Abstract:
Since Utopia (1516) the allegory of travel has been the preferred narrative vehicle for utopic discourse, as it allowed the Eurocentric subject to search for a “better place” outside the epistemological limits of Modernity. It is at this instance that Latin America is constructed as the “other,” a discursive strategy that deeply affected its ability to escape from such epistemological construct, therefore creating a crisis of self-representation —one that would function beyond and outside of this dominant paradigm. During the 20th century, the centred postcolonial Latin American subject (the intellectual, political and artistic elite) would arrive to the realization that there in fact is no other “better place,” so it engages in a geopolitical project that aims towards the political emancipation of the continent by challenging the imposed economic model, while leaving intact epistemological and ontological forms of “coloniality of power” (Quijano, Dussel, Mignolo). As the millennium draws to a close, Latin American subjects find themselves enslaved to a deeper and subtler form of capitalism, now in the form of the market economy known as neoliberalism. This is a time that will be marked by a melancholy created by the sense of the defeat of the continental liberation endeavour, which at an individual level is expressed in a paralysing force that inhibit all manifestations of collective social projects. This study aims to examine the aesthetic strategies with which Latin American cinema of the neoliberal era challenges this collective melancholy. This is achieved by detachedly exhibiting the dismantling process of social utopias that has taken place in the last three decades, while at the same time digging into those suppressed utopian agendas present in the collective political unconscious (Jameson). To this end, a corpus of films from Argentina, Mexico and Cuba produced between 1995 and 2005 have been analysed. Although these countries offer different socio-cultural and aesthetic responses to the imposed neoliberal rationale, they coincide in experiencing a social process of epistemological decolonization. This involves a reformulation of what citizenship entails, proposing to this end different strategies of response to the imposed market logic. This is a collective enterprise that in the socio-political sphere is being manifested in contemporary social movements that demand the replacement of current forms of representation through participation in the public collective arena. In the symbolic and artistic realms, this is also evident in the rejection of aesthetic and intellectual mediation, to favour instead a more direct, participatory role, a process that has also stimulated the re-narration of History through various manifestations of collective identity self-representation, among which cinema, as this study demonstrates, accomplishes a central role, simultaneously performing a process of representation and “decolonialization.” The latter is achieved by adopting the form of a utopian discourse carried out through a utopian allegory —one that opens a path of communication towards community impulses, stimulating the desire to revert the current social rules of coexistence. This study concludes that Latin American cinema has created a new allegory, one that we have designated “the standstill traveller allegory.” Its main distinguishing feature is that it subverts the modern version by incorporating into its own discourse both the fracture and the re-construction of the iconic “traveller” moved by its sense of telos. In the three national cinemas analysed here, the allegory of the “standstill traveller” assumes different approaches. In Argentina —with the evident collapse of representative authority from the dictatorial period (1976-1983) to the early 2000— the subaltern subject engages in an uncommitted non-linear wandering that finally leads to his identification within an epistemological and ontological identity structured around diversity rather than sameness. In Cuba, during the “Special Period” (1991-2004) the travel is an aborted one since it doesn’t take place, although the allegory of the standstill traveller is eloquent to reflect the crisis of coherence of the Revolutionary discourse. In Mexico under NAFTA (1992-present), the traveller fails to escape to his own circumstances because this deterministic dystopia is —as the deconstructive perspective of the film reveals— just a perpetuation of a more sophisticated form of the coloniality of power. It is in this way that the Latin American cinema of the inter-millennial period becomes an epistemological bridge that allows for the reconnecting of society with its forgotten impulses of empathy and solidarity.