KC Barrientos, Ph.D. | University of South Carolina (original) (raw)
Papers by KC Barrientos, Ph.D.
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A Contracorriente, 2023
Puerto Rican playright René Marqués’s 1953 drama La carreta (The Oxcart) follows a three-act tran... more Puerto Rican playright René Marqués’s 1953 drama La carreta (The Oxcart) follows a three-act translation of self, culture and dreams among the members of the protagonist jíbaro family. From a mountainside province to the urban slum of La Perla, to the segregated Bronx, young Luis uproots his mother and sister in pursuit of a better life and of the American Dream. Luis’s particular obsession with machines, industrial labor and urbanity as their ticket out of poverty reflects the technicity of the language in which he articulates his dreams. In reality, Luis’s family loses members to crime, violence and death in every new physical and cultural space they move to. Drawing on the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Gilbert Simondon on technicity, and the work of Homi K. Bhabha and Edward Soja on the translation of cultural spaces, this essay argues that the root of Luis’s conflicts with his family, and his tragic flaw that leads to his death vis-à-vis a machinery accident in a factory the final act, is his mistranslation of success and happiness as technicity in the modern world. This problem of translation arises from the exclusionary American Dream of the postcoloniality into which Luis and his family were born.
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Voces del Caribe, 2022
From the enslavement of Africans in the Antilles in the sixteenth century to the sociopolitical s... more From the enslavement of Africans in the Antilles in the sixteenth century to the sociopolitical struggle for rights today, the female Afro-Caribbean body has been the transactional site of power, violence, and pain. Enslaved Black mothers in the colonial era suffered the particular pain of separation from their children, or witnessing their offspring’s death, or both. Significantly, maternity is linked to birth in death such that the life and passing of the Afro-Caribbean woman’s children in turn impact her own identity as a survivor of a previous generation of colonialism hoping for a brighter future for her offspring. By examining the free verse poetry of Afro-Cuban poets Nancy Morejón and Georgina Herrera against Afro-Dominican Aida Cartagena Portalatín and Afro-Puerto Rican Lourdes Vázquez, this essay traces the inheritance of bodily and emotional pain from enslaved Black mothers to their emancipated or freeborn descendants who yet suffer from racism and hate crimes. The pain of the maternal figure in these works is associated with different stages of motherhood: childbirth, in which the mother’s body excruciatingly becomes two (as in “La visita” by Vázquez); the offspring’s childhood, during which the mother fights to her last breath to shield her young ones from enslavement and brutality (as in Morejón’s “La silla dorada” or Herrera’s “Oyendo hablar al viejo Owení”); and mourning, when the mother stands over the grave of her lynched or enslaved child and buckles under the weight of maternal guilt (as in Vázquez’s “On Maternity” and Cartagena Portalatín’s “Una mujer está sola”). The poems analyzed in this article interweave the distinct strands of maternal pain seamlessly into a portrait of the Afro-Caribbean mother’s unique suffering: for at the same time that her body transacts physically with the child’s body inside her as a woman reproducing, her race and class as a Black (and in some poems, enslaved) woman shadow her experience of motherhood with further anxiety and violence. The violence committed against the children’s Black bodies is therefore an extension of the culture of violence enacted against and embedded in the mother’s own Black body, both in the postcolonial Caribbean and across the ocean in the US. In support of these arguments, this paper refers to the cultural writings of Black feminists such as Patricia Hill Collins, M. Jacqui Alexander, Judith Butler, and Ginetta Candelario, and draws on theories of pain, memory, and recovery of Black female bodies in the Caribbean context.
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Academia Letters, 2021
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Academia Letters, 2021
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Academia Letters, 2021
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Label Me Latina/o, 2020
Eurocentric ideals of beauty continue to uglify and marginalize Afro-Latina bodies into postcolon... more Eurocentric ideals of beauty continue to uglify and marginalize Afro-Latina bodies into postcolonial modernity, both for their blackness and for their femininity. The poetry of Afro-Dominican feminist writer Elizabeth Acevedo directly interrogates this type of internalized Negrophobia which produces in the Afro-Latina woman a deep shame over her natural hair and her visible difference from Eurocentric beauty. This essay analyzes two of Acevedo’s poems, “Afro-Latina,” and “Hair,” as a reclamation of the Afro-Latina’s black beauty, body, hair and subjectivity. The two poems simultaneously speak to the Dominican history of amnesia of one’s one African roots, and call for a pan-Afro-Latinidad solidarity among Afro-Latina women of the Caribbean diaspora. The present analysis of Acevedo’s poems is furthermore grounded in key writings on race and black feminism by Frantz Fanon, Ginetta Candelario, Audre Lorde and M. Jacqui Alexander, in relation to Afro-descendant self-negation and the power of poetry in fostering black female pride.
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Portals: A Journal of Comparative Literature, 2020
The conceptualization of transculturation in Latinx literatures often centers on bilingualism. In... more The conceptualization of transculturation in Latinx
literatures often centers on bilingualism. In this vein, Dominican-
American writer Junot Díaz captures the trauma of the pressure
for the Latinx to translate their language, space and experience to
survive in the U.S. Díaz’s short stories “Negocios (Business)”
(2009) and “Invierno (Winter)” (2012) connect language to space
and, by extension, to transculturation. In my analysis of the
protagonist Dominican family, who struggle to learn English to
escape physical and emotional isolation in New Jersey, I draw on
the theoretical groundwork of Fernando Ortíz that frames
transculturation as the product of cultures in contact. I place Ortíz
in dialogue with Homi K. Bhabha’s reading of culture as an
intangible space, and Henri Lefebvre’s exposition of cultural,
mental-linguistic space as imbricated with geographic locus to
form social space. Vis-à-vis this map between Ortiz, Bhabha and
Lefebvre, I postulate that Yunior, the protagonist of “Invierno,”
and his father Ramón, the protagonist of “Negocios,” occupy a
third and other social space distinct from the Latin American and
Anglo-American cultures that bracket them. I conclude that
physical spaces such as the family apartment and the oceanside in
these stories function as markers for Spanish-speaking, Englishspeaking,
or third-as-other social spaces for Yunior’s family. In
light of this argument, I conclude that Díaz advances a social
commentary on the predicament of those Latinx immigrants like
Yunior and Ramón who are suspended in their otherness.
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Conference Presentations by KC Barrientos, Ph.D.
Calibans and Caribbeanisms 3rd Annual Conference: Troubling the Image, 2020
Detrás de las narrativas tradiciones occidentales de la conquista de África (Philosophy of Histor... more Detrás de las narrativas tradiciones occidentales de la conquista de África (Philosophy of History de Georg W.F. Hegel, por ejemplo, o Heart of Darkness de Joseph Conrad) subyace una metáfora maniquea de la pecaminosidad del Negro contrastada con la virtud del blanco. Entre los varios productos de esta ‘myth-making faculty’ (John Ower) es el mito del caníbal indígena: el consumo de cuerpos en contextos antropófagos y sexuales como evidencia de la Otredad intrínseca del africano y, como consecuencia, la necesidad de subyugarlo. A primer vistazo, el poema “Ñam-ñam” (1937) de Luis Palés Matos—poeta puertorriqueño y figura fundamental del movimiento literario negrista en el Caribe—parecería apropiarse de este mito del caníbal africano por fines exotistas. A diferencia con lecturas previas de Palés Matos, que tienden a criticar el efecto primitivista de su escritura como problemático en cuanto a las percepciones de las culturas afrocaribeñas, mi nueva (re)lectura de “Ñam-ñam” busca analizar la apropiación del mito caníbal como subversión de la metáfora maniquea de la pecaminosidad y Otredad del Negro. El ensayo presente se enfoca en las imágenes gráficas de aparatos digestivos y sexualidad femenina como parte de una metáfora extendida de una África que devora la cultura, religión y estética del colonizador occidental. Por medio de subvertir la lectura occidental de África como continente bárbaro y brujo que demanda la colonización hegemónica, argumento, Palés Matos representa el afrocaribeño como sobreviviente cuya cultura aún perdura, engullendo la del blanco y tomando poder sobre su propia narrativa en épocas poscoloniales.
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Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies Annual Conference, 2017
Decoloniality, as defined by Walter Mignolo in the context of Latin America, is a non-Eurocentric... more Decoloniality, as defined by Walter Mignolo in the context of Latin America, is a non-Eurocentric model of understanding modernity, colonial history, and transculturation. My paper explores how the 19th- and 20th-century Afro-Panameñan poets Tomás Martín Feuillet, Federico Escobar and Gaspar Octavio Hernández served as early examples of literary voices of decoloniality. I postulate that they sought to describe their distinctive Afro-Caribbean identity by (re)defining the construct of blackness in two ways: first, by refuting the contemporary epistemes of black “ugliness,” “sinfulness,” and culpability; and second, by defining the false stereotypes of whiteness of their era that supported that repression of black consciousness and pride. I also challenge critical interpretations of these poets’ works as either fully decolonial or fully submissive to the ‘white literary aesthetic,’ and conclude that their writing evinced the early stages of racial identity construction that is evident in the decolonial themes of later Afro-Caribbean poetic canon.
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39th Cincinnati Conference on Romance Languages & Literatures, 2019
El poema “Retorno al país natal” (1939) (“Cahier d’un retour au pays natal”) de Aimé Césaire util... more El poema “Retorno al país natal” (1939) (“Cahier d’un retour au pays natal”) de Aimé Césaire utiliza imaginerías espaciales para construir la conceptualización del poeta de la blancura y la negritud en una Martinica poscolonial del siglo XX. Se examinan en el ensayo presente las imaginerías de sepulcros blanqueados, cielos blancos y el mar abierto, entre otras imágenes similares en el poema, como metáforas espaciales por la raza. Basándose en las teorías de raza y pos/decolonialidad principalmente de Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks) y Aimé Césaire (Discourse on Colonialism), además de varios otros pensadores poscoloniales, se establece que las metáforas espaciales en “Retorno al país natal” señalan una agorafobia—asociando el miedo de espacios abiertos con el miedo de la blancura—y una claustrofia, que asocia el miedo de espacios cerrados con el de la negritud. A través de este análisis de la tensión entre estas dos fobias, se concluye que la voz poética está atrapado en un intersticio identitario entre lo blanco y lo negro, y que su momento de auto-aceptación desencadena su avance hacia el mar abierto que simboliza la liberación traída por una mentalidad decolonizada. Según esta lectura de la funcionalidad de los espacios en la obra de Césaire, se propone que la entrada del yo poético en el mar no es solamente una invocación de la Nueva Negritud, sino también un escenario metonímico de la propia decolonialidad latinoamericana del siglo XX.
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Views from Below: The Underdog in Contemporary Latin American and Spanish Film, 2017
The trope of locus amoenus, or the idyllic representation of heaven on earth, and its counterpart... more The trope of locus amoenus, or the idyllic representation of heaven on earth, and its counterpart locus horribilis, or the mundane incarnation of hell, was first critically defined by Ernst Robert Curtius in 1953 and identified in religiously influenced literature as early as Latin and medieval European works. Since then, the locus theory has appeared in numerous secular texts and films, such as Marcelo Ferrari’s Sub Terra (2004), as a means of distinguishing the once-pristine ‘purity’ of provincial spaces from the physically and metaphorically cramped mines and buildings produced by an urbanized modernity. This essay seeks to translate the conversation on provincial spaces versus urban ones into the context of Latin American modernization and its impact on indigenous cultures who either withstand, reject or succumb to from the invasion into their provincial locus amoenus, as portrayed in film. In Pamela Yates and Newton Thomas Sigel’s When the Mountains Tremble (1983), based on Elizabeth Burgos’ testimonial work I, Rigoberta Menchú (1983), Quiché activist Rigoberta Menchú describes her “virgin” and isolated mountainous homeland in Guatemala as a source of psycho-emotional security as well as religious and cultural “self-defense from the city.” In contrast, the nearby “city” forms the synecdochal backdrop of the urbanized, modernized mestizo hegemony: the expanding locus horribilis that devours the locus amoenus of the countryside with plantations and exploitation. Jayro Bustamante’s Ixcanul (2015), a portrait of a similarly young Quiché woman who yearns for freedom from her province, at first appears to subvert the locus trope with the mountains serving as an infernal prison and the “city” landscape of the United States promising celestial liberation. However, the film ultimately echoes the same cynicism as When the Mountains Tremble toward urbanity. In this comparative paper, I closely examine the dynamic between city and province in both films as locus horribilis invading locus amoenus. I further postulate that indigenous cultural erasure and economic dependence on the hegemony are some of the grave consequences of such an imbrication of spaces; and I conclude that, as illustrated by both films but especially by Ixcanul, the pristine and self-sufficient refuge of locus amoenus can no longer exist once contaminated by locus horribilis.
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Drafts by KC Barrientos, Ph.D.
Jayro Bustamante’s Ixcanul (2015) is groundbreaking for indigenous representation in media, as th... more Jayro Bustamante’s Ixcanul (2015) is groundbreaking for indigenous representation in media, as the first film to be produced entirely in the Kaq’chikel language of an indigenous Mayan community the Guatemalan highlands, and as a project that relied on the Kaq’chikel actors’ free translation of the script. Based on Kaq’chikel women’s eyewitness accounts, the film depicts the tragedy of a young indigenous woman, María, whose unborn child is kidnapped and trafficked when she is taken to the local urban hospital for a medical emergency. This paper is interested in the social significance of Bustamante’s artistic choice to overlap circular visuals and narratives throughout the movie, thereby mirroring the circular cosmologies of the Mayan community he films. Through a scene-by-scene analysis of key sequences, this essay argues that Bustamante treats the Mayan worldviews of the protagonists with deference and sensitivity; that the circular storytelling technique promotes an aesthetic of entrapment to underscore the subalternity of María and other young indigenous women like her; and that Ixcanul embodies responsible indigenous representation in media, made for and by indigenous people to foster awareness of the social injustices imposed upon them. In support of these arguments, this paper hearkens back principally to the theoretical and anthropological work of Faye Ginsburg, Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, and James Igoe on the history of irresponsible and fetishizing representation of indigenous peoples in mainstream media, and on the necessary steps to take toward responsible representation that can provoke ethical and productive discussions on indigenous people’s otherness, rights, and issues of social justice.
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A Contracorriente, 2023
Puerto Rican playright René Marqués’s 1953 drama La carreta (The Oxcart) follows a three-act tran... more Puerto Rican playright René Marqués’s 1953 drama La carreta (The Oxcart) follows a three-act translation of self, culture and dreams among the members of the protagonist jíbaro family. From a mountainside province to the urban slum of La Perla, to the segregated Bronx, young Luis uproots his mother and sister in pursuit of a better life and of the American Dream. Luis’s particular obsession with machines, industrial labor and urbanity as their ticket out of poverty reflects the technicity of the language in which he articulates his dreams. In reality, Luis’s family loses members to crime, violence and death in every new physical and cultural space they move to. Drawing on the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Gilbert Simondon on technicity, and the work of Homi K. Bhabha and Edward Soja on the translation of cultural spaces, this essay argues that the root of Luis’s conflicts with his family, and his tragic flaw that leads to his death vis-à-vis a machinery accident in a factory the final act, is his mistranslation of success and happiness as technicity in the modern world. This problem of translation arises from the exclusionary American Dream of the postcoloniality into which Luis and his family were born.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Voces del Caribe, 2022
From the enslavement of Africans in the Antilles in the sixteenth century to the sociopolitical s... more From the enslavement of Africans in the Antilles in the sixteenth century to the sociopolitical struggle for rights today, the female Afro-Caribbean body has been the transactional site of power, violence, and pain. Enslaved Black mothers in the colonial era suffered the particular pain of separation from their children, or witnessing their offspring’s death, or both. Significantly, maternity is linked to birth in death such that the life and passing of the Afro-Caribbean woman’s children in turn impact her own identity as a survivor of a previous generation of colonialism hoping for a brighter future for her offspring. By examining the free verse poetry of Afro-Cuban poets Nancy Morejón and Georgina Herrera against Afro-Dominican Aida Cartagena Portalatín and Afro-Puerto Rican Lourdes Vázquez, this essay traces the inheritance of bodily and emotional pain from enslaved Black mothers to their emancipated or freeborn descendants who yet suffer from racism and hate crimes. The pain of the maternal figure in these works is associated with different stages of motherhood: childbirth, in which the mother’s body excruciatingly becomes two (as in “La visita” by Vázquez); the offspring’s childhood, during which the mother fights to her last breath to shield her young ones from enslavement and brutality (as in Morejón’s “La silla dorada” or Herrera’s “Oyendo hablar al viejo Owení”); and mourning, when the mother stands over the grave of her lynched or enslaved child and buckles under the weight of maternal guilt (as in Vázquez’s “On Maternity” and Cartagena Portalatín’s “Una mujer está sola”). The poems analyzed in this article interweave the distinct strands of maternal pain seamlessly into a portrait of the Afro-Caribbean mother’s unique suffering: for at the same time that her body transacts physically with the child’s body inside her as a woman reproducing, her race and class as a Black (and in some poems, enslaved) woman shadow her experience of motherhood with further anxiety and violence. The violence committed against the children’s Black bodies is therefore an extension of the culture of violence enacted against and embedded in the mother’s own Black body, both in the postcolonial Caribbean and across the ocean in the US. In support of these arguments, this paper refers to the cultural writings of Black feminists such as Patricia Hill Collins, M. Jacqui Alexander, Judith Butler, and Ginetta Candelario, and draws on theories of pain, memory, and recovery of Black female bodies in the Caribbean context.
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Academia Letters, 2021
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Academia Letters, 2021
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Academia Letters, 2021
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Label Me Latina/o, 2020
Eurocentric ideals of beauty continue to uglify and marginalize Afro-Latina bodies into postcolon... more Eurocentric ideals of beauty continue to uglify and marginalize Afro-Latina bodies into postcolonial modernity, both for their blackness and for their femininity. The poetry of Afro-Dominican feminist writer Elizabeth Acevedo directly interrogates this type of internalized Negrophobia which produces in the Afro-Latina woman a deep shame over her natural hair and her visible difference from Eurocentric beauty. This essay analyzes two of Acevedo’s poems, “Afro-Latina,” and “Hair,” as a reclamation of the Afro-Latina’s black beauty, body, hair and subjectivity. The two poems simultaneously speak to the Dominican history of amnesia of one’s one African roots, and call for a pan-Afro-Latinidad solidarity among Afro-Latina women of the Caribbean diaspora. The present analysis of Acevedo’s poems is furthermore grounded in key writings on race and black feminism by Frantz Fanon, Ginetta Candelario, Audre Lorde and M. Jacqui Alexander, in relation to Afro-descendant self-negation and the power of poetry in fostering black female pride.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Portals: A Journal of Comparative Literature, 2020
The conceptualization of transculturation in Latinx literatures often centers on bilingualism. In... more The conceptualization of transculturation in Latinx
literatures often centers on bilingualism. In this vein, Dominican-
American writer Junot Díaz captures the trauma of the pressure
for the Latinx to translate their language, space and experience to
survive in the U.S. Díaz’s short stories “Negocios (Business)”
(2009) and “Invierno (Winter)” (2012) connect language to space
and, by extension, to transculturation. In my analysis of the
protagonist Dominican family, who struggle to learn English to
escape physical and emotional isolation in New Jersey, I draw on
the theoretical groundwork of Fernando Ortíz that frames
transculturation as the product of cultures in contact. I place Ortíz
in dialogue with Homi K. Bhabha’s reading of culture as an
intangible space, and Henri Lefebvre’s exposition of cultural,
mental-linguistic space as imbricated with geographic locus to
form social space. Vis-à-vis this map between Ortiz, Bhabha and
Lefebvre, I postulate that Yunior, the protagonist of “Invierno,”
and his father Ramón, the protagonist of “Negocios,” occupy a
third and other social space distinct from the Latin American and
Anglo-American cultures that bracket them. I conclude that
physical spaces such as the family apartment and the oceanside in
these stories function as markers for Spanish-speaking, Englishspeaking,
or third-as-other social spaces for Yunior’s family. In
light of this argument, I conclude that Díaz advances a social
commentary on the predicament of those Latinx immigrants like
Yunior and Ramón who are suspended in their otherness.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Calibans and Caribbeanisms 3rd Annual Conference: Troubling the Image, 2020
Detrás de las narrativas tradiciones occidentales de la conquista de África (Philosophy of Histor... more Detrás de las narrativas tradiciones occidentales de la conquista de África (Philosophy of History de Georg W.F. Hegel, por ejemplo, o Heart of Darkness de Joseph Conrad) subyace una metáfora maniquea de la pecaminosidad del Negro contrastada con la virtud del blanco. Entre los varios productos de esta ‘myth-making faculty’ (John Ower) es el mito del caníbal indígena: el consumo de cuerpos en contextos antropófagos y sexuales como evidencia de la Otredad intrínseca del africano y, como consecuencia, la necesidad de subyugarlo. A primer vistazo, el poema “Ñam-ñam” (1937) de Luis Palés Matos—poeta puertorriqueño y figura fundamental del movimiento literario negrista en el Caribe—parecería apropiarse de este mito del caníbal africano por fines exotistas. A diferencia con lecturas previas de Palés Matos, que tienden a criticar el efecto primitivista de su escritura como problemático en cuanto a las percepciones de las culturas afrocaribeñas, mi nueva (re)lectura de “Ñam-ñam” busca analizar la apropiación del mito caníbal como subversión de la metáfora maniquea de la pecaminosidad y Otredad del Negro. El ensayo presente se enfoca en las imágenes gráficas de aparatos digestivos y sexualidad femenina como parte de una metáfora extendida de una África que devora la cultura, religión y estética del colonizador occidental. Por medio de subvertir la lectura occidental de África como continente bárbaro y brujo que demanda la colonización hegemónica, argumento, Palés Matos representa el afrocaribeño como sobreviviente cuya cultura aún perdura, engullendo la del blanco y tomando poder sobre su propia narrativa en épocas poscoloniales.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies Annual Conference, 2017
Decoloniality, as defined by Walter Mignolo in the context of Latin America, is a non-Eurocentric... more Decoloniality, as defined by Walter Mignolo in the context of Latin America, is a non-Eurocentric model of understanding modernity, colonial history, and transculturation. My paper explores how the 19th- and 20th-century Afro-Panameñan poets Tomás Martín Feuillet, Federico Escobar and Gaspar Octavio Hernández served as early examples of literary voices of decoloniality. I postulate that they sought to describe their distinctive Afro-Caribbean identity by (re)defining the construct of blackness in two ways: first, by refuting the contemporary epistemes of black “ugliness,” “sinfulness,” and culpability; and second, by defining the false stereotypes of whiteness of their era that supported that repression of black consciousness and pride. I also challenge critical interpretations of these poets’ works as either fully decolonial or fully submissive to the ‘white literary aesthetic,’ and conclude that their writing evinced the early stages of racial identity construction that is evident in the decolonial themes of later Afro-Caribbean poetic canon.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
39th Cincinnati Conference on Romance Languages & Literatures, 2019
El poema “Retorno al país natal” (1939) (“Cahier d’un retour au pays natal”) de Aimé Césaire util... more El poema “Retorno al país natal” (1939) (“Cahier d’un retour au pays natal”) de Aimé Césaire utiliza imaginerías espaciales para construir la conceptualización del poeta de la blancura y la negritud en una Martinica poscolonial del siglo XX. Se examinan en el ensayo presente las imaginerías de sepulcros blanqueados, cielos blancos y el mar abierto, entre otras imágenes similares en el poema, como metáforas espaciales por la raza. Basándose en las teorías de raza y pos/decolonialidad principalmente de Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks) y Aimé Césaire (Discourse on Colonialism), además de varios otros pensadores poscoloniales, se establece que las metáforas espaciales en “Retorno al país natal” señalan una agorafobia—asociando el miedo de espacios abiertos con el miedo de la blancura—y una claustrofia, que asocia el miedo de espacios cerrados con el de la negritud. A través de este análisis de la tensión entre estas dos fobias, se concluye que la voz poética está atrapado en un intersticio identitario entre lo blanco y lo negro, y que su momento de auto-aceptación desencadena su avance hacia el mar abierto que simboliza la liberación traída por una mentalidad decolonizada. Según esta lectura de la funcionalidad de los espacios en la obra de Césaire, se propone que la entrada del yo poético en el mar no es solamente una invocación de la Nueva Negritud, sino también un escenario metonímico de la propia decolonialidad latinoamericana del siglo XX.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Views from Below: The Underdog in Contemporary Latin American and Spanish Film, 2017
The trope of locus amoenus, or the idyllic representation of heaven on earth, and its counterpart... more The trope of locus amoenus, or the idyllic representation of heaven on earth, and its counterpart locus horribilis, or the mundane incarnation of hell, was first critically defined by Ernst Robert Curtius in 1953 and identified in religiously influenced literature as early as Latin and medieval European works. Since then, the locus theory has appeared in numerous secular texts and films, such as Marcelo Ferrari’s Sub Terra (2004), as a means of distinguishing the once-pristine ‘purity’ of provincial spaces from the physically and metaphorically cramped mines and buildings produced by an urbanized modernity. This essay seeks to translate the conversation on provincial spaces versus urban ones into the context of Latin American modernization and its impact on indigenous cultures who either withstand, reject or succumb to from the invasion into their provincial locus amoenus, as portrayed in film. In Pamela Yates and Newton Thomas Sigel’s When the Mountains Tremble (1983), based on Elizabeth Burgos’ testimonial work I, Rigoberta Menchú (1983), Quiché activist Rigoberta Menchú describes her “virgin” and isolated mountainous homeland in Guatemala as a source of psycho-emotional security as well as religious and cultural “self-defense from the city.” In contrast, the nearby “city” forms the synecdochal backdrop of the urbanized, modernized mestizo hegemony: the expanding locus horribilis that devours the locus amoenus of the countryside with plantations and exploitation. Jayro Bustamante’s Ixcanul (2015), a portrait of a similarly young Quiché woman who yearns for freedom from her province, at first appears to subvert the locus trope with the mountains serving as an infernal prison and the “city” landscape of the United States promising celestial liberation. However, the film ultimately echoes the same cynicism as When the Mountains Tremble toward urbanity. In this comparative paper, I closely examine the dynamic between city and province in both films as locus horribilis invading locus amoenus. I further postulate that indigenous cultural erasure and economic dependence on the hegemony are some of the grave consequences of such an imbrication of spaces; and I conclude that, as illustrated by both films but especially by Ixcanul, the pristine and self-sufficient refuge of locus amoenus can no longer exist once contaminated by locus horribilis.
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Jayro Bustamante’s Ixcanul (2015) is groundbreaking for indigenous representation in media, as th... more Jayro Bustamante’s Ixcanul (2015) is groundbreaking for indigenous representation in media, as the first film to be produced entirely in the Kaq’chikel language of an indigenous Mayan community the Guatemalan highlands, and as a project that relied on the Kaq’chikel actors’ free translation of the script. Based on Kaq’chikel women’s eyewitness accounts, the film depicts the tragedy of a young indigenous woman, María, whose unborn child is kidnapped and trafficked when she is taken to the local urban hospital for a medical emergency. This paper is interested in the social significance of Bustamante’s artistic choice to overlap circular visuals and narratives throughout the movie, thereby mirroring the circular cosmologies of the Mayan community he films. Through a scene-by-scene analysis of key sequences, this essay argues that Bustamante treats the Mayan worldviews of the protagonists with deference and sensitivity; that the circular storytelling technique promotes an aesthetic of entrapment to underscore the subalternity of María and other young indigenous women like her; and that Ixcanul embodies responsible indigenous representation in media, made for and by indigenous people to foster awareness of the social injustices imposed upon them. In support of these arguments, this paper hearkens back principally to the theoretical and anthropological work of Faye Ginsburg, Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, and James Igoe on the history of irresponsible and fetishizing representation of indigenous peoples in mainstream media, and on the necessary steps to take toward responsible representation that can provoke ethical and productive discussions on indigenous people’s otherness, rights, and issues of social justice.
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