Displaced Persons and Returning Mothers: Flannery O’Connor, Pedro Almodóvar, and the Post-Fascist Baroque

Abstract

ABSTRACTReadings of the aesthetic attitudes of twentieth-century European fascism, from Adorno to Sontag, have established that certain models of art and culture tend to characterise and support systems of authoritarian violence in late modernity. This paper suggests Flannery O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person” and Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver as examples of a contemporary baroque aesthetic that emerges in the retreating shadow of state-level attempts to purify or regiment humanity. These artists demonstrate the capacity of the baroque to respond to systemic histories of domination and erasure by insisting on the uncontrollable vibrancy of the material world, the inescapable tangles of relationship, and the embarrassing, frightening, and potentially liberating condition of the embodied human.