectivity, usually considered the most elaborate expression of the national culture” 15). From Argentina, Beatriz Sarlo states that the re-launch of nationalism has several problematic features from a democratic standpoint. For Sarlo, el nacionalismo, la nación y las ideologías patrióticas funcionan entonces como sucedáneos colectivos de las ideas de comunidad que las dictaduras y los gobiernos reaccionarios son los primeros en destruir. Sobre una nación fracturada socialmente por las desigualdades económicas y culturales, el fantasma de la nación proporciona eso: una sombra que esfuma los contrastes, unificando, en el corazón de la Patria, a quienes en todos los demás aspectos están separados y son diferentes.1 (109) 1 “Nationalism, the nation, and patriotic ideologies function as collective substitutes for communitarian forms and ideas that dictatorships and reactionary governments are ready to destroy. Over a nation socially 2 Sarlo’s “ghost of the nation” is directly related to Guillermo Bonfil’s “México imaginado.” In his seminal study México profundo, Bonfil promotes the idea that there is, on the one hand, a deep Mexico based on indigenous culture and, in the other hand, an imaginary Mexico, close to Anderson’s “imagined communities.” Bonfil argues that “el México profundo, portador de la civilización negada, encarna el producto decantado de un proceso ininterrumpido que tiene una historia milenaria [y es] sistemáticamente ignorado y negado por el México imaginario, que tiene el poder y se asume como el portador del único proyecto nacional válido” (“the deep Mexico, representative of a denied civilization, embodies the decanted product of an uninterrupted process that has a thousand-year history [and is] systematically ignored and silenced by the imaginary Mexico, that has all the power and sees itself as the bearer of the only valid national Project” 244). However, as Claudio Lomnitz further argues, the two ideological horizons of Bonfil’s Mexico, the deep one and the imaginary one, arise both at the end of the colonial period. The product of a colonial vision, then, both Mexicos are connected to sets of real practices and beliefs, and thus are the product of the collective imagination. That is to say, both Mexicos are, at the same time, “deep” and “imaginary” and there are several “reasons why the imaginary Mexico has become so very real.” (Exits from the Labyrinth 248) From Venezuela, Gustavo Guerrero points out: “pareciera que, inopinadamente, las sociedades latinoamericanas se asomaran a un espejo vacío donde solo quedasen las fractured by economic and cultural inequalities, the ghost of the nation provides that: a shadow that erases contrasts, unifying, in the heart of the Homeland, those whom in all other aspects are separate and different”. 3 ruinas (o las sombras) de un concepto y de un cierto modo del sentir colectivo que habían garantizado la cohesión y las dinámicas comunitarias durante doscientos años” (“it would seem that, unexpectedly, Latin American societies are looking into an empty mirror where only remained the ruins {or the shadows} of a concept and a certain way of collectively feeling, that had guaranteed community cohesion and dynamics for two hundred years” 134). That empty mirror that only shows the ruinous traces of what was once a process and dynamics capable of organizing societies communally, even if only in an idealized way, could allow us to see the gestures that led to this distortion, this transitional process from the nation to the ghost nation, both imaginary entities that function as rhetorical regimes. Sarlo’s “ghost nation,”