Aesthetic Debts: Against Temporal Collapse and Toward Artistic Possibility in Post-María Puerto Rico Restricted; Files Only

Abstract

In this dissertation, I contend with how the uncertainty, ambiguity, and contradictions that Hurricane María unveiled in its wake have been represented in scholarship, literature, art, and the law. I pay special consideration to the work of Cecilia Aldarondo, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, Ana Portnoy Brimmer, Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Gabriella N. Báez, and Mara Pastor, among other important Puerto Rican artists of the 21st century.

Aesthetic Debts is a reckoning with how the aesthetic, politico-judicial, and spatial-temporal dimensions of life and culture are refigured by mass disasters and how those who represent each sphere respond to their catastrophic aftermaths. Situated within the disciplines of Time Studies, Caribbean Studies, Puerto Rican Studies, and Literary Studies, my project asks: What is left after the storm clouds dissipate? And what do we do with that trace?

Table of Contents

Introduction: Everything Changes

Chapter 1: The Daily Uncertainty: (Trans)Time in Post-María Puerto Rico

Chapter 2: The Other Americans: Transtime and the Creditor-Debtor Dialectic

Chapter 3: Beyond Necropolitics: Visual Art as Living Wake in No Existe un Mundo Poshuracán

Chapter 4: The Aporias of Coloniality: Law and Art at the Edge of the Plantation in Mara Pastor’s Natal Debt

Conclusion: The Present Is

Autobiographical Addendum: The Thing About Water

Bibliography

Non-printed Sources

About this Dissertation

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	English
Degree	Ph.D.
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Aesthetics American Studies Literature, American
Stichwort	Poetry Aesthetics Biopolitics Film Art Debt Necropolitics Cultural Studies Hurricane María Puerto Rican Studies Literary Studies Time Studies
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Michelle M. Wright, Emory University
Committee Members	Deepika Bahri, Emory University Valérie Loichot, Emory University

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