The Resilient Apocalypse: Narrating the End from Early Spanish Visualizations to Twenty-First Century Latin American Articulations (North Carolina . the Romance Languages and Literatures, 328)

Portraits of good battling evil in the geography of hell come in many forms in the Hispanic World. Apocalyptic nightmares, frightful images of chaos and death are inclusive and interrelated, yet simultaneously project an exceptional quality (“never seen or experienced before,” “the mother of all battles,” “I am the only one who can fix it”). This investigation explores how narrative logic may challenge unified notions of finalities when images remain unfulfilled in a proscribed End. By redeploying transglobal character and narrative potential, the Apocalypse suggests bewildering complexities as it trains its lens on New Beginnings. Here analysis explores resilient formulas for combating the End through resistance in Latin America, Spain and Latin@ communities in the US. Whether revealed through gilded illustrations, messianic chronicles, poetry, Baroque letters, racially-motivated novels, sexuality and spirituality in film or intimidating immigrant photos, apocalyptic examples explode notions of final moments. The Resilient Apocalypse ironically performs as both an internal defense (a vehicle for mourning) and a counter-discourse to power (a mechanism for resistance). This study argues for a strategy that listens to and keeps the enemy “in sight and in mind,” a method for grappling with and engaging difference by decolonizing the politics of the End. It reformulates an incomplete, mythical, and uncanny narrative into a poetics of resistance with communal solutions and obligations. When the Apocalypse is unremittingly sought after to impose social justice, salvation and reason, it paradoxically introduces future hope against itself. In the works of Beato de Liébana, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Cirilo Villaverde, Cristina García, Martín Kohan, Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, Santiago Roncagliolo, Alfonso Cuarón, etc., rival traditions internalize competing apocalyptic worldviews and arrive at sustainable plans of action for negotiating the afterward. By bracketing the finality of the End and proposing a tension between conflict archaeology and the transcendence of opposition through renovation, salvation or hope, this study reveals how plural, competing viewpoints of the End go a long way to legitimizing each other. Ultimately, The Resilient Apocalypse traces a compelling narrative theory of unfulfilled promise that forever changes the way we engage the other and value the self during intervals of fear.

Julia A. Kushigian is the Hanna Hafkesbrink Professor of Hispanic Studies at Connecticut College. Her literary and cultural studies are transnational probes of immersive works that engage compelling views of the Spanish-speaking world. She is the author of Orientalism in the Hispanic Literary Tradition. In Dialogue with Borges, Paz and Sarduy; Reconstructing Childhood. Strategies of Reading for Culture and Gender in the Spanish-American Bildungsroman; and Crónicas orientalistas y autorrealizadas: Entrevistas con Borges, Fuentes, Goytisolo, Poniatowska, Sarduy y Vargas Llosa.