UC Berkeley

This dissertation, “Forma, lo performativo, acción poética: Poetic Art’s Critiques of—and Alternatives to—an Americas of Conquest,” takes a comparative approach to the long history of poetic-artistic form in the Americas, together with an analysis rooted in traditions of Frankfurt-School critical aesthetics, in order to propose an alternative genealogy for the emergence of various modern experimentalisms. From the vantage point of the current fiftieth anniversary of the 1970 Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War (though not limited to that moment alone), “Forma, lo performativo, acción poética” examines a broad range of texts from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries to investigate the development of divergent yet still fundamentally related poetic experimentalisms across the Americas. Whereas existing models of trans-American comparative criticism often foreground essentialist notions of experience and identity to produce the historical “grounds” for comparison, my work builds upon Left-Kantian- and Frankfurt School-based notions of critical aesthetics to explore the performative and thus sociopolitical aspects of artistic form itself. Underscoring the primacy of form as critically reflective aesthetic illusion-experience, I unveil the ways that poets and artists have registered and sought to imaginatively contest the realities of colonial capitalism since the advent of European colonialism in the Western Hemisphere. I thereby begin to argue that there exists a still unrecognized history of poetic-artistic form itself operating as anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-heterosexist critique of oppressive systems of thought and action in what I deem an “Americas of Conquest.”“Forma, lo performativo, acción poética” sets forth the preliminary mapping of the story of poetic art’s formal and substantive contestations of power in the Americas. I look at genre, tropes, and formal conventions that bring poetry to the doorsteps of politics. It begins by examining how enslaved African-American poet Phillis Wheatley and Colonial Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz each made use of the dream-vision genre’s narrative framing device to register critiques of the racist and heterosexist ideologies shaping their worlds. From that Colonial-period prelude I move to examine the experiments of nineteenth- through twenty first-century poets and artists to initiate discussion of the politicized and nominally depoliticized modes of artistic rebellion their work employs. My aim, in doing so, is to underscore that the story this dissertation only begins to tell involves a nineteenth- through twenty-first century narrative, one that senses within it prior histories of poetic form as critique in ways that go as far back as the colonial encounter itself. I thereby proceed to reconsider, for example, the art experiments of the Civil Rights-era Chicanx art collective Asco (Spanish for “disgust”) and the 1970s, Pinochet dictatorship-era Chilean art collective Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA). Thereafter, I look to the forms of acción poética that contemporary poet-artists experiment with, specifically in the work of figures like Emmy Pérez, Rafa Esparza, and Harry Gamboa Jr. While the historical framework of this dissertation might seem arbitrarily overextended, it nonetheless constitutes a necessary experiment that allows me to examine the ways in which poetic form, through its own historical unfolding in the Americas (starting with figures like Sor Juana and Wheatley), begins to register and critique the systems of thought and action that enable and sustain colonization, socioeconomic exploitation, and political oppression in the Americas. “Forma, lo performativo, acción poética” seeks to enhance debates on Chicanx/Latinx literature and culture as well as on global modernism. By foregrounding the work of Chicanx/Latinx poets and artists while situating their work within a global context, this dissertation underscores the contributions Latinxs have made to modern trans-American literary culture while at the same time embracing, contesting, or entering in dialogue with Eurocentric histories of modernism. Finally, this dissertation highlights the impact of literary and artistic cultures on social transformation processes, contending that avant-garde poets and artists from the geo-social peripheries have cultivated some of the most radical and egalitarian artistic visions of the future.