Episode 07: The Vanishing Frame

In this episode, Ryan is joined by Dr. Eugenio Di Stefano, Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Di Stefano is the author of The Vanishing Frame: Latin American Culture and Theory in the Postdictatorial Era, published in 2018 by the University of Texas Press. The Vanishing Frame shows that as Latin American culture has become increasingly influenced by the politics of the human-rights movement, contemporary writers, visual artists, and critics have sought to “eliminate the division between art and life…so that the pain of the victim [of dictatorial violence and torture] can somehow become that of the reader or the spectator.” Rather than promoting freedom or justice, however, this “vanishing” of the artistic frame is – the book contends – compatible with the logic of neoliberalism, and therefore complicit with a system that intensifies economic inequality, injustice, and un-freedom. To identify alternatives to this free-market consensus, the book points to recent works by figures like Fernando Botero and Roberto Bolaño, works that insist on the autonomy of the work of art, and therefore on the importance of the artist’s intention, meaning, and political ideology rather on than the experience of the audience. Here Di Stefano unpacks these provocative claims, as well as describing the genesis of his latest collaborative project, the online Latin American cultural journal FORMA.