Introduction

Visions of Transmerica deals with neobaroque aesthetic forms in the service of a Latin American discourse of cultural heterogeneity and hybridity as it pertains to questions of identity. This book intends to explain how literary and artistic works that use the extravagant techniques of neobaroque style decenter and destabilize normative categories of identity with ambiguous nomadic subjects. Transgressing culturally and politically established borders and boundaries, these works displace the idea of selfhood within fluctuating territories of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, social group, and (post)humanity. Examples of Latin American and US-Latine fiction, performance, and visual works characterized by exuberant language and transgressive characters lead us to propose an alternative discourse of identity based on the concepts of “alterity” and “trans-identity.” The nomadic figure appears in these works as the embodiment of a transitive identity, or the “transentity” of a “trans-self.” Subsequently, this study demonstrates the subversive political implications of nomadic migration, understood as physical cross-border transit as well as cultural boundary transgression.