Suchergebnisse

An examination of the significance of dance performances in the demonstrations of the Puerto Rican summer of 2019, this essay argues that these performances belong to a history of irreverent, extravagant mourning gestures that periodically irrupt in Puerto Rican culture as decolonial practices by dislocating the socially prescribed binding between performance and affect. Using the theories of Saidiya Hartman, José Esteban Muñoz, and Juana María Rodríguez, and connecting to the work of Rocío Zambrana on strategies that address the island's colonial legacy, the essay explores the mournfully irreverent dance performances of the Afro-Boricua bomba dancer Clara Isabel Díaz, the patería combativa (combative queer voguing) of Aldrin Manuel Cañals, and the reggaetón perreo of queer feminist activists Perra Mística and Kaya Té as gestures of loss and mourning that both demand redress and enact what Puerto Rican artists, activists, and critics have begun to call "decolonial joy."

This examination of José Lezama Lima's groundbreaking essay on the controversial late-nineteenth-century Cuban poet Julián del Casal situates the essay in the postrevolutionary context in which it first appeared in a Havana newspaper in 1941, a year after the ratification of the Constitution of 1940 and the publication of Fernando Ortiz's celebrated Cuban Counterpoint. It explores Lezama Lima's essay as a response to this moment in Cuban history as one that sought to forge, according to Rafael Rojas, a new "pact of national reconciliation," and was characterized by anxieties over Cubans' ability to produce. It argues that Lezama Lima's essay responded by turning from questions of production and proposing instead an urban aesthetic practice of reception and failure that foregrounds—in a manner not unlike contemporary queer critics—the racial and sexual spectral and ephemeral as sources for alternative forms of productivity and agency.

The reading of this beautifully crafted, exhaustively documented, and ethically inspired book by Licia Fiol-Matta, The Great Woman Singer: Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music, takes me back to this scene of my early youth. For The Great Woman Singer is a book about the call to open-ended aural suspension and search, about the incitement to listen to what Fiol-Matta defines as the skillfully complicated, contradictorily rich, self-reflexive, brilliant "thinking voice" that four of Puerto Rico's greatest female pop singers, Myrta Silva, Ruth Fernández, Ernestina Reyes (La Calandria), and Lucecita Benítez, manifested in their singing during the period encompassed by the island's process of colonial modernity and its aftermath. In tense dialogue with the social forces that would turn their powerfully odd, singular voices into mere representative "nada" or nothingness, Fiol-Matta offers in her book alternative stories of Puerto Rico's complex and often cruel colonial modernity as told from the most intimate and ephemeral of spaces: from the grain of the singing voice that thinks as it sonically wrestles with its gendered, racialized, and class-coded conditions, the technologies of modernity in the music industries, the sonic ideologies of progress and development of the Puerto Rican Estado Libre Asociado or Commonwealth state, and forced migration and its marginalization in the urban metropolitan setting of New York. The Great Woman Singer is thus simultaneously a tentative and thoughtful reconstruction of the performances of this singing "thinking voice," based on a painstakingly varied acopio or collection of ephemera (interviews, reviews, programs, records, cassettes, CDs, MP3s, publicity photos, album covers, posters, newspaper clippings, wardrobe, videos, films, fan recollections, and memories), and a critical pedagogy on how to listen to these voices if we are to recover not the intent of the originally sung performances but the polysemous possibilities of interpretation that these four masterfully enduring voices inscribed in them.

In the 1960s, camp's ironic register expanded to many of the decade's cultural and artistic discourses, becoming hegemonic in historical accounts. This essay examines the response of two queer diasporic Puerto Rican artists, the filmmaker José Rodríguez-Soltero and the drag performer "superstar" Mario Montez, who were members of New York's artistic underground, to such an expansion. While Puerto Rican and Latino migrants to the city were associated in the works of underground artists with a seamlessly unfractured culture of fervor and belief that often made their cultural practices illegible as "art," queer diasporic Puerto Rican artists, who were the product of multiple colonial and metropolitan displacements, promoted an aesthetics of mediation that combined calculation with surrender, and self-conscious dismantling of cinematic and artistic conventions with exaltation and belief. The essay further examines the recent comeback of Montez in contemporary queer debates on camp, failure, and shame in light of this diasporic aesthetics.