Time Ripens on the Counter: A Literary History of the Americas

Author

Judah Rubin, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkFollow

Date of Degree

6-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

English

Advisor

Ammiel Alcalay

Committee Members

Peter Hitchcock

Sonali Perera

Subject Categories

Latin American Literature | Literature in English, North America

Keywords

1970s, 1980s, Intellectual Commitment, Poetics, Solidarity Aesthetics, Literary History

Abstract

The tumultuous years of the 1970s and 1980s are generally seen as marking the ends of the New Left in the United States and the Americas at large. With shifts afoot in US policy that would see the drawdown and close of the Vietnam War, increased subversion and infiltration of Left-wing movements, these decades are often remembered as a holding pattern and, later, nadir in progressive, not to mention revolutionary, gains. The same was true, if not amplified, across the Americas where, tens of thousands were murdered, imprisoned and disappeared across the Southern Cone and into the Andes, and where guerilla movements, with the exception of groups like the FARC in Colombia and the Shining Path in Peru, largely gave up armed struggle, or, as in the case of the Shining Path, amplified the bloodletting at the expense of mass organization and struggle. Still, revolutionary struggle in Nicaragua yielded the Sandinista overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship. In Central America, however, US-funded regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador, and the resources poured into the Contra War against the Sandinistas would turn back gains made. Internal political decisions in Nicaragua and infighting among groups in El Salvador would similarly contribute to Left-wing movements being all but destroyed by the early 1990s. Yet within this shrinking field of possibility, solidarity aesthetics held on, though often under different, and more agonistic, critical banners. Time Ripens on the Counter attempts to trace literary, filmic, and artistic currents as they circulated in the Americas, whether in calls for support, in translation, in affiliation, or in disidentification. Working to reconstruct key texts and moments of these years, this dissertation maps the intersections of key figures, ideas, and movements, while recognizing the prismatic isomorphy at the heart of reading the Americas, whether south to north, or north to south. In the chapters that follow, I argue that in the years following the revolutionary fervor generally given the shorthand “the 60s” across the Americas artists and activists frequently navigated the changed and changing political and artistic environment they found themselves in with recourse to strategies of approximation and translation.

Following on this introduction, Chapter 2, I Don’t Even Have My Scar on Fellas, I look at the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces in Peru, analyzing American countercultural icon and filmmaker Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie (1971) and Peruvian filmmaker Carlos Ferrand’s work with the collective Liberación Sin Rodeos. Both Ferrand and Hopper benefitted, in markedly different ways, from the RGAF’s cultural policies, and I look at these films a means of reading the Peruvian 1970s. At the close of the chapter, I shift my focus to Ferrand’s work on the film Cimarrones (Maroons), which he collaborated on with poet Enrique Verástegui. The film had to be completed in exile as the initial reformism of the RGAF shifted into outright repression by the close of the decade, and I examine its politics and Verástegui’s poetic historiography in his book Taki Onqoy, written during this period. In Chapter 3, Nos-Otros, I shift to looking at US-based poet Hannah Weiner, and Argentine poet Arturo Carrera, reading their work in relation to Deleuze and Guattari, set against the backdrop of the history of early post-structuralism and minimalist music in the US, and the adoption of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the rise of the right-wing junta that governed Argentina between 1976-1983. In Chapter 4, the context out of which Cuban poet and critic Roberto Fernández Retamar’s famed essay “Caliban: Notes Toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America” emerged is reconstructed, while I read it into New Narrative writer Bruce Boone’s novel Century of Clouds (1981) and the Marxist Literary Group’s Summer Institute out of which that book emerged, and Sylvia Wynter’s writing of the late-1970s. By understanding how Retamar’s essay was deployed by these and other writers, I narrate the changing face of Cuba as it Sovietized in the 1970s. In Chapter 5, poet Raúl Zurita and novelist Diamela Eltit, as well as CADA, the collective they belonged to in the 1970-80s, are seen to subvert ideas of authority and authorization in Pinochet’s Chile, in their works “La Vida Nueva” and El Padre Mío. By Chapter 6, we return to questions of solidarity and revolutionary struggle, as I consider Chicano writer Alejandro Murguía’s autofiction Southern Front and his more recent memoirs of his time with the Sandinistas, as well as the work of poet Margaret Randall during her time in Nicaragua, and that of American artists involved in the Artists Call for Solidarity with Central America, including video artist Martha Rosler’s work deconstructing media narratives around Reagan’s Central America policies and covert wars. In the final chapter of the dissertation, Chapter 7, I look at ideas of “post-memory”, erasure, and conceptually oriented writing practices of three contemporary poets, Carlos Soto-Román, Hugo García Manríquez, and Mónica de la Torre. In each of these chapters I attempt to read the sprawling milieu that produced these poetics, while using this reconstruction to argue that the collapse frequently attributed to these years was asymptotic and that the continued work by these artists kept alive a sense of commitment, camaraderie, and conversation even under the immense duress of political and social upheaval and existential threat.

Recommended Citation

Rubin, Judah, "Time Ripens on the Counter: A Literary History of the Americas" (2024). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5836