Cultural Studies
Centro Nacional de las Artes, Mexico

Curriculum Vitae

The global scale is by and large the basis of contemporary theories of risk in the social sciences. Yet the fact remains that the periphery, which may or may not be included as content matter, is seldom, if ever, the place of enunciation. What risk is, how it is perceived, how it is handled, and the importance that it has in everyday lives has been constructed almost exclusively from the core countries. As a consequence, risk has been theorized according to a map of certainties and uncertainties, anxieties and expectations that are practically incommensurable with peripheral experience. In my own theorization of risk, I incorporate artists based in Mexico as enunciating subjects in order to account for subjective peripheral experiences of risk. Hence, I target the question “from the periphery,” not only in the sense established by world-systems theory, but also in the disciplinary sense. In what ways do artists point to scholastic imaginations of risk as narratives that themselves have to be questioned? Against what kind of concept is risk being defined in the social sciences? And in the arts? What notions of stability unfold? If art and peripheral experience, as forms of risk, are a condition of understanding rather than a point of exception, can stability be conceived more as desire than as the normal condition of things? How does stability as a desire mark the narratives of the core geographical and disciplinary areas from where the global itself is imagined? When we think of art as occurring in that ontologically liminal space at the periphery between the real and the possible, art itself emerges as the space of risk par excellence. As a place where the battle over the realization of meaning is enacted, art unravels as a form of risk. Such a conception of art opens up an interesting dialectic with risk understood as a set of possibilities arising from objective historical conditions and with risk as inscribed in reality by dominant narratives.

Paulina Aroch-Fugellie holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from Amsterdam University, a Master’s degree in African Studies from El Colegio de México and a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature from UNAM. She was born in Chile, 1973, and grew up in different parts of Central America and Africa; later Mexico and The Netherlands. She has studied, taught and worked in theater for over eight years, and has published her poetry in diverse forums. As a scholar, her main areas of interest are semiotics, discourse analysis, postcolonial theory, critical theory, post-structuralism, dialectic materialism, negative dialectics and psychoanalytic theories of language. She has written and/or lectured on related topics in diverse forums in Brazil, Mexico, the U.S., the U.K., The Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Croatia and Argentina. Currently, she teaches courses on African history and politics at the ITESM (Mexico City campus), and cultural studies, art theory and interdisciplinary methodologies at the National Center for the Arts, Mexico City.

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