Visions of Transmerica

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This book examines Neobaroque Latin American fiction, poetry, essay, and performance from the 1970s to the early 2000s, focusing on cultural hybridization and identity transformations. It highlights how ornamental styles and experimental techniques effectively present decentered identities through sexually ambiguous, multiethnic, interracial, transcultural, and mutant characters, as well as metafictional narrators. By doing so, it illustrates the ability of Neobaroque works to challenge normative, essentialist, and binary identity categories. The study encompasses Latin America as a cultural macroregion, using examples from countries such as Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, and the US-Mexican border. Drawing on gender, queer, trans, and Chicana feminist theories, it advocates for a reimagined model of selfhood influenced by the exuberant style and experimental nature of the Neobaroque. The structure includes an introduction, discussions on boundaries and transgressions, hypotheses regarding identities in motion, the significance of Latin America and the Neobaroque, and a discourse on identity as a discursive process. It contextualizes the study within existing literature and addresses the relevance of this literature to contemporary readers, concluding with final remarks on the study's scope.