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ETD_3913

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Candice Amich

My dissertation contends that poets and performance artists of the Americas have been at the forefront of exploring the psychic and bodily effects of neoliberal globalization. More than just a set of market-driven policies aimed at privatization and deregulation, neoliberalism is a perceptual regime. Invoking globalization experts such as David Harvey, I argue that neoliberal globalization has produced profound changes in the way we experience time and space, and that these changes require new aesthetic forms. In countering the erasure of cultural memory, disruption of local environments, and omnipresent spectacle of commodity fetishism that characterize neoliberalism as a spatiotemporal regime, the poets and performance artists I study—Dionne Brand, Ricardo Dominguez, Coco Fusco, Ana Mendieta, Nancy Morejón, Adrienne Rich, Ed Roberson, Cecilia Vicuña, and Raúl Zurita—engage this transformation of the sensible. Historically framed by two September 11th tragedies, my dissertation opens with the US-backed 1973 coup in Chile—that brutally implemented a neoliberal mode of governing—and closes with the 2001 World Trade Center attacks. The works that constitute my archive explore exile, displacement, alienation and cultural amnesia in order to reenact and revise earlier hemispheric moments of colonization and expropriation. While recalling legacies of slavery, indigenous genocide, and imperialism, the poems and performances I analyze also suggest different futures; at the heart of these formal experiments is a desire for new modes of social being that find their expression in textual and corporeal performances. While the novel remains the privileged genre of literary globalization studies, my project maps the complex ways in which poetry and performance, through multi-sensory techniques and tropes of touch, explore globalization as an embodied experience. As such, a major goal of my project is to traverse the gap between the abstractions of globalization discourse and the localized particulars of corporeal and textual performance. The unique temporal register this critical poetics achieves—in its accessing of repressed histories and geographies to pose new political futures—is what I refer to as ‘future memory.’

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.1/rucore10001600001.ETD.000065074

doi:10.7282/T3KW5F12

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