@article{THESIS,
      recid = {7517},
      author = {Colaneri, Laura},
      title = {The Sinister Southern Cone: Mood, Affect, and Horror in  the Cultural Imaginary of Argentine and Brazilian State  Terror},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2023-08},
      number = {THESIS},
      pages = {368},
      abstract = {This dissertation examines the narrative strategies that  Argentine and Brazilian authors, filmmakers, and artists  have used to respond to twentieth-century dictatorships. It  analyzes the appearance of horror genre conventions in  novels, a film, an experimental play, an experimental  artwork, and archival sources, arguing that these  conventions create the sinister mood, defined as a  pervasive sense of fear and apprehension in response to  ominous but shadowy threats of violence and death. It  argues that the texts examined in this dissertation feature  the sinister mood and use familiar horror aesthetics from  cross-cultural filmic and literary traditions to make  political violence more legible in the cultural imaginary  of dictatorship; inspire an affective response in the  reader or viewer that can help them approach the experience  of state terror; and ultimately resist the shadowy nature  of authoritarian power. Chapter one examines esotericism,  secret societies, and conspiracy, particularly the role  played by Argentina’s most famous esoteric practitioner,  José López Rega—known as “el Brujo”—in history and Luisa  Valenzuela’s 1983 novel Cola de lagartija. It argues that,  due to the shadowy, untransparent nature of Argentine  politics in the 1970s, esoteric activities became conflated  with behind-the-scenes political conspiracy, lending  otherwise banal terror an aura of supernatural evil that  exacerbated the atmosphere of fear and paranoia circulating  through everyday life, literature, and culture during this  era. Chapter two analyzes how the film Crónica de una fuga  (dir. Israel Adrián Caetano, 2006) portrays a historical  Clandestine Detention Center using the visual motifs of the  Gothic haunted house to make the political dissidents’  experience of terror legible, while nevertheless  highlighting the strangeness of space and time when horror  lurks, detected but unacknowledged, beneath the everyday.  Chapter three features another Argentine haunted house: the  setting of Griselda Gambaro’s Información para extranjeros  (1973), in which audiences take an unsettling tour through  rooms staging scenes of uncanny violence. It demonstrates  that the play evokes both the Gothic haunted house and the  haunted spectacle in order to create a sinister atmosphere  that exposes how authoritarian power disguises itself and  relay a demand from this troubled past to intervene in our  own present. Chapter four examines how Artur Barrio’s 1970  artworks featuring the Trouxas Ensanguentadas reappear the  disappeared tortured bodies of Brazil’s political prisoners  as abject corpses, making terror affectively known to the  spectator in order to counteract the powerfully obscure  nature of the sinister mood. Chapter five similarly looks  at how repressive attempts to disappear bodies are turned  back against the military government. Reading the  contradictory materiality of Evita Perón’s embalmed cadaver  in Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Santa Evita (1995) as alternately  monstrous and saintly, abject and beautiful, this chapter  poses that the corpse’s haunting curse reorients the  sinister to hold repressors accountable for their crimes  against the dead. Through its attention toward the  appearance of horror genre conventions in cultural works  relating to state violence and dictatorship, this  intervention addresses the narrative and representative  possibilities of genre, mood, and affect for portraying and  contesting the legacies of state terror. },
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/7517},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.7517},
}