Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production by Leticia Alvarado (review)

In the current convoluted context of US identitarian politics, scholarly approaches that articulate discourses for collective survival are not only relevant, but also urgent. In Leticia Alvarado’s Abject Performances, this urgency converges with an active critical analysis of cultural products that refuse identitarian coherence, focusing specifically on the uncertainty of Latinidad. This choice seems at first counterintuitive, considering that hate speech and anti-immigration rhetoric have found institutional power at the White House. The safe response to a seemingly unstoppable MAGA violence upholds aesthetics and politics of respectability in the hopes of not being cast off — in this case, deported. Alvarado makes a case for a different strategy of survival for the Latinx community, and for marginalized communities at large: to embrace abjection as a way of exposing the fissures of a country that rejects whatever it cannot understand or control. She finds world-making potential in the artists examined in this book, understanding their disdain for normative inclusion as an aesthetic strategy that transforms their own abjection “into a destabilizing force” (11). From here, Alvarado brings together artistic, academic, and activist ways of being and doing in this world, opening spaces to imagine brighter futures.

Alvarado’s project dialogues with contemporary theorists examining the political role that identitarian markers play in the functioning of the social fabric. Along these lines, the book intervenes in larger cultural studies conversations, drawing upon notions of abjection understood as foundational to exclusionary systems (Kristeva 1982; Butler 1993). The abject is that which must be despised in order for the “proper subject” to function, unveiling the fissures of political systems that base their myth of democratic grandeur precisely on rejection and marginalization. In this same line of theoretical inquiry, Alvarado associates the paradoxical existence of what is at once pleasurable and repulsive within the philosophical concept of the sublime proposed by Immanuel Kant. Alvarado locates this “emotive site that frustrates reason” (15), this shapeless object, this incomprehensible wonder, within Latinx, queer, racialized, and sexualized bodies. She finds political potentialities of Kant’s sublime in the inexplicable fascination that abject performances can evoke, and the yet-to-be-known ways of thinking and feeling that can emerge from such performances. Employing negative affects of uncertainty and unbelonging, Latinx artists’ aesthetic strategies generate resilient “structures of feelings,” understood by Raymond Williams as emerging affective links of solidarity and mutual recognition forged in given socio-historical moments. Alvarado connects artistic and creative processes with alternative ways of feeling together, and with the growth of dissident affects for communal survival.

Abject Performances not only expands the scholarship on abjection; it also offers a dialogue with radical destabilizing forces in academia (Alarcón 1989; Moraga and Anzaldúa [1981] 2002; Sandoval 2000). The work of intersectional feminism by women of color is central to the book’s project, placing in dialogue academic and activist proposals in the fields of queer, ethnic, and race studies, as well as Latino studies, American studies, performance studies, and visual culture. The amalgamation of apparently disparate perspectives becomes a strategy that underlies the incisive analyses in the book. In this sense, the legacy of the late José Esteban Muñoz permeates the project not only through the critical analysis of Latinx political possibilities, but also through the performative gesture that stages these very possibilities. Alvarado brings together scholarship that could be read as antithetical to her project, selecting what is meaningful and intertwining dissimilar perspectives. This hybridity renders a dynamic thinking, intensely traversed by affective links to Muñoz’s understanding of minoritarian aesthetics as modes of community formation and social critique. Both Alvarado’s and Muñoz’s work are attempts “at weaving together a provisional whole that is indeed not a whole but rather an enabling sense of wholeness that allows a certain level of social recognition, [...] a reparative performance” (Muñoz 2006:683). In the wake of anti-Latinx and anti...