Espectros de parentesco Crisis de pertenencia en la literatura y el cine argentino contemporáneo (2001 – 2020)

Abstract

What are art’s affordances after a crisis? How does art process its relation to the nation-state after its near dissolution? In my dissertation, I grapple with these questions by exploring literary and cinematographic works that reflect on the withering of the nation as a locus for identity. In my work, Argentina’s 2001 socioeconomic meltdown is a catalyst for an ongoing crisis of signification that writers and filmmakers interrogate by tracing the contours of what I call “specters of kinship.” I conceptualize specters of kinship as the cultural deployment of family narratives that explore the intersections of political crisis and history through haunted figures —ruins, archives, repertoires, and cartographies. While scholarship on the 2001 crisis focuses on presentist forms of epistemological resistance, my work produces a new understanding of this period. My dissertation shows how a constellation of cultural objects opens a temporality after the crisis of the nation where its material and symbolic remains –bourgeois industrial ruins, formerly stable cultural belonging, and national monolingualism– are at once dislocated and reimagined in terms akin to what Freud called “family romance.” Thus, my research turns the crisis into a productive site by reading in these narratives an affective politics of mourning in overlapping senses of belonging. I begin my manuscript by reading Andrés Di Tella’s documentaries through the category of patrimonial ruins in order to analyze the nostalgic drive behind his rendition of the declining Argentine industrial bourgeoisie. Then, I examine how public and private archives intersect with family narratives of migration and dislocate monolithic notions of ethnic and cultural identity in Edgardo Cozarinsky’s cinematic and literary work. Lastly, in chapter three, I analyze the links between family, motherhood and language in the late literary work of Sylvia Molloy. Specifically, I interrogate how a repertoire of multilingual practices dislocates institutionalized monolingualism.