Aesthetic Interruptions: Image and Form in Twenty-First Century Hispanic Caribbean Literary and Visual Production

Aesthetic Interruptions engages the status of images in post-Soviet Cuban and Puerto Rican artworks, arguing that the images afforded by the works studied affirm the unfounded nature of community and the interruption of purportedly fixed grounds. By focusing on the contemporary social and political contexts’ that condition the literary and visual works that are studied—and the effect of these contexts’ on critical approaches to the artworks examined—this dissertation opens a space from which to think beyond the notion of contemporary Hispanic Caribbean literature and art as disenchanted. By probing into Cuban writer Antonio José Ponte’s textual engagement with history, Abilio Estévez’s aesthetic positing of an alternative realism and the photographic and textual void registered in the work of Puerto Rican writer and visual artist Eduardo Lalo, Aesthetic Interruptions evidences the contingency of grounds and fictive element constitutive to constructions of community and politics.