| This dissertation explores the discourse of Transition from dictatorship to democracy and analyzes the changing relationship between art and politics during and after the authoritarian regime of Augusto Pinochet, which both violently debilitated political opposition and reorganized society into a much touted (and much criticized) neoliberal economic model. Focusing on the work of writer-artists Diamela Eltit and Cecilia Vicuna, who engage issues of social marginalization on a variety of interconnected fronts (gender, race, ethnicity and class) and in various genres (novels, poetry, performance, visual arts, and works that blur these distinctions), I consider the intersections between postmodernist theories about the political possibilities of art in the age of multinational capitalism. These issues are inseparable in the Chilean context from discussions of the role of cultural production for postdictatorship mourning and memory, yet whereas Eltit's texts take the form of a critique of neoliberalism from the perspective of those who are necessarily dehumanized for the good of the market, Vicuna locates the founding violence of contemporary society with older forms of marginalization rooted in colonial history. I argue that the complex engagement with issues of cultural memory in these texts works not only to remember the traumas of dictatorship, but also to expose the reconfigurations of power enacted by the regime and unchecked by succeeding civilian governments. The kinds of self-reflexive artistic practices engaged seek not only to critique dominant discourses from the margins of society, but also to question the very limits of such a gesture and to posit the aesthetic as a space in which a collective politics can only be conceived as a process of constant negotiation through otherness and difference. My dissertation thus begins to articulate the ways in which postvanguard aesthetic production, forged as a means of resisting dictatorship, persists throughout the Transition---both in Chile and in the exile-created diaspora---and constitutes a space for rethinking the postmodern dilemmas of neoliberal democracies. |
