"'There´re corpses': Alienation as Resistance and Radical Neighbourhoods in Cabezón Cámara´s Beya".

MAURO GRECO

Otro; 9th ?Berlin Summer School in Social Sciences. Linking Theory and Empirical Researc; 2019

In this paper, I would like to engage with one example of what I would like to call radical neighbourhoods. While in my PhD I analysed the aesthetic representations of the Argentine clandestine detention centres (equivalent of the European concentration camps) of the last dictatorship (1976-1983), and in my "first" postdoc I sought to articulate fieldwork with an archive inquiry about the matter, in the current UofE's post I am coming back to my PhD kind of work, analysing aesthetic depictions of "complex complicities" and grey zone solidarities and responsibilities in human rights violations (four case studies: South-Africa under apartheid, Romania under Stalinism, la France de Vichy and the last Argentine dictatorship). Nonetheless, in the present essay proposal, I would like to articulate both interests jointly. On the one hand, the methodological approach towards aesthetic representations to understand past limit situations. On the other, the focus in the theme, study object and social relationship that, in the latest three-years, has triggered my attention: the idea and practice of being a neighbour, its usual understanding as "ordinary man/woman" (Laquer, 1980; Browning, 1992; Theidon, 2006; Crenzel, 2010; Carassai, 2013), and the sort of social exchanges enabled in a neighbourhood. In other terms, how the idea and practice of neighbouring can be a via regia to study extreme situations shapings and even perhaps the specific form a community can take.In the present paper proposal, I will concentrate on one particular novel, Beya. Le viste la cara a Dios (Beya. You saw God's face, 2011, 2012, 2013), of Gabriela Cabezón Camara, a young and feminist Argentine writer. The three dates next to the novel's title are due the latter appeared first as an ebook, then as a printed one and finally as a comic. Thereupon, it is a novel, thematising radical events such as the kidnapping of women to be sexually exploited, embedded in the pop culture of letters sharing sense-making with images, figures and colours. The novel arises then a return to classical aesthetic problems such us the rapport between content and form, if every content can be shaped in any manner, or if the form itself is not a content for its own sake (White, 2006) sharing this condition with what is typically called the mater of an issue.In the first section of the essay, I will systematise the readings -both journalistic and academics, since the novelty of the novel- that the latter has received (among the first: Máximo, 2012; Danser, 2012; Golosina Canibal, 2012; Amaya, 2013; and Valenzuela, 2013. Amongst the academic ones: Terranova, 2014; Dominguez, 2013, 2013a, 2013b; Bianchi, 2015). In the second part, I will seek to describe the novel's argument regarding my interest in the radical neighbourhood as close as possible to the immanence of the novel. In the third section of it, following an inductive approach from the novel's launch pad to the concepts able to be read in it, I will try to analyse it with especially regarding to three exponents of contemporaneous feminist bibliography: Mary Gaitskill's On not being a victim, Sharon Marcus' Fighting bodies and Virginie Despentes' Théorie King Kong.I am mainly interested in three possible arguments to be read and developed from the novel. Firstly, the idea that a certain degree of alienation is the first sort of resistance the kidnapped and exploited woman can oppose to her operators. Secondly, the continuities highlighted by the novel between dictatorship and post-dictatorship contexts, regarding general social boundings and specific "ordinary people" behave towards clandestine detention centres, places at the same token know and unknown of being sheltering uncommon practices and dynamics. Last but not least, I would be interested in "adding another block in the wall" of what can be a understand as a broader project about radical neighbourhoods, taking into account not exclusively dictatorship's clandestine detention centres or places of trafficking in women, but also clandestine workshops where immigrants are reduced to servitude and drug's points of sale in working-class neighbourhoods. What interest me of all this -obviously- very different environments, even without taking into account countries' or continents' economic inequalities, is the everyday life around them. In other terms, the invisibilization congenital with routine, the aim to survive. I would, finally, like to add one last problematic "neighbouring", namely, the refugee camps where displaced immigrants seek to arrive in European coasts, in a manner that the inequalities with which we can deal when they are far away become more pressing when there are just in front of our noises: which are the stories we tell ourselves to continue living our comfortable lives "as if nothing had happened" (Echeverría, 1987) when a few kilometres away there are concentration camps for people trying to survive?