Ollin García Pliego (México) writes poetry and narrative, and is a Ph.D. Candidate in Hispanic Literatures and Cultures at Indiana University, Bloomington. For his doctoral dissertation, he uses political philosophy and postcolonial theory to unveil the literary and film reproductions of violence in late twentieth and early twentieth-first century Latin America in order to deepen our understanding of conflict in Mexico, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Brazil. Also, Ollin holds an MFA in Spanish Creative Writing from the University of Iowa (2018). His literary work has appeared in Little Village Magazine, Suburbano, Revista Corónica, and Literal Magazine: Latin American Voices.
What excites you about philosophy?
I have been quite engaged with politics, literature, and culture since I was a teenager. While growing up in Mexico, I witnessed the paramilitary and political maneuvers of President Felipe Calderón’s administration, which exacerbated violence in the country to unprecedented levels with the so-called Drug War (2006-2012). Since then, I have kept thinking about the relationship between power, violence, sovereignty, capital, and culture. After living in the U.S. for more than a decade, taking a few Ph.D. seminars in theory and criticism, years of reading, and debates with colleagues and friends, I began an intellectual dialogue with the works of thinkers in the tradition of political philosophy, postcolonial theory, and sociology. Most of my academic exchanges have been around the concepts of violence, sovereignty, war, the state of exception, necropower, biopolitics, and neoliberalism. What excites me about philosophy is the degree to which we can reveal the dimensions of violence and its portrayal in contemporary literature and film and its political, economic, and sociological realms. For Slavoj Žižek, symbolic violence is embedded in language and its forms, and systemic violence refers to the disastrous impacts of the economic and political systems of the nation-state and the global markets. Through the lens of systemic violence, studying contemporary Latin American literature and film is a powerful means to reflect upon the paramilitary and military activity in the region during the Cold War and post-Cold War battlegrounds. At the same time, some of the portrayals of violence in literature and film create spaces of pedagogy and resistance that seek to find alternatives that could foster social and political change, aspects of global concern.
What is your favorite thing that you’ve written?
Academically, an essay about Nicaraguan author Omar Cabezas’ La montaña es algo más que una inmensa estepa verde(1982), an autobiographical/testimonial piece that explores Cabezas’ participation in the Nicaraguan Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) during the country’s Civil War. My theoretical framework is pre-Socratic thinker Heraclitus’ polemos and its further elaboration by Heidegger and Derrida to unveil a series of dichotomies in the book that detour Cabezas from delving into the military action that he witnessed.
Creatively, a non-fiction chronicle that narrates my experience as I left Trinidad and Tobago in December 2007. I was sixteen years old and had spent a few months studying English and French in the country. My father and I had scheduled my return trip to Mexico via Toronto due to the unavailability of other air routes to exit the country during the winter holidays. At the boarding gate, during a random check-up, a security officer inspected my passport and found an irregularity with a Chac Mool hologram on the last page. I was detained. A series of interviews with the Trinidadian and Canadian authorities in Port of Spain followed. Luckily, I had the support of the Mexican Embassy.
What are you working on right now?
I am working on two scholarly projects. The first one is a final revision of an article about two Carlos Fuentes’ short stories from his debut book, Los días enmascarados (1954): “Chac Mool” and “Por boca de los dioses.” Through a decolonial theoretical framework, I argue that while the Aztec and Mayan deities that appear in both stories punish the Creole/middle-class protagonists, Fuentes’ narrative voice nevertheless reproduces the European stereotype common in the Spanish cronistas de Indias of the sixteenth century: that the indigenous deities (and people) practice human sacrifices periodically. This aspect of Fuentes’ narrative voice portrays the “barbarous” conception of non-European cultures embedded in the colonial matrix of power.
The second one is the beginning of my doctoral dissertation. In my project, I examine the representations of systemic violence in Mexican, Central American, and Brazilian literature and film produced between the 1980s and 2010s. The selected period reflects and informs how late capitalism, global neoliberalism, and the power dynamics of exploitation have impacted cultural production in Latin America while creating spaces of dialogue among the local and international audiences that could foster social change. Some of the literary works that I am analyzing are Roberto Bolaño’s 2666(2004), Gioconda Belli’s El país bajo mi piel (2000), and Paulo Lins’ Cidade De Deus (1997). As for film, I am examining Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores perros (2000); Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s Cidade De Deus(2002); and José Padilha’s Tropa De Elite (2007).
What are you reading right now? Would you recommend it?
In the fields of philosophy and decolonial thinking, I am rereading Slavoj Žižek’s Violence: Six Sideways Reflections and Walter Mignolo’s The Idea of Latin America. In fiction, I am reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (Swann’s Way) and revisiting Jorge Luis Borges’ Fictions. As for poetry, I am reading Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit: A Book of Instruction and Drawings and reviewing Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. Yes, I would absolutely recommend any of these books to anyone!
If you could have a one-hour conversation with any philosopher or historical figure from any time, who would you pick and what topic would you choose?
As much as I would like to talk with many philosophers from different periods of history, I would still invite Karl Marx to have a one-hour conversation over a Viennese-style beer. I would choose to discuss the derivatives of Communism since the mid-nineteenth century and ask him the following questions:
1) In the political theory you developed in the Communist Manifesto with Friedrich Engels, how would you account for the rise of Stalinism in the Soviet Union, and what alternatives would you provide to avoid the Gulag and the repressive State Apparatus? Would you say that the concentration of power is inevitable regardless of the political doctrine, and under what theoretical frameworks would you explain it?
2) You have also argued that the communist revolutions would be proletarian. Therefore, how would you describe the revolutions led by bourgeois figures, such as the Cuban case with Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara?
3) What alternatives or adaptations would you consider for Communism, given that we have dealt with overpopulation, scarcity of resources, and environmental damage in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries?
4) What do you have to say about the Communist regimes that have failed to provide welfare and resources for all? How about the existence of capitalism in the economies of Communist nations?
5) What do you think will follow after the U.S. economic and political control of the globe, and what is next after neoliberal capitalism?
Where is your favorite place you have ever traveled and why?
This question is a difficult one. I am passionate about urban spaces like Mexico City, New York, Paris, and Tokyo. Nevertheless, I have found very few healing places in my travels so far. A region that I am particularly fond of is the Caribbean: the diaphanous waters on the island of Tobago and Barbados. A few years ago, I took scuba-diving lessons in a coral reef off the coast of Bridgetown. All I could think of then was the beauty of the gigantic marine turtles flying around a sunken WWII ship and the rainbows of fish in the coral reefs devouring the metal.
This section of the APA Blog is designed to get to know our fellow philosophers a little better. We’re including profiles of APA members that spotlight what captures their interest not only inside the office, but also outside of it. We’d love for you to be a part of it, so please contact us via the interview nomination form here to nominate yourself or a friend.
Dr. Sabrina D. MisirHiralall is an editor at the Blog of the APA who currently teaches philosophy, religion, and education courses solely online for Montclair State University, Three Rivers Community College, and St. John’s University.
