Acts in Inventory: Unsettling Material Accumulation in Hemispheric Aesthetics

Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

American Studies

First Advisor

Brooks, Daphne

Abstract

Acts in Inventory begins with the assertion that modernity has been profoundly shaped by colonial acts of material accumulation that occurred in the even encounter between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. As a relational comparative study of hemispheric culture, Acts in Inventory asks: where and what are the objects that artists, scholars, and writers gather to narrate loss from within the colonial present? To answer, this project situates aesthetics as its primary frame of intervention. Rather than center a specific aesthetic discipline, this dissertation turns to inventory as a way of naming how the myriad ways in which aesthetics is inseparable from the colonial logics of accumulation. I argue that artists, writers, and performers across the Americas contend with the accumulative logics of coloniality by working through and against aesthetic strategies of inventorying. I turn to inventory as opposed to other terms, such as collection or archive, to make sense of material accumulation as a discursive practice in the realm of aesthetics. By attending to inventory as an expansive aesthetic quality, this dissertation attends to how material accumulation creates value systems of relation––and how, in turn, those value systems shape human experiences in the modern/colonial world. As a part of this attentiveness, I consider how the accumulative logics of the cabinet of curiosities (Wunderkammer) have endured in the longue durée of coloniality, and offers ways of understanding how sociality and dispossession are entangled within aesthetics. Across four essays, my expansive reading of how inventory appears in literature, art, and performance both builds upon and departs from scholarship on collecting in twentieth-century aesthetics. I do so by engaging across decolonial poetics and thought, Black studies, Latinx studies, Indigenous studies, literary and cultural analysis, and psychoanalytic theory to analyze several aesthetic practices, spanning creative thinkers from the United States, African diaspora, and Indigenous and Latinx Americas. Among them are writers William Archila, Dionne Brand, Carolyn Forché, Yásnaya Elena A. Gil, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Yvette Siegert; installation artists Amalia Mesa Bains and Fred Wilson; and performers Mbye Otabenga, Goyaa?é [Geronimo], Rosa Covarrubias, and Sun Ra. At times I analyze their practices against the grain of specific assemblages of objects, such as anthropological media, formal archives, and museum collections. At other times, I draw upon cultural texts such as newspapers, biographies, and canonical works that shape the possessive logics of material accumulation and objecthood. At large, I center the ways that the centered works pursue antidotes to the objectifying accumulative force upon which coloniality (especially U.S. empire as an expression of coloniality) are predicated. Taken as a whole, this dissertation’s relational comparative analysis argues that uprooted subjects assert their place in modernity– –and thus, their inextricable humanity within it––by using aesthetics to paradoxically repossess things that elude physical grasp.

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