A Pacific Coast Ontology of Intensity and Process in the Writings of Alfredo Vanín-Romero, Antonio Preciado-Bedoya, and Gregorio Martínez
Through an engagement with Deleuze and Guattari’s relational ontology of intensity and process, this thesis performs a reading of selected Pacific Coast texts from Colombia, Jornadas del tahúr (2005) by Alfredo Vanín-Romero; Ecuador, De sol a sol (1992) and other poems by Antonio Preciado-Bedoya; and Peru, Crónica de musicos y diablos (1991) by Gregorio Martínez-Navarro. Concerned with the territorialization of race and the experience of material and subjective enslavement in the Pacific Coast of South America, I explore how each author links these subjective and material conditions with the outcome of the connection (intensity) and disconnection (process) of desire machines that make possible the subject’s experience of the real. By relying on the relational forced of desire, as a key ontological relational force in writings by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the chapters explore molecular and molar dimensions of becoming able to bridge European and Pacific Coast understandings of the basis of a free subjective development. Thus, the starting point of the understanding of freedom and enslavement in this thesis is that on the Pacific Coast of South America depicted by Vanín-Romero, Preciado-Bedoya, and Martínez-Navarro, “Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections” (AO 8). Taking into account desire’s machine-like interconnectedness, which also involves the connection with intensive flows from “sonorous, optical, or linguistic ‘effects’” (LS 7) in the context of cultural existence, this thesis explores individual and social instances of stratification and destratification (labor and leisure). Out of the bodily intensities that persist in language, as a cultural manifestation, the Pacific Coast authors portray the construction of metaphysical and linguistic surfaces through which they can visualize the emergence of a subject of freedom and an interconnected understanding of the history of slavery.
Afro-Pacific Literature, Ontology, Intensity, Process, Freedom, Enslavement
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