Political address and performative enactment: Lemebel’s “Manifiesto: Hablo por mi diferencia"

• In Event: Latin American Marxisms

Abstract

This presentation considers Chilean artist Pedro Lemebel’s intervention at a democratic demonstration in 1986. Lemebel’s “Manifiesto” confronts the Communist party’s failures while pleading for a share in socialist utopia. Lemebel exposes the party’s privileged historical agent, the proletariat, to the transformations wrought upon Chilean society under General Pinochet’s regime, which had dealt it debilitating blows. I suggest that Lemebel exposes such agency, in effect, with a materiality from which it has increasingly been cast adrift, a materiality inspired by Lemebel’s milieu of pobladores, locas and feminists. Grappling with Lemebel’s subversion of the language of hombría, I present a tentative reading of the “Manifiesto” as a claim to historical agency, one which neither refrains to identity politics nor abandons utopia. My presentation builds on the book chapter’s focus on a political avant-garde by mapping a specific constellation of literary and performative avant-gardes similarly adrift between pedagogy and performance.

Author

• Gwendolen Pare, University of California Irvine