ABSTRACT
“Formations of sense” refers to the articulation between aesthetic production and social discourses (and practices) that inaugurate or suggest a new path for the social and aesthetic imagination of a country, a region, or a place. These formations allow contents, ideas, strategies to pass from one region, one time, one point of enunciation into another. These formations are multiple and contingent. In this essay, I offer instantiations of this mechanism covering the modern period in Latin America up to the beginning of the twenty-first century. They include the role of early popular theater in Argentina and Mexico, the historical condensation of the problem of a Latin American subject in the 1920s, the role of the archive in the construction of popular agency (Miguel Angel Asturias and Horacio Castellanos Moya), the extimate nature of the subject of race in modern Cuba (Lydia Cabrera, Alejo Carpentier, and Fernando Ortiz), the function of photography in the constitution of a discourse about social death (Sara Facio and Paz Erázurriz), and the junction of performance, protest, and feminism in recent Latin American social and aesthetic movements.
