Explores a new form of fiction that emerged in late-twentieth-century
visual art across the Americas.
With Non-literary Fiction, Esther Gabara examines how contemporary art
produced across the Americas has reacted to the rising tide of
neoliberal regimes, focusing on the crucial role of fiction in daily
politics. Gabara argues that these fictions depart from familiar
literary narrative structures and emerge in the new mediums and
practices that have revolutionized contemporary art. Each chapter
details how fiction is created through visual art forms--in performance
and body art, posters, mail art, found objects, and installations. For
Gabara, these fictions comprise a type of art that asks viewers to
collaborate in the creation of the work and helps them to withstand the
brutal restrictions imposed by dominant neoliberal regimes.
During repressive regimes of the 1960s and 1970s and free trade
agreements of the 1990s, artists and critics consistently said no to
economic privatization, political deregulation, and reactionary social
logic as they rejected inherited notions of visual, literary, and
political representation. Through close analyses of artworks and
writings by leading figures of these two generations, including
Indigenous thinkers, Gabara shows how negation allows for the creation
of fiction outside textual forms of literature.
