Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production

Dissident Acts

by Leticia Alvarado

In Abject Performances  Leticia Alvarado draws out the irreverent, disruptive aesthetic strategies used by Latino artists and cultural producers who shun standards of respectability that are typically used to conjure concrete minority identities. In place of works imbued with pride, redemption, or celebration, artists such as Ana Mendieta, Nao Bustamante, and the Chicano art collective known as Asco employ negative affects—shame, disgust, and unbelonging—to capture experiences that lie at the edge of the mainstream, inspirational Latino-centered social justice struggles. Drawing from a diverse expressive archive that ranges from performance art to performative testimonies of personal faith-based subjection, Alvarado illuminates modes of community formation and social critique defined by a refusal of identitarian coherence that nonetheless coalesce into Latino affiliation and possibility.

232 pages, Paperback

Published May 4, 2018

Reviews

[Nic · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall a successful application of Kristeva’s theory of abjection to a variety of contemporary Latinx “performances,” especially Ana Mendieta, the Chicano Asco art collective, Nao Bustamante, and those Latinx Mormons who identify with the abjected Lamanites from the Book of Mormon. While I didn’t walk away from the text with a better understanding of the concept of abjection, Alvarado’s application of it to various case studies helped to reframe her subjects in neat ways. I didn’t think that her use of Kant’s theories of the beautiful and the sublime were necessary to make her argument, and they appear throughout a few of the chapters as sort of reminders of some points she made in the introduction rather than as necessary points of entry to the respective Latinx performances of abjection.

[el · Rating 3 out of 5]

"It is precisely in its [the sublime's] designation of the limits of the imaginable where I find promising misfires in the apparatus of the aesthetic." (14)

"I strain to listen to and am pulled into the vortex by rumors and whispers, the chisme that rises like a plume where the materiality of the archive unravels." (61)

"The piece serves as a critique of the inactivity and resulting political ineffectuality of the mural form despite the permanent presence of murals on urban walls. The processional functions as a reclamation of social space in the face of police surveillance on the streets. It brings the exalted figures of mural symbology down off the wall and into the muck of the street, but not before updating their look to speak to contemporary urban experience." (83)

"Instead, through the cultural producers of this book, whom I follow in abjection, I hope to have gestured at an affective terrain capable of reorienting our quotidian commitments, toward willful otherness, displaced phantoms, queer failure, and apostasy that guide us away from currently imagined politicized subjectivities to those we don't fully know but around which we might build across communities toward a dismantling of the present." (166)

[Mills College Library]

302.23089 A472 2018