214 Sección Bibliográfica

films that have widely circulated in US classrooms, film festivals, and online stream­
ing sites such as Javier Fuentes-León’s Contracorriente (2009), Julia Solomonoffs El
último verano de la Boyita (2009), Miguel Ferrari’s A zu l y no tan rosa (2012), and
Mariana Rondón’s Pelo malo (2013) to only name a few. Published in 2015, it is
quite surprising that none of these features are even mentioned in passing, giving an
uninformed reader a false idea of the state of the field. That being said, the quality
of the essays contained in Despite A ll Adversities and their organization make this
an indispensable reference for the classroom. The anthology will, furthermore, be
a cornerstone for future scholarship on LGBTQ cinema in Latin America, and to
scholars in broader cinema studies interested in collocating this relatively small cor­
pus of films within global queer cinema dialogues.

Vinodh Venkatesh Virginia Tech

Miller, Karina. Escrituras impolíticas. Anti-representaciones de la comunidad

en Juan Rodolfo Wilcock, Osvaldo Lamborghini y Virgilio Pinera. Pittsburgh:
Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2014. 155 pp.

In the first pages of Escrituras impolíticas, Karina Miller cites from “La
comunidad organizada,” a 1949 speech by Juan Domingo Perón. In it, he offers
a utopian vision of the future, a community articulated around the welfare and
harmonious convivencia of all, a community with high aspirations in both cultural
and bodily wellbeing. For Miller, Perón functions— as he has for other critics— as a
touchstone figure of hegemonic politics. His discourse “funda el mito de la comu­
nidad, su ficción de origen y trascendencia,” Miller writes (11). That myth of com­
munity is the myth of a pueblo, founded on a constitutive antagonism between “us”
and “them.”
W ith Perón as her starting point— and with Fidel Castro functioning as
an additional exemplar o f hegemonic discourse— Miller asks whether it was possi­
ble, within the highly politicized field of Latin American literature during the sixties
and seventies, to work outside of these terms. Her corpus answers this question in
the affirmative, as she traces a series of “impolitical” writings that seek to evade or
complicate the us-them dichotomy. Concretely, she sustains that Juan Rodolfo Wil­
cock, Virgilio Piñera, and Osvaldo Lamborghini did so by mobilizing affects and
experiences that lie outside the war zone o f politics in its moralistic mode, namely
“la violencia, la soledad, el miedo, el asco, la apatía, el aburrimiento y la estupidez,
entre otros” (12). These affects and experiences help to found a series of fictional
dystopian worlds that would negate the positive fullness presupposed by discourses
like Perón’s.
Miller makes this case through a series of close readings, with each chap­
ter focused on a specific author. Thus Wilcock’s characters pass through experiences
o f loneliness, stupidity, and metamorphosis. His monsters undo notions of com­
munity founded on wholeness, occupying instead “islas improductivas” that func­
tion as places of “resistencia a la mitologización de la comunidad” (54). In a simi­
lar way, Piñeras writings often represent fear, boredom, and apathy as alternatives
Sección Bibliográfica 215

to the “lógica de lo político como antagonismo bélico”— an antagonism founded

on, again, a charismatic leader assembling the harmonious community around him
(78). His characters chew gum and play canasta, stubbornly unproductive in their
habits. Finally, Lamborghini and the “estética del asco” that runs through his writ­
ings forces language and literary taste to their limits, where the economy of signifi­
cation that underlies hegemonic politics reaches its outer bounds (113). Through
her analysis of these three cases, Miller makes the case for a current of impolitical
literature underneath the high tides of Latin American writing during the sixties
and seventies.
Her convincing analyses successfully weave together a number of liter­
ary, critical, and theoretical references, from Herman Melville to Roberto Esposito.
These sources help Miller situate her corpus within long-developing debates around
the concept of hegemony in Latin American studies. Her reading of Lamborghini
represents a key case in point. She understands the proliferation of bodies in his
writings— violating and violated bodies— as the index of a politics of affect that
functions as the “talón de Aquiles” o f hegemony. In its immanent operations, that
is, affect interrupts or escapes the logic of representation that underpins the notion
of hegemony (133). This argument builds on similar ones made about works by
Wilcock and Piñera, perhaps representing the apex o f this tendency in way Lam­
borghini reduces representation to bodily experience.
At stake in these analyses is precisely the relationship between bodies and
the sorts of collectivity that gather them together. And this relationship specifically
hinges on the question of work— both as obra and as trabajo. As such, against the
imperative to write in a highly politicized manner where the us-them dichotomy
is transparent, “las escrituras impolíticas de [este] corpus evaden la responsabilidad
de la obra.” Against this responsibility, these authors “insisten en la proliferación
de afectos negativos e improductivos” (23). The resistance to productivity is visible
most clearly in the chapter on Piñera, where Melville’s Bartleby functions as a mod­
el for the Cuban writer, both for the way he enacts a rupture in communication and
for how he portrays passivity and the rejection of labor. In similar fashions, Wilcock
and Lamborghini also refuse work, both because of their resistance to the “respon­
sabilidad de la obra,” but also because the affects they generate are unproductive in
most senses of the word.
If, however, some sort of productivity can be found in these writings,
it is certainly a preparatory sort of production. This is the sense one is left with
upon finishing Miller’s book— that writers like Wilcock, Piñera, and Lamborghini
are primarily invested in clearing and preparing the ground for future action. In
other words, her analysis points us not to the realm of the apolitical, but rather to
the barrenness that is, perhaps, the hidden truth of all hegemonic discourse. The
last words o f the book— quoted from Lamborghini— are “Hum, no sé. La historia.
Beh (143). In one sense, this ending is somewhat frustrating, for it leaves the read­
er without a robust conclusion and without a sense of closure around the various
analyses making up the book. But in a different key, it is perhaps highly appropri­
ate, in as much as it exemplifies the basic gesture of the writers studied in Escrituras
impolíticas, which is precisely this sort of refusal.

Craig Epplin Portland State University

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