Barbarita Polster
Home Department: Spanish & Portuguese
Barbarita Polster is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literary Studies, with a home department in Spanish & Portuguese. She holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where she was awarded the Dean’s Graduate Scholarship, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Cleveland Institute of Art (emphases in Visual & Critical Studies and Visual Culture, respectively). From 2019-2023, she served as a Lecturer at both SAIC and North Park University (Chicago). Her critical writing has appeared in Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, ArtSpiel, Wrong Life Review, and Shifter.
Her research examines mid-twentieth-century Caribbean literature, visual culture, and political movements through the lens of the Neobaroque, understood not as a literary movement alone but as a series of logical operations that may be found throughout regional cultural projects during this period. The dissertation project will begin with 'canonical' Neobaroque writer Severo Sarduy before expanding outward beyond literature to include figures and events not traditionally associated with the movement: the labor organizing of Puerto Rican concrete poet Esteban Valdés, the improvised everyday inventions during the Periodo Especial in Cuba, and the New Jewel Movement's construction plans for what is now Maurice Bishop International Airport in Grenada. The project will be bolstered by a healthy dose of Bataille's political economy, Benjamin's trauerspiel writings, and David Scott's problem-spaces as a means of trying to hypothesize a correlation between revolutionary projects and their attendant expectations, and the Neobaroque - with its tendency toward encryption/artifice, repetition, and ruins - as a post-hoc response to the moment when these historical projects appear to falter. Understood as a historical bellwether, the cultural texts (broadly defined) of the Caribbean provide insight into contemporary questions of democracy, economy, and society; the region's cultural producers operating at the intersection of all three of these modes point to the revolutionary potential - and potential missteps and hazards - of their (and hopefully, by extension or revision, our) time.
Her research examines mid-twentieth-century Caribbean literature, visual culture, and political movements through the lens of the Neobaroque, understood not as a literary movement alone but as a series of logical operations that may be found throughout regional cultural projects during this period. The dissertation project will begin with 'canonical' Neobaroque writer Severo Sarduy before expanding outward beyond literature to include figures and events not traditionally associated with the movement: the labor organizing of Puerto Rican concrete poet Esteban Valdés, the improvised everyday inventions during the Periodo Especial in Cuba, and the New Jewel Movement's construction plans for what is now Maurice Bishop International Airport in Grenada. The project will be bolstered by a healthy dose of Bataille's political economy, Benjamin's trauerspiel writings, and David Scott's problem-spaces as a means of trying to hypothesize a correlation between revolutionary projects and their attendant expectations, and the Neobaroque - with its tendency toward encryption/artifice, repetition, and ruins - as a post-hoc response to the moment when these historical projects appear to falter. Understood as a historical bellwether, the cultural texts (broadly defined) of the Caribbean provide insight into contemporary questions of democracy, economy, and society; the region's cultural producers operating at the intersection of all three of these modes point to the revolutionary potential - and potential missteps and hazards - of their (and hopefully, by extension or revision, our) time.