Poetry, Performance, and Power in the Andean Avant-Gardes By Tara Ann Daly A dissertation submit

146 Pages·2010·5.99 MB·English

by  Tara Daly

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
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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.

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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.

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