Cultura, política y neoliberalismo : nuevas subjetividades y representación en Argentina y Centroamérica, 1990s-2000s

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary and comparative project that lies at the intersection of political economy and cultural production. Specifically, it explores the relationship between film and literature, and the consolidation and later crisis of neoliberalism as the dominant socio-economic system in Argentina and four countries of Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Costa Rica) during the 1990s and early 2000s. The dissertation argues that the turn to neoliberalism implies a concurrent change in cultural production characterized by a shift in subjectivity, representation, and the relationship between politics and aesthetics, resulting in a reformulation of the critical possibilities of cultural texts in a historical moment characterized by a crisis of leftist political projects. As commodities within the global market themselves, cultural texts are able to unveil the contradictions, inequalities and tensions within neoliberalism, resisting its dominant logic, but at the same time appropriating and reformulating it in a variety of ways. By neoliberalism the dissertation means three things. First, a philosophy and theory of political economy that proposes individual wellbeing and national progress to be best advanced by an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. Second, a set of specific policies such as privatization and the elimination of tariffs on the movement of capital and goods implemented by national governments and international organizations with concrete material effects. Third, the specific form of the late capitalist system that seeks to establish itself as the dominant global economic logic, but also as the basis for social relations in general. In a world still reeling from the economic crisis of 2007, an investigation of neoliberalism becomes an essential means to reevaluate the past, but also to establish a critical continuation with the present. Since economic relations are also social relations, and since there is no such thing as economic change without a concurrent change in culture, a cultural critique of neoliberalism presents us with new possibilities for human agency, and also allows us to be critical of those that still promise "freedom" under the guise of market liberation. The dissertation organizes its exploration of the relationship between neoliberalism and cultural production in Argentina and Central America through five specific "interventions", each one exploring a distinct, but interrelated, theme. The first chapter, written under the theme of "Money", focuses on Argentina, specifically on the repercussions of neoliberal policies tied to the 1991 Convertibility Law, which pegs the Argentine peso to the dollar and establishes a complete liberalization of financial transactions to and from the country. The chapter analyzes the novel Plata quemada (1997) by Ricardo Piglia and the film Nueve reinas (2000) by Fabián Bielinsky as veiled critiques of the neoliberal 1990s, revealing through a critical association with criminality the instability and inequality of a system that hides behind financial discourse, the actual reality of macroeconomic thievery. The second chapter focuses on postwar Central American fiction through the theme of "Disenchantment." It consists of a critical exploration of the short novel El asco (1997) by Honduran/Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya and the novel Managua, Salsa City (2000) by Nicaraguan/Guatemalan writer Franz Galich. The chapter challenges the characterization of these novels as pessimistic and cynical, arguing that they are in fact re-imagining the relation between politics and aesthetics in a new socioeconomic context. The third chapter, written under the theme of "Time," concentrates on two films of the so-called New Argentine Cinema : La mujer sin cabeza (2008) by Lucrecia Martel and Bolivia (2001) by Adri�n Caetano. Although in distinct ways, the chapter argues that both films develop a sense of time in direct opposition to the "accelerated time" commonly associated with global capitalism, thus challenging the imaginary of Argentina as urban, cosmopolitan and European through a temporal affective experience tied to those who are not integrated into the space-time of the global market. The fourth chapter, written in relation to the theme of "Violence", discusses the novel El material humano (2009) by Guatemalan writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa and the short story collection Mediod�a de frontera (2002) by Salvadoran writer Claudia Hern�ndez in the context of a sharp rise in violence experienced by both countries during recent years. The chapter argues that partly due to this violence, and to a loss of faith in the neoliberal project as a whole, both works challenge the allegory as the dominant form of literary representation, searching for new paradigms of literary depiction. The fifth and final chapter, written under the theme of "Affect", explores two contemporary Central American films : Agua Fr�a de mar (2010) by Costarican director Paz F�brega and Gasolina (2008) by Guatemalan director Julio Hern�ndez. The chapter argues that both films construct an ambiguous affective sensibility that captures the uncertainty of a historical moment characterized by crisis and change, in which the promises of social development and progress under a neoliberal agenda have been severely challenged, but in which there is still no foreseeable alternative, nor maybe even the belief in on