Escribir sobre la ruina. Operaciones políticas de la poesía mexicana contemporánea 1985-2015
During the last thirty years, Mexico has experienced a profound transformation. With the beginning of the 1980’s, neoliberalism started to take shape in the country through economic, social and political policies that, in the view of those in power, would propel the Mexican economy into the twenty-first century. The promise of economic success and of modernization came with severe consequences: in these thirty years, neoliberalism has aggravated social inequalities and endangered the democratic will that is the foundation of society. How can literary discourse configure and respond to this threat? How can it become, in its most successful moments, a reconciliatory but critical political discourse? These are the main questions I attempt to answer in this dissertation. Considering the historical and political context that produce them, the primary purpose of this dissertation is to examine the different aesthetic and thematic strategies with which this corpus of works can configure a discourse of resistance against neoliberalism’s disarticulation of the political subject. I call these strategies “political operations”. Tracing a historical account of a series of moments of high political relevance, I examine how poetic discourses and a few fiction narratives escape the binding power of hegemonic neoliberal rationalities. Chapter 1 examines the emergence of a new kind of political organization, namely a commune, as a sign of an extraordinary sense of social solidarity after the earthquakes of 1985 in central Mexico. I analyze “Las ruinas de México” by José Emilio Pacheco as a poetic discourse that articulates that emergence. Chapter 2 focuses on the unspoken and contemporary disaster of the AIDS pandemic during the eighties by reading Poesida by Abigael Bohórquez as poetic testimony of the deaths of members of the gay community. Following a historical intermezzo explaining the political transition to democracy from the mid 90’s to the mid 2000’s in Mexico, Chapter 3 discusses the poetic reaction of Jorge Humberto Chavez’s work to the surge of violence during Felipe Calderón’s presidency. Chapter 4 explores the way narratives can elude the pull of the narconarrative by analizing the cinematic universe of Alex Rivera. Chapter 5 discusses the global implications of neoliberalism beyond national borders by reading comparatively two works of ecopoetics by Mexican poet Coral Bracho and the work in English by Juliana Spahr.
Mexican literature, Mexican, Poetry, Mexican Poetry, Politics, History, Neoliberalism, Ecocritics, Disaster
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