Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film by Monika Kaup (review)

Monika Kaup’s work on the neobaroque adds a new, interesting, and important perspective to an immense wealth of works on the subject. Her book spans centuries and continents, slicing through the geographic boundaries formed by oceans, nations and ideologies with an informed and elegant ease. In her book Kaup expertly presents major creative and theoretical works from and concerning the baroque and neobaroque. Since her work so astutely considers the wide-ranging ideas and works related to her topic, Kaup’s tome could possibly serve as an introduction to readers who have little knowledge of the neobaroque and its relationship to the baroque. However, with this statement should come a warning; her book is not for the intellectually faint of heart or those looking for a quick and easy-to-digest overview. Kaup uses her vast knowledge of the field to present a surprising new dimension that expands the definition of “neobaroque” in ways that are at once interesting and vertiginous. Her analysis of U.S. Latino cultural production as neobaroque is well founded and makes sense within the already accepted paradigm of the neobaroque as a decolonizing machine. However, some might see her inclusion of canonical and marginally canonical authors from the global north such as T. S. Eliot and Djuna Barnes as problematic. With their inclusion, Kaup risks expanding the definition of the neobaroque to its breaking point and, in turn, removing from it any critical force as a tool for decolonization. However, rather than diminishing the neobaroque’s critical potential, Kaup’s work adds to it significantly.

In her “Introduction,” Kaup defines the baroque, and subsequently the neo-baroque, as an open system. She says that “the baroque refuses to regard cultures as a fixed, ‘self-contained system,’ the property of discrete, segregated social groups. Rather, the baroque is an ‘antiproprietary’ expression that brings together seemingly disparate writers and artists; few artistic and representational phenomena are so good at bending so many different ways as the baroque” (3). As she later goes on to explain with the help of major thinkers on the discussion of the baroque such as Walter Benjamin and José Antonio Maravall, though the baroque is an “open” system, it is also one that is contested (15). Here Kaup presents the problem confronting anyone who wishes to understand the neobaroque, and one that her book confronts consistently, that of defining something, the neobaroque, which by its very nature seems to resist any totalizing gesture including basic definitions. In short, if something is defined by its openness and inclusivity what are its limits? What are the boundaries that critics or anyone for that matter can use to define and understand it?

In order for something to be defined, it must have distinct limits that set it off from what it is not. For Kaup and many other critics, the neobaroque is an enterprise of decoloniality, or as the Cuban writer José Lezama Lima called it, an art of contraconquista. Kaup clarifies that the aesthetic rebellion is a negotiation with power explained by Deleuze and Guattari as a “minor literature” or by Stuart Hall as an articulation. Kaup employs those and other theoretical concepts to show how the neobaroque decolonizes not by occupying the position of the Hegelian “slave” to the colonizing “master,” creating a distinct opposition within a predetermined system, but by evading the dialectic altogether. It does this through “the art of recycling” (20), the art of reusing or reworking the past through parody and other means. This explains the “connective” prefix “neo” in neobaroque rather than the “dissociative post” to denote a connection with the past.

Defining the neobaroque as a decolonial art of conterconquest has a long and theoretically complex bibliography to which Kaup’s work adds significantly. The problem most readers will encounter with her analysis is the inclusion of authors who are decidedly not Latin American and who cannot easily lay claim to work...