UC Berkeley

This dissertation unveils a decolonial textual genealogy in which Baroque aesthetics merges with Quechuan thought and practice. I argue that this bifocal lens allows us to see a constellation of Andean authors that have recodified Baroque aesthetics during moments of historical crisis in order to critique colonial-capitalist modernization and reshape modernity’s emancipatory potential. In chapters on presumably “non-Baroque” works like Simón Rodríguez’s Sociedades americanas (1828-1848) and César Vallejo’s Trilce (1922), I demonstrate how the Quechua-syncretic legacy of the New World Baroque (the recreation of Indigenous myths like the Pishtaco or the Condenado) converge with the literary assimilation of the technological wonders (the Panorama in Rodríguez, the radio in Vallejo) to underline Amerindian epistemologies’ role in the modernizing process in Latin America. I re-insert these texts as the missing links of a chain that connects the colonial period (Fray Calixto Túpac Inca’s Representación verdadera [1749]) and the neoliberal era (Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s novel La Virgen Cabeza [2009]). Taking up these works, my dissertation examines how the interaction between Baroque colonial-syncretic imagery and Peninsular Baroque tradition—Góngora’s Soledades or Velázquez’s Las meninas—unfolds a decolonial critique that disrupts the Eurocentric modern project and points towards alternative, or dissonant, modernities.Besides the introduction and the epilogue, this dissertation consists of four chapters. Chapter 1 examines the colonial reformulation of the Baroque play between appearance and reality in Representación verdadera (1749), an indigenous memorial to the Quechuan thinker Fray Calixto Túpac Inca. I argue that Fray Calixto deploys a Baroque decolonial critique that illuminates the shadows of the Enlightenment project and radicalizes the emancipatory potential of modernity. Chapter 2 focuses on the crucial role of the Baroque allegory of the ruin in Sociedades americanas (1828-1848) by Venezuelan philosopher Simón Rodríguez during the post-independence political crisis in the Andes. In this chapter, I show that, by linking the allegory with the textual assimilation of the visual logic of the Panorama and the Andean popular discourse (i.e., the myth of the Pishtaco), Rodríguez disfigures the illusions of the Criollo republican project. Chapter 3 analyzes the avant-garde collection of poems Trilce (1922) by César Vallejo. I contend that Trilce’s dialogue with the legacy of the New World Baroque underlines the modernizing role of Indigenous subjects (codified in the indigenista debate as “presences of the past”) in the literary and sociocultural fields. This gesture creates a dissonance in avant-garde poetics that privilege the literary assimilation of technology as a sign of “the new” and also criticizes the Andean neocolonial modernization in the 1920s. Chapter 4 focuses on La Virgen Cabeza (2009), a Neobaroque novel by Argentine writer Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, where Cleo (a transgender woman and medium of the Virgin Mary) leads the transformation of a shantytown into a self-sustaining community. I propose that the articulation between the Andean immigrant culture and the Baroque rhetoric in the text interrupts the Argentine Europeanizing national narrative and explores alternative modes of transnational integration to global capitalism. This dissertation thus makes significant contributions to Latin American Studies. It highlights Baroque aesthetics’ role in one of 19th century’s most radical thinkers—Rodríguez—filling an important void in Latin American Baroque Studies. In addition, with a central focus on Vallejo, my dissertation redefines the notion of “Neobaroque poetry” in the 1920s vanguardias. Finally, my doctoral thesis correctively stretches past the longstanding limitations of Area Studies by discussing Argentina’s literary tradition, typically linked to the “Southern Cone,” via its Andean-Baroque roots. I do this by connecting La Virgen Cabeza’s “Neobarroso” with Indigenous practices.