Autonomy and Post-Autonomy

• In Event: Aesthetic Form and the Limits of “Nuestra América”

Abstract

This paper examines the political and theoretical challenges involved in a series of recent projects—e.g., posthegemony, post-autonomy, anti-literature—that promise to rethink the relationship between aesthetic form and politics in Latin American literature and visual art. By situating these projects within a longer history of Latin Americanist literary criticism that includes the writings of Roberto Fernández Retamar and Ángel Rama from the 1970s and 1980s as well by Alfred Coester and Luis Alberto Sánchez from the 1910s and 1930s, the paper will explore the extent to which they reformulate key claims and assumptions embedded in the literary-critical tradition from which they are thought to have departed. Ultimately, however, what is at stake in how posthegemony, post-autonomy, or anti-literature conceptualize aesthetic form and its relationship to politics is more than the question of newness or innovation. Rather, it is that such projects advance an understanding of aesthetic form that is not only complicit with the logic of the market but also unable to fully explain the political work of aesthetic form in recent Latin American literature and visual art.

Author

• Charles Hatfield, University of Texas at Dallas