Beyond Incarceration: Prison Literature and Political Subjectivation in Cold War Latin America.

Abstract

My dissertation, Beyond Incarceration: Prison Literature and Political Subjectivation in Cold War Latin America, analyzes prison literature written about political prisoners’ experience during the military dictatorships in Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay in the second half of the 20th century. I investigate how the political function of prisons was reshaped within the repressive strategies of Latin American states, by concentrating on specific moments in which prison breaks sparked public debate that altered the social perception of the political. Drawing on the historical, sociological, and political archives and debates of the times, I read Roa Bastos’ Hijo de Hombre, Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña, Augusto Boal’s Torquemada, and José Charlo and Aldo Garay’s film El círculo to unravel the underlying tissues of silences, erasures and oblivion, i.e. the political unconscious that shaped leftist subjectivities from within prison walls. My research intervenes in the cultural studies inquiry about Cold War conditions in Latin America: Since the end of the Southern Cone dictatorships, debates about cultural history in the area have been dominated by very valuable work dealing with the ‘politics of memory’. These post-dictatorship debates have centered on human rights but also on bearing witness to state violence and trauma via literature, testimonio, and film in subsequent years. While this has been very important work, it has tended to leave some questions from that period unaddressed. My research returns to the dictatorships during the Cold War in order to rethink the process of political subjectivation as it evolved in the “revolutionary” groups of the Left. Prisons are the unique theater for my inquiry. By intertwining historical events, prisoners’ testimonies, and prison literature, I examine anew the constitution of subjectivity that was being re-evaluated within prison as it came to impact broader social debates. My findings indicate that rather than bringing political activity to an end, the massive incarceration of militants actually converted the prison into a new site for political formation. Unpredictable folds in subjectivation developed leading to more intensified unity as well as more vigorous political critiques of the very movements to which the prisoners belonged.