La Dimension Inexacta: Two Case Studies on Poetry and the Politics of Cultureal Productino in Puerto Rico in the 1970s.

Abstract

This thesis stems from the intersection between two practices that influence the cultural trajectory in Puerto Rico, poetry and politics, with a focus on the work of two relatively unknown poets, José María Lima (1934) and Luis Antonio Rosario Quiles (1936), and how their work relates to discursive conflicts in the 1970s. I emphasize the subjectivity that emerges from their poetry, which questions the way in which different forms of violence influence cultural practices, psychologically and politically. I describe the significance of studying Puerto Rico as a proving ground for U.S. American neocolonial and anti-Communist policies and practices. Although the analysis is centered on Puerto Rico, the implications of the analysis extend beyond the Caribbean, and beyond the seventies, to the nature of the relationship between literature and politics throughout Latin America. From the fifties on, the Cold War became a rhetorical base that promoted deep changes in the way cultural practices are built. Within this context, literature was alternately appropriated and rejected in relation to political ideals, and it became a privileged place from which to rethink the nature of politics and community. I analyze the seventies as a moment where there was an economical and discursive breakdown in which politics understood as a transcendental structure began to be critically reconsidered. Within that breakdown a poetic practice was conceived that imagines a political subject who rejects the previous sacrificial stance of the militant subject and moves toward a radical state of vulnerability that imagines new ethical horizons.