| Expropriated Subjectivities: The Limits of Form in Latin America focuses on cinematic and literary interventions in political theory and practice in mid and late twentieth century Brazil and Peru. Each of the films and texts analyzed in Expropriated Subjectivities attempts to intervene in political philosophy by enacting---putting into scene---the difficulties, losses and estrangements of living neoliberal, neo-colonial socialities. They each envision cinematic and literary form as repeating colonial forms of dispossession including the commodification of labor, bodies and lives in slavery and the forcible relocation of indigenous peoples and others for the purposes of destabilizing local forms of sociality and securing labor populations. Each cultural intervention exposes, reinscribes and performs logics of inclusion and exclusion which give shape to the political body. These image-texts re-envision urbanization and urban planning through expropriation to reveal Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Chimbote and Lima as materializations of fantasies of civil society (a racialized community of citizen subjects), modern industrial power, and the proper order of life, labor and death that depend upon the differentiation, exclusion and social death of Blacks, Indigenous groups, animals and goods. Going beyond a recognition of the biopolitical management of populations in modern Latin America, I argue that Clarice Lispector's A paixao Segundo G.H (1964), Carolina Maria de Jesus' Quarto de despejo: diario de uma favelada (1960) and A Casa de alvenaria: diario de uma ex-favelada (1961), Jose Maria Arguedas' El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (1969), Francisco Lombardi's Caidos del cielo (1990), Katia Lund and Fernando Meirelles' Cidade de deus (2002) and Henrique Fonseca's O homem do ano (2003) instead focus on the disorienting effects of expropriation such that they show that populations and their unpredictable social landscapes exceed biopolitical forms of inscription used to contain their movements within modern categories. |
