Prospective Graduate Students / Postdocs
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Kim Beauchesne
Associate Professor
Research Interests
Colonialism
Latin America
Trans-Pacific Studies
Globalization
Relevant Thesis-Based Degree Programs
Research Options
I am available and interested in collaborations (e.g. clusters, grants).
I am interested in and conduct interdisciplinary research.
Research Methodology
Archival work, literary analysis, cultural studies
Graduate Student Supervision
Doctoral Student Supervision
Dissertations completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest dissertations.
Maquinas y automatas: retratos de la mujer amazonica y su relacion con la naturaleza en la literatura del auge de la extraccion del caucho (1879-1914); Machines and automatons: portraits of amazon women and their relationship with nature in the literature of the rubber extraction boom (1879-1914) (2022)
No abstract available.
Rutas textuales de la exclusion : raza y etnicidad en textos de enunciacion andina del Peru colonial y republicano (2013)
My dissertation examines representations of ethnicity and race in narratives from the beginning of the conquest and colonization (XVI century) to the present, which I call “discourses of Andean enunciation” in Peru. These discourses are formulated, either orally or in writing, by Andean subjects ethnically self-identified as Indian/indigenous. In Latin American studies, emphasis has been given to notions such as “hybridity” and “mestizaje”, diminishing the relevance of the idea of race. Also, Andean authors’ rhetorical tools as strategies of resistance have been highlighted. My dissertation traces the inclusion and evolution of an idea of race in discourses by marginalized Andean subjects. The body of primary texts belongs to different periods starting from Spaniards’ arrival in the Andes to the present millennium: Instrucción al Licenciado don Lope García de Castro (1570) by Titu Cusi Yupanqui; El Primer Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno (1615) by Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala; Representación verdadera ... (1750) by Fray Calixto Túpac Inca; Huillca. Habla un Campesino Peruano (1974), enunciated by Saturnino Huillca and edited by Hugo Neira Samanez and Hilos de mi Vida (2002) by Hilaria Supa Huamán. The corpus is analyzed from a diachronic perspective, in order to find continuities and ruptures in the ways race and ethnicity are represented. My working hypothesis suggests that an idea of race can be traced back to the beginnings of colonization and is imposed by the dominant society through discourses on religion and education. I argue that this idea is reformulated by Andean marginalized subjects of enunciation, who resist it and simultaneously incorporate some of its discoursive elements, thus revealing its impact as a mechanism of domination.The body of the dissertation is divided into three chapters, dealing with representations of the conquest and colonization, the decades before and after Tupac Amaru II’s revolution; and the contemporary period. The study of the primary texts is complemented with a review of other selected texts by Andean, Spanish and “criollo” or “mestizo” authors, in order to contextualize the emergence of the primary texts.
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Master's Student Supervision
Theses completed in 2010 or later are listed below. Please note that there is a 6-12 month delay to add the latest theses.
Desidero ergo sum : on the metaphysics of desire in Felisberto Hernandez's Las Hortensias (2012)
This thesis uses Lacan’s rhetorical understanding of human desire to investigate in greater depth the role of desire in Uruguayan writer Felisberto Hernández’s 1949 novella Las Hortensias. Chapter one looks at the dynamics of veiling and unveiling, of the female body, and of desire itself, which is both repressed into the subtext and expressed on the textual surface. Chapter two discusses the role of the sex doll—Las Hortensias’s privileged object of desire—in determining the identities of the characters who remain in its thrall. The next three chapters suggest that the story’s plot can be divided into two distinct phases: in the first, desire tends to follow a predominantly metaphoric logic, in which one love object is substituted for a number of others, while in the second it tends to follow a more metonymic logic, in which objects are displaced one after the other along a linear sequence. Desire in this first sense is the topic of chapters three and four, while desire in the second sense is the topic of chapter five. Chapter six looks at desire from a different angle: as an intersubjective, socially mediated phenomena, one which belies the notion that desire is an exclusively private, intimate affair. All chapters trace desire’s operations primarily in relation to the story’s protagonist, whose journey through the narrative is read as a kind of passage through Lacan’s three orders—from the symbolic dimension of desiring subjectivity, to imprisonment within an imaginary realm in which desire is derailed, and finally to a traumatic encounter with the real, with the unsymbolizable experience of psychosis. Chapter seven examines the forces behind desire’s derailment, while the thesis’s conclusion reaffirms its guiding idea: that Las Hortensias, by presenting desire’s promise of plenitude and presence as inextricably bound up with emptiness and absence, with philosophical issues of being and nonbeing, tells us something about its metaphysics, i.e. about the very nature of desire itself.
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Publications
- Asian questions and Latin American views. An introduction (2018)
Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana, 44 (87), 9-17 - Planetary synchrony: The discursive connections between the relation of the trip of Sebastián Vizcaíno (1614) to Japan and the chronicles about America (2018)
Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana, 44 (87), 113-135 - Introduction: Utopian interventions and their relevance in the contemporary Americas (2017)
Performing Utopias in the Contemporary Americas, 1-21 - La parrilla viajera: Canibalismo y colonialidad en la cultura contemporánea de las Américas (Chagoya, Dias, Riedweg y Cros) (2017)
Chasqui, 46 (2), 87-105 - Performing utopias in the contemporary Americas (2017)
Performing Utopias in the Contemporary Americas, 1-323 - Reviews of Books (2017)
Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 1-28 - The traveling grill: Cannibalism and coloniality in the contemporary culture of the Americas (Chagoya, Dias, Riedweg, and Cros) (2016)
Chasqui, 45 (2), 87-105 - "I am now an outlaw": The appropriation of the rebel in Adolfo Briceno Picon's Tyrant Aguirre (2011)
Revista Iberoamericana, 77 (236-237), 665-683 - Colonial resonances: "El Interior", by Martin Caparros, and the contemporary exploration of marginalized Argentina (2011)
Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispanicos, 35 (3), 467-490 - Introduction: The theory and practice of the utopian impulse in Latin America (2011)
The Utopian Impulse in Latin America, 1-26 - The utopian impulse in Latin America (2011)
The Utopian Impulse in Latin America, 1-307 - Unreal comments: The Daily of Inca Garcilaso of Francisco Carillo Espejo (1996) and the contemporary reinvention of a national icon (2009)
Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana (70), 101-123 - "Yguatou": The politics of eating in Jean de Lery (2005)
Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana (60), 99-119 - Reviews of Books
Bulletin of Spanish Studies
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