The Vanishing Frame. Latin American Culture and Theory in the Postdictatorial Era by Eugenio Claudio Di Stefano (review)

Di Stefano’s book examines with great rigor the topic of human rights and artistic representations (films, narrative, and painting). From the onset, he makes clear his approach: “I contend that human rights discourse comes to obscure an anticapitalistic project that was at the center of leftist mobilization in the 1960s and 1970s by replacing it with a political project that centers on an injustice done to the body by the state” (2–3). A few pages later, he comes to a polemic conclusion: “. . . the aesthetics and politics of human rights in Latin American have given way not to freedom but rather to its opposite: unfreedom” (7). The Vanishing Frame is a strong contribution to an already vast bibliography on these points. Its main novelty lies in the fact that the theoretical argumentation is founded on an anticapitalistic perspective in contradiction with what the author labels as the human rights Left.

From the aesthetics point of view it is necessary to remember that as early as 1970 Cuba’s Casa de las Américas made a significant contribution to the understanding and literary representation of the political struggles in the continent. It added a new genre to its annual contests: “testimonio.” The Diccionario de la Literatura Cubana. M–Z. (1984) explains the origins and characteristics that define the new category (1013–1015). For Di Stefano “. . . Latin American testimoni . . . raises the point of the aesthetics frame and the ‘extraliterary’ desire to eliminate it . . . the logic of human rights demands that we see novels, books, and films less as art than as ‘extraliterary’ objects that allow readers/viewers to share the pain of those who have been violated” (36).

Unfortunately, he does not elaborate much his assertion that human rights do not produce freedom. Certainly authoritarian and tyrannical governments/leaders impose unfreedom but the letter and the spirit of the United Nations documents do not. Furthermore, human rights activists take on them not to solely fight against capitalist dictatorships, but communist regimes as well. In Cuba and Venezuela, with governments controlled by the anticapitalistic left, the record of human rights violations is appalling. The United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948. It was backed by all nations that had endured fascist and Nazi experiences. The former Soviet Union and two of its then allies, Czechoslovakia and Poland, abstained in spite of the fact that the document values individual, economic and social rights.

In chapter 1 (“From Revolution to Human Rights”), the author sets the foundation for the rest of the work and arrive to this conclusion: “the Left has forgotten about its past commitment to economic quality” (41). He reiterates this idea subsequently: “human rights justice does not equate to economic justice” (126). In contrast, the UDHR recognizes the following rights in several articles: 17 (to own property), 22 (social security), 23 (employment, equal pay, just and favorable remuneration), 25 (adequate standard of living, the protection against sickness, disability, etc.).

Chapter 2 (“Disability and Redemocratization”) deals precisely with a new aspect: disability. Di Stefano quotes Saúl Sosnowski saying that the “Uruguayan military regime used ‘the common metaphor of health and disease’ to interpret and justify policies against the guerrilla movement” (48). In his reading of Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden, he argues that it is “the dominant figure through which we conceptualize the transition into democracy” (53).

In chapter 3 (“Making Neoliberal History”) the author takes on “the discourses of two demons [that] reduces both the Right and the Left to a (violent) sameness, even though the military killed more people than any revolutionary group” (73). In any given society where there is an armed conflict, the State controls all repressive instruments. For this reason, we should keep in mind that the victims of both sides are equally important. It is not exclusively a matter of statistics or...