Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. Evanston. Candice Amich. Northwestern University Press: 2020; Pp. 232.

PRECARIOUS FORMS. PERFORMING UTOPIA IN THE NEOLIBERAL AMERICAS. Candice Amich. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020; Pp. 232.

Discussions about our current society must wrestle with neoliberalism and its impacts: from the existence of billionaires to the defunding of public services, from deregulations of capital to restrictions for migrants, neoliberalism’s consequences are present everywhere and shape the economies of this century in the Americas. Precarious Forms. Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas, by Candice Amich, makes an important contribution to multiple conversations and fields by centering utopic performance art, poetry, and installations from the Global South. 

In Precarious Forms, an accessible interdisciplinary book, Amich frames neoliberalism as the centering of entrepreneurial activities, which require free markets, free trade and strong property rights. To achieve this capitalist imperative, she critiques in her introduction that the state must not provide social services, assuming that human needs would be better fulfilled by private action. But Amich argues that what actually characterizes neoliberalism is the “accumulation by dispossession (…) without regard to social costs” (4). This dispossession of human needs prioritizes individualism over collectivity, sustained by a “perceptual regime that disciplines time and space” (4). To resist neoliberal regimes, she analyzes “corporeal and textual performances that not only despair for the world as it is, but also dream other visions of the world as it could be” (155). This book explores the utopic impulses of several artists that respond to and resist the action of neoliberalism, understanding the violence it inflicts across bodies and societies in the Americas and then imagining spaces outside or beyond that dispossession. The art pieces Amich discusses not only imagine different presents or futures but also aim to create and experience utopic possibilities in the here and now. They are united through the notion of the precarious, understood as “a response to neoliberalism’s flexible modes of accumulation, (…) neither certain nor secure in its attachment to form, privileging precarious life over capital.” (19) 

The book centers on the work of artists like Dionne Brand (Canada), Coco Fusco (Cuba-USA), Regina José Galindo (Guatemala), Ana Mendieta (Cuba), Cecilia Vicuña (Chile), and Raúl Zurita (Chile), each one the focus of a chapter in which Amich presents their oeuvre. The book’s emphasis on Chile and Cuba is intentional since both are key sites for the deployment of neoliberalism: the first because of the coup d’etat of Augusto Pinochet and the development of a neoliberal constitution before the administrations of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the USA; and the second because of the conflicts with the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union, as well as its internal crisis. By choosing central zones of neoliberal impact, Amich effectively achieves a hemispheric scope, connecting processes across the Americas. Tracing transnational connections enables the book to understand contemporary processes, including those that cross borders and generate exchanges between different countries and locations. (It is impossible to analyze phenomena without following these relations.) Thus, Amich succeeds in presenting a complex and comprehensive portrait of neoliberal action and its violences, as well as vivid case studies of creative resistance and collective imagining of new worlds that endow human life with dignity. From the Washington Consensus to the dictatorship of Pinochet, from the maquiladoras (factories in México owned by foreign corporations) along the US-México border to the Cuban exile, Precarious Forms follows the consequences of neoliberal policy and how it impacts citizens across the continent. 

One strength of this volume is that Amich does not only document violence. Whereas many approaches to neoliberal action can disempower those affected by it, by presenting people only as victims, Amich centers strategies of effective resistance and worldmaking by Latin American and Latine artists. Fusing the methods of Performance Studies and Latin/e American Studies, the book’s six central chapters analyze poetry, video, performance, and installations. This wide range offers the reader a broad, multifaceted understanding of the utopic potential and action of art. While each chapter offers insightful readings of systemic and lived contexts. Amich proposes that creative interventions can reveal what is hidden: for instance, readers learn how Dolores from 10 to 22 by Coco Fusco and Ricardo Dominguez exposes the violence in the maquiladoras. Utopic performance, she demonstrates, can turn individuals into a temporary community of people, operating together against the individualism of the times, as Comunidad by Regina José Galindo epitomizes. Art can restitute, or perform restitution of, ties with the land of a displaced, exiled body, as the Esculturas Rupestres of Ana Mendieta proposes. Or it can offer a voice to the dead in the words of Raúl Zurita, moving across his poems published in the book INRI. Amich’s multidisciplinary focus—and the wide scope of each artwork she examines—finds connections in diverse experiences and pieces. As the book develops, we grasp how economic, political, and social processes cannot be thought of without tracing transnational connections. Likewise, the book explores how these artists’ and thinkers’ “precarious visions” act in constant conversation with each other. Through these strategies, Amich presents art as a vehicle for transformation.  

Precarious Forms provides a relevant contribution to the analysis of contemporary creators in Latin/e America. It offers solid and rigorous approaches to analyzing artists working in different media across the continent while tracing transnational connections among them. Its interdisciplinarity strongly contributes to several fields, including American Studies, Spanish, Literature, Gender Studies, and Performance Studies. Its significance is also derived from how it deals with urgent and contemporary public issues and economic violence. The book effectively questions practices that frame art and scholarship in very limited ways, instead of developing expansive categories and cross-sectional lenses. Conceptually, Amich links the precarity of lives with the precarity of artistic forms: fertilizing the soil for the emergence of art pieces and collective practices that create utopias in the middle of dark times. Rooted in a truly hemispheric analysis, Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas should be read closely and discussed across fields and art forms as we make sense of the times in which we are living.  

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