Content area
Full Text
Nelly Richard, The Insubordination of Signs: Political Change, Cultural Transformation, and Poetics of the Crisis and Masculine/Feminine: Practices of Difference (s), translated by Silvia R. Tandeciarz and Alice A. Nelson, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
Readers in cultural studies will welcome the English translation of two works by Nelly Richard that encapsulate her work on expressive culture in Chile during and since the Pinochet dictatorship. At the forefront of the opposition to the regime's repressive hold on Chile, Richard's work is among the most cited on the art of resistance. This transplanted cultural critic from France is recognized as an authoritative voice on Chilean visual arts and literature. Together with her discussions of relevant theory (primarily feminist and deconstructionist in the books considered here), she has helped define cultural studies in the Southern Cone. Much of the published work on Chile in recent years has had a "post-dictatorship" focus on the country's transition to democracy; the translations of Richard's work, covering the dictatorship and its aftermath, offer an even deeper understanding of this significant period.
The essays included in The Insubordination of 'Signswere originally pub-lished between 1990 and 1994 as lectures or journal articles. Richard seeks to account for the ruptures, discontinuities, and fragmentation wrought on cultural expression during the dictatorship, what she calls semiotically "the catastrophe of meaning" (5). She traces the aesthetic movements, choices, and crises of obliterated memory and disillusions of identity. She celebrates, as well as interrogates, the fusion of art and politics and of forms and ideologies in Chile's literary and artistic production. The famous CADA movement (the Art Actions Collective) takes center stage in her discussion. Richard elaborates on the group's philosophy and enumerates its bestknown actions: art that takes to the streets (pamphleteering about hunger), that spreads across the skies (poet Raul Zurita's sky writing), that invades public space and appropriates strategies from transportation, mass media, and the military. CADA's activity fuels Richard's analysis that, as the translators mention in their introduction, is "[s]ituated at the intersections of...