Winning articles for the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies Article Prize for 2023
“French Kissing the Icon: Erotic Iconoclash and Political Subversion in Deborah Castillo’s The Emancipatory Kiss”
By Irina Troconis
Abstract
This article explores the obscene’s potential to become politically subversive through the analysis of the performance video The Emancipatory Kiss by Venezuelan artist Deborah Castillo. Drawing from a theoretical corpus that brings together pornography studies and media studies, memory, and materiality, and that engages with iconoclasm as defined by Bruno Latour and Michael Taussig, I discuss the operations that enable Castillo’s piece to perform an act of what I call “erotic iconoclash”, which, I propose, makes visible and palpable the fragility of the power attributed to hypermasculine military figures of authority. I argue that Castillo’s act of erotic iconoclash generates a residue—an intolerable secretion—in the image that resists being absorbed into symbol or narrative, that arouses and moves the audience, and that is not concerned with making sense of the world, but rather with un-making the world as we know it. In doing so, it opens up a way for us to rethink the relationship we establish with the dead and their many and varied afterlives outside the suffocating circularity created by acts of destruction and reconstruction.
Theorising Belle Époque Rio de Janeiro through Opium: João do Rio’s “Visões d’ópio” as a Postcolonial Framework
In 1905, Brazilian writer João do Rio published the crônica “Visões d’ópio” (Visions of opium), an account of his forays into the Chinese opium dens of Rio de Janeiro. While opium is often emblematic of both Parisian cosmopolitanism and exotic Orientalism in fin-de-siècle literature, I argue that the drug is less a replication of these coordinates in Brazil than a method of geopolitical thinking. Drawing from opium’s extractive history in China and its versatility as a material thing – plant, commodity, drug, alkaloid – I argue that opium as theory and praxis not only reconfigures the writer’s experience of Rio, but also makes stark the strategies behind and costs of Brazil’s colonial formation. While opium sustains a desire for modernity through its exotic and cosmopolitan imaginaries, its destabilising effects on the body disrupt fantasies of colonial amalgamation, exposing histories of extraction and racialised labour implicit in the drug’s circulation. Through an analysis that bridges empirical and new materialisms – and from a Chinese geographical axis that puts Brazil into a transnational dialogue beyond Europe – opium becomes a medium for thinking through Brazil’s colonial roots and its place in the world among other nation-states during a period of transition from empire to republic.
