Trans Readings and Translocalities in Beyond the Pink Tide

What does a transnational inquiry look like, and can its deployment not only transit through disciplines but also translate—render visible and ethically interpret—localized embodiments and epistemologies in relation to hemispheric perspectives? In Beyond the Pink Tide, Macarena Gómez-Barris calls on “translocalities” (Alvarez et al. 2014) precisely to unveil knowledges of trans and queer subjects, indigenous people, and political dissidents' embeddedness in failed progressive governments and their un-detachments to a history of violent regimes of power in the Americas. Beyond is fueled by the critical destabilizing linguistic and embodying marker of trans, a tool of inquiry and a way of being that unsettles disciplinary borders, gender and corporal limits, and national boundaries. Gómez-Barris calls for a transnational Americas studies, or a decolonial American studies, that engages with “the intersections and crosscurrents of interdisciplinary formations [that] pushes beyond the Cold War architecture of area studies” (11), emphasizing literary and visual aesthetic practices that make us sense suppressed minorities' world-building undercurrents during and after the pink tide.If in the introduction Gómez-Barris invokes Walter D. Mignolo's (2005) proposal of uncoupling the established subcontinent's name and image alongside Lisa Lowe's (2015) formulation of reading across archives to rethink the liberal nation-state while also alluding to Mabel Moraña's (2006: 34) suggestion of the “reconstruction of political platforms in order to approach society and culture” to then lead us to Angela Davis's (2017: xiv) reflection on Black and Palestinian solidarity with Che, Fidel, and Amilcal Cabral, the chapters that follow make of the limits of naming, the canonicity of archives, the borders of disciplines, and the frontiers of solidarity a porous undertaking. In other words, Beyond provides a trans solidarity—an embodied practice and a way of reading—that moves and works at the “intersections of social action and creative praxis” (xiv).In chapter 1, Gómez-Barris opens with a critique of the aftershocks of dictatorial rule and its neoliberalist consensus through the sonic interruptions of Ana Tijoux and of the Chilean student movement. In the former, the Chilean mestiza rapper vibrates against the “shock doctrine” (Klein 2007) established in the 1970s to demand a resistance to the “whitewashed triumphant narratives of the Chicago boys and their technocratic masculinity” (24), while in the latter the streets are taken to demand the abolishment of the Organic Constitutional Act of Teaching (LOCE)'s extractive policies established during the authoritarian regime. Gómez-Barris takes Roderick Ferguson's We Demand (2017) as a North and South coalition of rebellion against debt, to then turn to the South-to-South collaboration, “Somos sur” (“We Are South”), of Tijoux with Palestinian rapper Shadia Mansour (2014)—a dissenting noise (Rancière 1999: 30) that becomes a discourse of anti-imperialist and antisettler colonialism, one that is against racism and global oppression.As the first chapter emphasizes dissenting acts disrupting the dominant sounds of the neoliberal state, in the following, Gómez-Barris transits to the “sexual underground” (55) of the cuir South to emphasize, in conversation with US (queer) critique (Duggan 2003; Reddy 2011; Spade 2013), the incommensurability of difference to the normalization of the neoliberal state. Here Gómez-Barris hinges on Pedro Lemebel's oeuvre to question the inherent paradoxical constructions of recognizability of the Chilean Left. Such “in-capturability” of the Southern Cone's travesti/cuir subject, or the anti-identitarianness of transness (Halberstam 2018), Gómez-Barris insists, through the groundbreaking text Re-sentir lo queer (Re-sensing the Queer) (Falconí Trávez, Castellanos, and Viteri 2014), shifts our attention to how the “non-normative is always situated in relation to social violence and forms of difference that include and exceed gender/sex identities within specific regions” (57). The cuir—a “regional,” differential, but relational critical modality of queerness—queers the national, according to José Quiroga (2000), and interrogates its boundaries of legitimacy (63): a paradox exposed in Una mujer fantástica (A Fantastic Woman), a film that situates transness as a social excess excluded of rights and of reparability by the “progressive” state.In chapter 3, the author moves us to the US/Mexico border to expand a hemispheric trans-feminist critique, to unravel, along with Achille Mbembe's (2019) lens, “who may live and who may die” (73). There, at the border, the text dissects the Coyotaje installation, making intelligible the “disposability of transmigrants as constructed by the global economy” (69). Such maximization of precarity, argues Gómez-Barris, along with trans-feminist thinker Sayak Valencia (2018), is predicated on a machine of violent masculinity apprehended to neoliberalism as an extension of colonialism's patriarchal inheritance that produces quotidian gender and corporal violence. A trans-feminist critique, she continues, situates the residues of global economies and (neo)coloniality's logic of power inflicted on these localized sites. Teresa Margolles's experimental aesthetic practices explore this crisis, showing the absence-presence trope that destabilizes the militarization of the border, “the gore materiality of life and death” (79), and the permanent war on sexo-racialized bodies at the border.The final trans-localized case study reads the extractive capitalism in Tierra del Fuego, Chile, explicated through Patricio Guzman's El botón de nacar (The Pearl Button): a visuality that moves from a cartographic totality to a particularized indigenous territory trans-versed by the colonization of Great Britain and the Chilean state's processes of dispossession. In these transits of empires—Jody Byrd (2011) reflected—the film foregrounds indigeneity's endurance of anti-indigenous sentiment. Taking a decolonial view (104), inherent in Beyond the Pink Tide's core, this chapter emphasizes 1) the disturbance of academic disciplines, specifically that of an ethnographic entrapment; and 2) the shifting of our optics to the displacement and disappearance of the indigenous, corporeal and territorial, as well as their daily maneuvers of survivability and their submerged knowledges of the sea.Beyond the Pink Tide, in its brevity and accessibility, emphasizes the trans signifier of alterity, moving the reader through specified cultural and literary practices, uncontained by the frames of national citizenship, and unpacked by noninsularity thinking, that is, a trans Americas viewpoint that rethinks the South/North dichotomy and posits a trans-hemispheric approach to the questions of subjectivity, territoriality, and normativity

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Indigenous · Lesbian · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Queer · Sociology · Solidarity · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Cuban History and Society · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law

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