The Role of the Aesthetic in Decolonial Critique

Claudia Llosa’s film The Milk of Sorrow/La teta asustada (2009) figures in a polemic over magical realism and the colonial overdeterminations of spectatorship ranging from Jean Franco to Dolores Tierney and beyond. Denounced for its complicity in the Western gaze, magical realism plays into the reality that Latin American acclaim often follows favorable reception in the Global North. The debate has yet to reckon with the ensuing tensions. Indeed, Llosa’s film highlights the contradictions of its Berlinale poster, which sells the narrative of an Indigenous woman who overcomes trauma and becomes modern. Though peddling exoticism, the poster questions a transcultural reconciliation of indigeneity and modern nationhood by oscillating between Peru’s birthing and burying alive of Quechua protagonist Fausta. The film explores these incongruities. It shakes off the modernity–Andean village binary by construing Fausta as a decolonial aesthetic agent who creates her home in her informal settlement, her pueblo joven. Born into Indigenous traditions, she reads the world through them, reconceiving her cultural inheritance as she fulfills her responsibilities and learns. Upending aesthetically inflected racial and gender dynamics and magical realist and transcultural paradigms from the inside, the film self-reflexively investigates the status of aesthetic forms and images and the way we read them. Intricate aesthetic strategies shape its politics at the intersection of violence, religion, poverty, and artistic invention. Uncovering these overlooked aesthetic registers, this essay demonstrates the significance of the aesthetic to the controversy over magical realism and transculturation and to the project of decolonial cultural critique more broadly.