Regal Mystery: Counterculture and Caicedo's Corpse.
Gomez, Felipe
2004
Abstract
A young scholar disappears while working on a dissertation which addresses the largely ignored body of work by Andres Caicedo, a Colombian fiction writer, playwright and film critic who committed suicide at age 25 in 1977 after being instrumental in the constitution and development of the countercultural interdisciplinary collective Grupo de Cali. Using the texts the scholar has left behind as traces, an old friend attempts to discover his whereabouts. Some of those texts reflect on Caicedo's only published novel to portray popular music as a transnational commodity, examining its fundamental role in the constitution of local countercultural youth communities in a Colombian city forcefully modernized throughout the 1970s. Furthermore, they point to the symbolic and material confrontations for identity taking place inside and between these communities, or against established ones, and seem to claim that what is really at stake behind the conflicts generated by listening practices and musical taste is the place of identity markers such as age, class, race and gender in the definition of an acceptable local and national culture vis-a-vis hegemonic establishments. Another section of his corpus studies the representation of horror and monstrosity in the Grupo's early writings and films through the lens of <italic>tropicalization</italic>. It is argued that recurrent ghoulish motifs in their work act as a double-edged transcultural technology which tropicalizes the canonic grammar of Gothic film and literature by adjusting it to a contemporary local reality at the same time as it transgressively rewrites local representations of monstrosity originated in widely diverse sources. A last set of texts assemble a thanatopsis of the writer from representations of suicide in Caicedo's works and elsewhere. These texts provide revealing connections among horror, history, popular culture, artistic creation/reception, and psychology, sustaining that the writer's crafted death constitutes an act of communication. Assuming a fundamental analogy between the endeavor of the literary critic and that of the detective, this dissertation adopts the form of the mystery novel, pursuing, upon the surface of discarded texts, traces which allow deciphering the enigma of the disappearance of a scholar interested in Caicedo's resolutely fulfilled promise to die young. It builds upon and contributes to the fields of Latin American literary, film, and cultural studies by exposing the dramatic struggle between a globalizing, canonical culture and the rooted expressions of a local counterculture, and the role art and death play in that exchange. By exploring the time between the writer's suicide and the scholar's vanishing, it also speaks of the fate undergone by Colombian culture and everyday life in the last quarter of the 20<super>th</super> century.Subjects
Colombia Novel Original Writing Regal Mystery: Counterculture And Caicedo's Corpse Spanish Text
Types
Thesis
Metadata
Show full item recordCollections
Remediation of Harmful Language
The University of Michigan Library aims to describe library materials in a way that respects the people and communities who create, use, and are represented in our collections. Report harmful or offensive language in catalog records, finding aids, or elsewhere in our collections anonymously through our metadata feedback form. More information at Remediation of Harmful Language.
Accessibility
If you are unable to use this file in its current format, please select the Contact Us link and we can modify it to make it more accessible to you.