Charles St-Georges

Desde sus inicios, los términos del siempre eurocentrista sueño americano han sido dictados por una lógica temporal sumamente normativa. Por un lado, había que exterminar o esclavizar a las poblaciones no blancas para establecer el modelo económico que fuera a fomentar el tipo de productividad necesaria para realizar los objetivos de dicho sueño: un continente en que los eurodescendientes pudieran tener un mejor futuro. El futuro era modernidad, y la modernidad era blanca. Por otro lado, para este proyecto eran necesarios un heteronormativismo y un capacitismo implacables para poblar la tierra de nuevas generaciones de blancos que heredaran las ganancias de este sueño. En ambos casos—el del cuerpo blanco y el del cuerpo heterosexual y no discapacitado—se trata de una lógica que decide cuáles cuerpos merecen formar una familia: unidad básica para determinar la ciudadanía de uno y su capacidad para contribuir al futuro de la nación al procrear, lo cual forma la base del imaginario político de cualquier país, según Lee Edelman.

Ambientada en una hacienda argentina antes y después de la abolición completa de la esclavitud en 1853, Los inocentes (2016, dir. Mauricio Brunetti) nos presenta a dos niños que son amigos—a pesar de las prohibiciones de Güiraldes, el amo—precisamente porque ninguno de los dos tiene futuro: Aduma por negro y Rodrigo por ser el hijo discapacitado de Güiraldes. Cuando Güiraldes viola a la hermana mayor de Aduma—Eloísa—y la deja embarazada, la mata para encubrir su pecado. Pero una década después cuando para su sorpresa, Rodrigo vuelve de Buenos Aires con una esposa embarazada del “heredero digno” que siempre quiso, un encuentro fantasmal con Eloísa convierte a Güiraldes en una víctima más de su propia lógica e invita al espectador a reflexionar sobre lo que ha quedado de esta lógica en el siglo XXI.

Ghosts represent a certain duality—an absent presence, a splitting of spirit and body—and are often deployed in narrative to represent some kind of rupture in time stemming from an original injustice. The most classic example is used by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx to discuss the case of Hamlet, who is haunted by his father’s ghost when it demands vengeance for his murder. Although these types of simple hauntings come to an end once the desired action has been completed, more complicated varieties do not have such a clear-cut path to resolution. The ongoing hauntings of everyday life often require an internal struggle—a peacemaking process within individuals—in order to purge the absent presence of its troubling qualities. While to be clear, there are no actual ghosts in Margarita Cota Cárdenas’s Sanctuaries of the Heart (2005), there is a plethora of ghostly dualities that haunt the narrative voice, lurking between absence and presence, mind and body, narrative and lived experience. The present study proposes an examination of the narrative strategies used by Cota-Cárdenas in order to negotiate with life’s contradictory dualities, up to and including the false dichotomy between life and death.
While defining the uncanny, Freud proposed that, contrary to Western logic, death is very much a part of life. Unable to accept this complementary relationship between what are supposed to be polar opposites, the Western psyche represses human mortality, and where there is repression, there is haunting. In Strangers to Ourselves (1991), Julia Kristeva proposes that we create a “foreign” space within ourselves: a process that results in an internal duality. In The Uncanny (2003), Nicholas Royle affirms that ghosts and other haunting projections of the repressed emerge as a result of this duality. While Sanctuaries of the Heart can easily be described as a cleaning out of skeletons from a collective Mexican-American closet, the study at hand explores the multi-layered spectral dimensions of Cota-Cárdenas’ lesser-known novel in order to analyze her narrative strategies for reconciling injustices and making peace with ghosts.

Sobre Subero, Gustavo. Queer Masculinities in Latin American Cinema: Male Bodies and Narrative Representations . London: I.B. Taurus, 2014, 241 pp., ISBN: 9781780763200 Resumen: resena sobre el libro de  Subero, Gustavo.  Queer Masculinities in Latin American Cinema: Male Bodies and Narrative Representations . London: I.B. Taurus, 2014, 241 pp., ISBN: 9781780763200 Palabras clave: resena,   Subero, Gustavo,  Queer Masculinities in Latin American Cinema: Male Bodies and Narrative Representations

Set in present-day Buenos Aires, the film Sudor frío (2010, dir. Adrián García Bogliano) features two former agents of the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional who continue to imprison zombified abductees from the Dirty War of the 1970s and 1980s in their decrepit house of horrors, where they also capture and torture newer generations of Argentine youth who are discon- nected from the historical violence of the dictatorship and are supposedly disenchanted with politics in general. Stunted in their normative develop- ment as young citizens toward traditional benchmarks like employment, home ownership, and procreation, their suspension in time can be read as zombiesque, allowing for the blurring of differences between generations. The distinct ways in which they have become frozen in time hold the po- tential to engender a kind of temporal critique that calls into question not only the national progress that has been made since the return to democracy, but also the prescriptive timeline that defines individual progress according to the logic of the neoliberal economy left intact since the last dictatorship.

Sometimes criticized for the film’s emphasis on delay and ‘dead time’, the present analysis suggests a reading of the seemingly stagnant plot-line of Mariana Rondón’s Pelo malo/Bad Hair (2013) as an effective rhetorical strategy for interpellating viewers into the ‘sideways’ time of queer childhood – a theoretical framework established by Kathryn Bond Stockton – to explore the intersectional processes at work in the subject formation of Junior, the film’s 9-year-old Afro-Venezuelan protagonist. In contrast to most contemporary Latin American films with child protagonists that serve as embodiments of history, Rondón refuses viewers this temporal distance to depict a child undergoing ghostly erasure by the patriarchal mechanisms that dictate the terms of a nation’s history and citizenship.

Patricia Riggen’s popular film La misma luna has been praised as a heartwarming film that humanizes undocumented immigrants for Ameri- can audiences and, for Mexican audiences, deviates from typical immigra- tion narratives by focusing on women and children as immigrants rather than men. Despite this seemingly progressive intentionality, I argue that Riggen’s film is exceedingly conservative in its portrayal of mexicanidad as not only inescapably patriarchal, but “naturally” so. Mexico’s ruling class has a vested interest in reaffirming mexicanidad as biological, and therefore, politically incontestable. By selling mexicanidad in a transna- tional context as a racial essence under constant threat by Anglo-American hegemony, hegemonic institutions within Mexico create the illusion of national and ethnic unity, thus erasing any and all internal racism and classism. In La misma luna, the characters’ race and gender performances work in tandem to naturalize prescribed notions of national identity and reaffirm the bourgeois and politically-limiting mandate to be a “good” Mexican by being a “good” (wo)man, equating the imperative to remain true to one’s nationality to the allegedly unproblematic imperative to re- main true to one’s biology. Additionally, membership into mexicanidad is reinscribed as contingent upon neoliberal practices of consumerism, up to and including viewing the film itself.

Director José Mojica Marins is both the mastermind and actor behind Zé do Caixão, an icon within Brazilian popular culture and an international cult sensation. Marins encountered numerous conflicts with Brazil’s military dictatorship, and after producing the first two films of an intended trilogy, At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964) and This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse (1967), the third film, Embodiment of Evil, was not made until 2008. Throughout this trilogy, Zé do Caixão kidnaps, tortures, and murders scores of victims, effectively mimicking the human rights abuses that occurred under the dictatorship. He advocates liberation from the oppression of traditional morality while reinscribing its rhetorical raison d’être: purpose through procreation. The popular appeal of these films, their political intentionality, and their production during and after the dictatorship allow for an analysis of the rhetorical strategies employed by Marins in his attempt to both shock audiences and instill in them a counterhegemonic consciousness. Despite the radical agenda at work in Marins’s films, I will argue that this trilogy is conservative in its rhetorical framework, serving as an example of Lee Edelman’s reproductive futurism, wherein political legitimacy is contingent upon procreation.

Aparecidos (2007) is a Spanish-Argentine coproduction directed by Paco Cabezas and marketed as a horror film “based on real events”—on the national trauma of Argentina’s dirty war. The film’s supernatural diegesis consists of the literalization of two ghostly principles: history as a discourse with the dead and trauma as a specter that haunts the survivor(s) in repetitive fashion. This study examines how this rhetorical strategy complicates and ultimately deconstructs the notion of objective chronology: an institution whose discourse claims to provide a coherent master narrative for human existence.

En este análisis de dos textos del argentino Manuel Mujica Láinez—Misteriosa Buenos Aires (1950) y El retrato amarillo (1956)—se enfoca en el vacío entre la infinita fluidez de la conciencia narrativa y la concreta materialidad del cuerpo que pretende delimitar y definir al sujeto social. Al hacer hincapié en este vacío, el autor desmitifica la coherencia de la narrativa social que arbitra la normativa formación del sujeto social. En estas novelas, ambos protagonistas son adolescentes que se encuentran atrapados entre lo real de su deseo homoerótico y la gramaticalidad simbólica que prohíbe la textualización de aquello. Lo inestable e inexplicable del deseo sexual humano expone algunas de las fisuras que son inherentes en el discurso (hetero)normativo que a la vez le construye y le exige una identidad a cada individuo: una identidad que supuestamente se justifica y se arraiga “naturalmente” en la materialidad y la individualidad del cuerpo humano. En el caso de ambos protagonistas, ocurre cierto desdoblamiento del sujeto ante esta contradicción: un caso se manifiesta en términos clínicos (la esquizofrenia) y el otro en términos narrativos. El deseo sexual se contrapone al deseo político de describir al sujeto social (Althusser) de manera concisa y coherente. De esta manera, el autor señala tanto la arbitrariedad del orden social como la falsa inteligibilidad de la narrativa a través de la cual se construye.

En 2007, el público mexicano asistió en cifras récord al cine para ver una versión modernizada y urbanizada del mito de la Llorona. En Kilómetro 31, Rigoberto Castañeda—el escritor y director de la película—juega con este espacio fluido en el que se confunden lo vivo y lo muerto, representándolo mediante el agua para producir un efecto estremecedor y desestabilizador. Tal como lo ha notado Julia Kristeva, lo fluido—con toda su inestabilidad y apertura—se asocia con lo femenino y por lo tanto contribuye a la mi(s)tificación de la mujer (tema abarcado por Simone de Beauvoir). En este estudio, nos enfocaremos en el uso cinematográfico del agua en Kilómetro 31 y en el vínculo que crea entre lo inquietante/inexplicable y lo femenino/(intra)uterino para reinscribir la mi(s)tificación de la mujer, colocándola de manera ritualista en el dominio de lo sobrenatural, simultáneamente reinscribiendo el dominio de lo lógico/explicable/concreto como territorio masculino y hasta absolviendo al hombre de su reacción violenta contra la amenaza “femenina” al orden social.

This book examines the interactions between ghosts and families in three recent horror films from the Spanish-speaking world that, rather than explicitly referencing recent political violence, speak to the societal conditions and everyday normative violence that serve as preconditions for political violence. This study deconstructs intersectional processes of racially and sexually normative subject formation—and its oppositional other, ghostly erasure—that are framed by a common temporal logic, wherein full citizenship is contingent upon a nation's dominant notions of contemporaneousness and whether individuals properly inhabit prescriptive timelines of (re)productivity.

St-Georges’s study explores ways in which ghosts and families are manipulated in each national imaginary as a strategy for negotiating volatility within symbolic order: a tactic that can either naturalize or challenge normative discourses. As a literary and cinematic trope, ghosts are particularly useful vehicles for the exploration of national imaginaries and the dominant or competing cultural attitudes towards a country's history, and thus, the articulation of a present political reality. The rhetorical figure of the family is also key in this process as a mechanism for expressing national allegories, for expressing generational anxieties about a nation's relationship to time, and for organizing societies and social subjects as such, interpellating them into or excluding them from national imaginaries. By proposing these specific coordinates—ghosts and families—and by mapping their relationship between Spain and Latin America, Troubling Timelines proposes a study of a temporal framework that, besides bridging the traditional area-studies divide across the Atlantic, creates a space for interdisciplinary inquiry while also responding to increasing demand for studies that focus on intersectionality.