Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas by Candice Amich

Abstract

Reviewed by: Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas by Candice Amich César Barros A. Amich, Candice. Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas, Northwestern UP, 2020. 232 pp. What forms of resistance can artistic practices, poetry, and performance art, in particular, stage within a space swallowed by neoliberal governance—a global system that creates exploitative and precarious forms of work and sociability and that hinders collective organization and political transformation? This is one of the main questions that Candice Amich attempts to tackle in Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas. The book sets out to analyze an important body of work from consecrated artists across the Americas, ranging from Canadian-based poet Dionne Brand to multifaceted Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña. Amich uses 'utopia' as the main conceptual tool to understand how these artists, the majority of whom are women, confront neoliberal precarious contexts. Their strategies, Amich contends, do not stage other possible worlds directly (in the more affirmative sense we tend to give classic forms of utopia) but rather, through an Adornian turn, affirm the negation of the "neoliberal sensorium," thus staging the blatant contradictions and tensions in the ways of life determined by neoliberalism. These works respond to precarity by creating forms that, through the affirmation of a negation, point to the possibility of transforming the base structure of neoliberal realities across the continent. This utopian wager can take the form of "utopian longing" (Nancy Morejón and Brand), "precarious forms of bonding" (Ana Mendieta and Coco Fusco), or "state ritual violence," as Amich proposes in the case of Regina José Galindo's performances. With this book, Amich has created a fruitful space for dialogue among practices from different artists during different periods of the neoliberal historical sequence. The book will appeal to those interested in performance art and poetry and in the relation between artistic practices and pressing issues such as migration, exile, precarious forms of labor, and post-revolutionary and post-dictatorship struggles for justice and visibilization. Her close readings are illuminating and some of them offer novel ways of entering or re-entering classic works. Among these is the reading of Fusco and [End Page 151] Domínguez's Dolores from 10 to 22, in which Amich dives into the tensions within the neoliberal gaze. The crossing of this work with performative strategies of the Zapatistas is revealing, as is the insertion of Debordian ideas to develop these arguments, if at times the author over-emphasizes the "staging" strategies of the Mexican revolutionary movement over other important facets. One also wonders if Amich's utopian wager can be so seamlessly applied to indigenous world-making practices. One of the most illuminating parts of the book is her reflection on testimonio as a way of entering Galindo's work. Precarious Forms creates productive dialogues among artistic practices that imagine paths of resistance during these unjust, carceral, and deadly times. Some chapters would benefit from a clearer characterization of the realities they confront. For instance, the critique of masculinist revolutionary narratives that Brand, Morejón and Daisy Zamora react to in their works, a critique central in Amich's reading, could have been developed in more detail. The same could be said of the very interesting point of the neoliberal individualization of subjectivities—how does this come to be and to what ends are these processes of subjectification deployed? The breadth and scope of the book is nonetheless impressive and Precarious Forms is a novel contribution to a corpus of critical works that center utopia in the struggle against neoliberalism. César Barros A. SUNY New Paltz Copyright © 2020 The Center of Latin American Studies