11 - Eli Neira, Regina José Galindo, and Ana Clavel: “Polluting” Corporealities and Intermedial/Transliterary Crossings

Summary

Contagion as metaphor permeates critical discourses from the medical sciences, the humanities to the social sciences. Because of its association with the literal sense of contagion as disease/infection, this figure of speech carries negative connotations of crisis or threat including “moral contagion,” “emotional contagion,” “cultural contagion” and “social contagion” (Mitchell, Contagious Metaphor 1–2). However, “thought contagion” as a metaphor has also become imbued with positivity: “a byword for creativity and a fundamental process by which knowledge and ideas […] are communicated and taken up” (Mitchell, Contagious Metaphor 4). Taking my cue from this more optimistic understanding, the notion of contagion, both in terms of the crossover of forms and thematic dissidences challenging the hegemonic cultural or racial-sociopolitical status quo, seems a propitious one when describing the multimedia works of Eli Neira (b. 1973, Chile), Regina José Galindo (b. 1974, Guatemala) and Ana Clavel (b. 1961, Mexico). Within this volume, contagion can be linked to Debra Castillo's discussion of the “fungibility” of intermedial digital poetry (219–34), to Sarah Bowskill's idea, drawn from the work of Motín Poeta, of multimediality as a “contamination between artistic languages” (145 n.2) and to Eli Neira's “Ch’ixi or ‘sullied’ mestizo identity, a compendium of impure attributes and hybrid techniques” (59). If genre, media, and mode become the key means by which forms of culture (literature, music, film, image) are (pre)categorized according to a set of “pure” qualities, then nowhere is this contamination more evident than in the multimedial, intermedial, or transliterary works of performance-artists-writers-poets Neira and Galindo and multimedia writer and artist Clavel, whose self-conscious engagement with cultural hybridization highlights our understanding of genre/media/mode as a dynamic process, rather than as a pre-given set of rules (Frow 2–5).

Even the labels used here to describe the respective specialism – a notion typically denoting singular expertise – of Neira, Clavel, and Galindo have proven difficult to choose given the highly diverse and skilled artistic and (non)literary forms from which their works draw. While they often stress their status as either writer (Clavel) or performance artist and poet (Neira/ Galindo), they share, each in their own particular way, an interest in breaking generic conventions by combining multi-hyper-intermedially and/or transliterarily “conventional” forms (e.g. poetry, photography, fiction) with more recent developments (digital technologies e.g., blogging, videos, website, online art, and (video) performance art).