The Resilient Apocalypse: Narrating the End from Early Spanish Visualizations to Twenty-First Century Latin American Articulations

By Julia A. Kushigian

Portraits of good battling evil in the geography of hell come in many forms in the Hispanic World. Apocalyptic nightmares, frightful images of chaos and death are inclusive and interrelated, yet simultaneously project an exceptional quality ("never seen or experienced before," "the mother of all battles," "I am the only one who can fix it"). This investigation explores how narrative logic may challenge unified notions of finalities when images remain unfulfilled in a proscribed End. By redeploying transglobal character and narrative potential, the Apocalypse suggests bewildering complexities as it trains its lens on New Beginnings. Here analysis explores resilient formulas for combating the End through resistance in Latin America, Spain and Latin@ communities in the US. Whether revealed through gilded illustrations, messianic chronicles, poetry, Baroque letters, racially-motivated novels, sexuality and spirituality in film or intimidating immigrant photos, apocalyptic examples explode notions of final moments. The Resilient Apocalypse ironically performs as both an internal defense (a vehicle for mourning) and a counter-discourse to power (a mechanism for resistance). This study argues for a strategy that listens to and keeps the enemy "in sight and in mind," a method for grappling with and engaging difference by decolonizing the politics of the End. It reformulates an incomplete, mythical, and uncanny narrative into a poetics of resistance with communal solutions and obligations. When the Apocalypse is unremittingly sought after to impose social justice, salvation and reason, it paradoxically introduces future hope against itself. In the works of Beato de Liebana, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Cirilo Villaverde, Cristina Garcia, Martin Kohan, Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, Santiago Roncagliolo, Alfonso Cuaron, etc., rival traditions internalize competing apocalyptic worldviews and arrive at sustainable plans of action for negotiating the afterward. By bracketing the finality of the End and proposing a tension between conflict archaeology and the transcendence of opposition through renovation, salvation or hope, this study reveals how plural, competing viewpoints of the End go a long way to legitimizing each other. Ultimately, The Resilient Apocalypse traces a compelling narrative theory of unfulfilled promise that forever changes the way we engage the other and value the self during intervals of fear.

• Language: English
• Publisher: UNC Department of Romance Studies
• Release date: May 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9781469681894

Book preview

UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL

DEPARTMENT OF ROMANCE STUDIES

NORTH CAROLINA STUDIES IN THE ROMANCE LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

Founder: URBAN TIGNER HOLMES

Editor: JUAN CARLOS GONZÁLEZ ESPITIA

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UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

CHAPEL HILL

North Carolina 27514

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NORTH CAROLINA STUDIES IN THE

ROMANCE LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

Number 328

THE RESILIENT APOCALYPSE

NARRATING THE END FROM EARLY SPANISH VISUALIZATIONS TO TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY LATIN AMERICAN ARTICULATIONS

NORTH CAROLINA SERIES ON ROMANCELANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

EDITORIAL COMMITTEE

Juan Carlos González Espitia, Editor-in-Chief

Frank A. Domínguez

Oswaldo Estrada

Irene Gómez Castellano

Rosa Perelmuter

Monica Rector

Leslie Daniel, Managing Editor

EDITORIAL BOARDS

French

Francis Assaf

Janet Beizer

Kevin Brownlee

Elisabeth Cardonne-Arlyck

Linda Clemente

William F. Edmiston

Dominique Fisher

Perry Gethner

Stirling Haig

Nancy Lane

Peggy McCracken

Warren Motte

Marshall Olds

François Rigolot

Ruth Thomas

Ronald W. Tobin

Colette H. Winn

Luso-Brazilian

Severino Albuquerque

Paul Dixon

Earl E. Fitz

José Ornelas

Darlene Sadlier

Ronald W. Sousa

Jon M. Tolman

Spanish & Spanish-American

Debra Castillo

Sara Castro-Klarén

Cecelia J. Cavanaugh

Stuart A. Day

Malva E. Filer

Candelas Gala

E. Michael Gerli

David T. Gies

Roberto González Echevarría

Alejandro Mejías-López

Sylvia Molloy

Óscar Montero

Julio Ortega

José M. Regueiro

Óscar Rivera-Rodas

María Salgado

Margarita Zamora

Italian

Daniela Bini

Antonio Illiano

Ennio Rao

Rebecca West

THE RESILIENT APOCALYPSE

NARRATING THE END FROM EARLY SPANISH VISUALIZATIONS TO TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY LATIN AMERICAN ARTICULATIONS

JULIA A. KUSHIGIAN

CHAPEL HILL

NORTH CAROLINA STUDIES IN THE ROMANCE

LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

U.N.C. DEPARTMENT OF ROMANCE STUDIES

2024

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kushigian, Julia Alexis, author.

Title: The resilient apocalypse : narrating the End from early Spanish visualizations to twenty-first century Latin American articulations / Julia A. Kushigian.

Other titles: North Carolina studies in the Romance languages and literatures ; no. 328.

Description: Chapel Hill : U.N.C. Department of Romance Studies, [2024] | Series: North Carolina studies in the romance languages and literatures; number 328 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: Portraits of ’good battling evil’ in the geography of Hell come in many forms in the Hispanic World. Apocalyptic nightmares, fearful images of life, chaos and death are inclusive and interdependent, yet simultaneously project an exceptional quality. Where images remain unfulfilled in narrow allegiances to a proscribed End, this investigation explores how narrative logic may challenge unified notions of finalities. Redeploying transglobal character and narrative potential, it distinguishes itself by training the lens on New Beginnings. Its analysis embeds resilient formulas for combating the End through resistance in Latin America and Spain revealed in gilded illustration, decolonizing drama, messianic chronicles and poetry, baroque letters, racially-motivated novels, sexuality-threatening films, and intimidating immigrant photos complete with destruction wreaked by climate change. Through chaos the resilient Apocalypse simultaneously performs as an internal defense (a vehicle for mourning) and a counter-discourse to power (a mechanism for resistance). Its strategy listens to and keeps the enemy ’in sight and in mind,’ a formula for grappling with and engaging difference that analyzes the traces left on each other’s cultural fabric in an open-Ended, communal struggle. This study argues for decolonizing the politics of the End and reformulating an incomplete, mythical, uncanny quality into a poetics of resistance garnering communal solutions and obligations. Here the Apocalypse is unremittingly sought after to redefine social justice, salvation and reality over time and past collateral damage, ironically providing future hope against itself, the crushing fear of the End. It crystalizes what had yet to be comprehensively explored: how rival traditions internalize competing apocalyptic worldviews to arrive at sustainable plans of action, time-tested, reputable cultural models to control dissension from within and without, and social goals supported by traces the other imprints on their cultural ethos. Bracketing the finality of the End and arguing the process from conflict archaeology toward New Beginnings, salvation, solace or hope, resolves an incomplete myth by negotiating the afterward. Revealing how plural, competing viewpoints of the End go a long way to legitimize each other, this theory of unfulfilled promise forever changes the way we engage the other and value the self-- Provided by publisher.

Subjects: LCSH: Apocalypse in literature. | Spanish literature--History and criticism. | Latin American literature--21st century--History and criticism.

Classification: LCC PN56.A69 K87 2024 (print) | LCC PN56.A69 (ebook) | DDC 860.9/38228--dc23/eng/20240125

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023057135

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023057136

Cover design: Ana Cristina Juan Gómez

Cover art: The Siege. Beatus, Presbyter of Liébana. Commentary on the Apocalypse and Commentary on the Book of Daniel. Toledo (?), Spain, 1220. MS M.429, folio 149v, The Morgan Library & Museum. MS M.429. Purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) in 1910. Photographic credit: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.

© 2024. Department of Romance Studies. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

ISBN Paperback: 9781469681887

ISBN EPUB: 9781469681894

ISBN UPDF: 9781469681900

Layout and copyediting by CJV Publicidad y Edición de Libros [e-mail], Cel.: (57) 3045698330 (Colombia)

For children caught in the headwinds of the Apocalypse

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

Apocalyptic Resistance

The Rhetoric of the Apocalypse and New Beginnings in the Hispanic World

CHAPTER 1. Visualizing the End: Passages in Apocalyptic Wartime Interventions

Beato de Liébana: Apocalyptic Commentaries and Illustrations

a. The Siege of Jerusalem and the Lamentation of Jeremiah

b. The Whore of Babylon

c. Seventh Angel: Thunder, Lightening, and Earthquake

Thousands Joining Isis, Despite Global Efforts: The Feminization of Violence through the Apocalypse

Filmic Visualizations of Apocalyptic Chaos and the End

a. Jennifer Maytorena Taylor’s New Muslim Cool (2009)

b. Carlos Carrera’s Backyard: El traspatio (2009)

c. Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia de la luz (2010)

d. Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018)

In Sum:

CHAPTER 2. Decolonizing the Apocalypse while Passing for Empire: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Sor Juana and the Decolonization of the Apocalypse

Revenge, Wounds, Mistrust, and Other Forms of Collateral Damage: The Respuesta

Collateral Damage: Challenging the False Prophets from Within

In Sum:

Appendix A: Cédulas reales, México 8, 10, 15, 16

Appendix B: Carta Atenagórica

Appendix C: Sor Filotea 2 de noviembre, 1690

Appendix D: 12 de febrero, 1681

CHAPTER 3. Portraits of Apocalyptic Mutation: Systemic Racism, Anti-Religious Fervor and Monsters

Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés o la Loma del Ángel (1882)

The Mythical Apocalypse: La cola de la serpiente

Racing to the Cuban Diaspora: Monkey Hunting in Hyphenated Cultures

Racial, Ethnic, Social, Political and Religious Injustice: From Holy Week to the Festival of Turupukllay in Abril rojo

Transnational Fear and Hatred: Luisa Futoransky’s El Formosa

The Apocalypse in Cyberspace: Martín Kohan’s Fuera de lugar

In Sum:

CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1. Adam and Eve type of Paradise in the Branch IIa map from Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid

Figure 2. The Siege. Beatus, Presbyter of Liébana. Commentary on the Apocalypse and Commentary on the Book of Daniel.

Figure 3. The Whore of Babylon. Beatus, Presbyter of Liébana. Commentary on the Apocalypse

Figure 4. The Great Whore and the King of the Earth.

Figure 5. Seventh Angel: Thunder, Lightning, and Earthquake

Figure 6. Photo accompanying New York Times article Thousands Joining Isis, Despite Global Efforts.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful for the ongoing research support of Connecticut College through the Hanna Hafkesbrink Endowed Chair, previous research and sabbatical opportunities at the Archivo General de Indias; the Biblioteca Nacional de España; El Escorial; the Gerona Cathedral; Camino Lebaniego and Santo Toribio de Liébana in Camaleño, Spain; Santiago, Chile and the Morgan Library & Museum, New York for this work. I acknowledge the Yale-Mellon grant that made possible my research on Bishop Fernández de Santa Cruz’s life for the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz chapter through his biography, Dechado de príncipes, the original work located in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. I recognize my Fulbright Specialist grant for work on the eradication of gender violence in collaboration with the Universidad del Azuay, Cuenca, and the Consejo de Educación Superior and the Fulbright Commission, Quito, Ecuador, which informs this research. I am exceedingly grateful for the intellectual support of family and friends throughout this project who have inspired me to share the value of investing in the poetics of new beginnings over atrocities, fear, and inconceivably horrific endings that reappear with troubling regularity.

INTRODUCTION

Portraits of good battling evil in the geography of hell come in many forms in the Hispanic world. Frequently configured in scenes of chaos, revolt, and trauma, these depictions are attributed to the Apocalypse and the end of the world as we know it. Whether communicated through the oral tradition, in narrative, or the arts, they surface with renewed atrocities, conspiracies, wars, horrific crimes, and pandemics to threaten all regardless of race, class, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, time period, or origin. The Apocalypse historically claims roots in Zoroastrian antiquity, Buddhist and Hindu reincarnations, Greek and Roman mythology, Egypt’s judgment of the dead, Indigenous cosmology and pre-Muslim, early Jewish, and Christian rituals. It recurrently triggers fearful images opposing good and evil, life and death, and justice and inequity that are interdependent.¹ Furthermore, apocalyptic schemes overlap over time through frameworks focusing on the search for symbols of the approaching end of time (millennialism, eschatology) and the promise of justice and restoration (messianism, enlightenment, timeless bliss). In traditional apocalyptic scenarios, deprivation, powerlessness, social upheaval, poverty, cultural turmoil, taxation, and a need for revenge are recurring features, but salvation is also endlessly offered. Here narrative logic intentionally embeds the End in rhetorical exchanges, a series of tropes, arguments, topics, and ideologies that stage the battle in religious texts, literature, the arts, commerce, news, science, and politics.² The resurgence of interest in the Apocalypse throughout time may be attributed to a recognizable prototypical formula of agency that I summarize here for the purpose of classification and contextualization: (1) identify one or more of the underlying conditions of unrest (economic, social, or cultural) that affect(s) the community; (2) create a strategy that addresses the issue; and (3) experience the consequences of the End (whose severity depend on social class, politics, religious affiliation, race, gender, privilege, sexuality, etc.). While every apocalyptic moment may project a unique, exceptional quality (never seen or experienced before; the mother of all battles; I am the only one who can fix this), in effect the formula and End are already proscribed in this classic devising of the Apocalypse, even though settings, time periods, and protagonists will change. For example, a clash of groups may sort itself out between those fearing the enemy from within (the same religious, philosophic, spiritual, political, economic, and ethnic traditions that link families and neighbors), and those the enemy from without (rival traditions, political adversaries, false prophets). It is also entirely possible that clashes prevail in times when the outsider is not systematically identified as the enemy, or the anger and frustration against false prophets respond to hostilities and corruption generated by insiders.³ That is, beyond an aesthetic of the End edged in finalities, the transglobal character and narrative potential of the Apocalypse suggest bewildering complexities unfulfilled in this critical approach. By redeploying apocalyptic discourse as an unresolved connection to the End to hear the other’s voice, unhinge and challenge unified notions of survival as exceptionally tied to individuals, time, or place, the Apocalypse proposes resilient formulas for combating, postponing, and diffusing finalities, pushing them into new beginnings.

Comparative conferences, studies, and collections in recent decades rescue the Apocalypse from dusty shelves to reinvigorate or repurpose methodologies for its analysis (Amanat and Bernhardsson; Cohn; Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination; Filiu; Gruber and Colby; Pagels; Portier-Young; J. Rubenstein; Yabro Collins, Crisis and Catharsis; Žižek). They explore how revelation from divinities to humans attracts interdisciplinary, transcultural, multinational critics and the curious, leveling the playing field by moving to the realm of popular discourse and flourishing regardless of positionality. The current study questions the fixity of the Apocalypse, because its nature—revealed through a broad sense of artistry and authorship, plot combinations and twists, deferrals, internal inconsistencies and rhetorical performances—instigates different reactions to a threatening End. The other End of the spectrum is the reason why apocalyptic discourse possesses a remarkable flexibility, given that endings paired with beginnings, or unrest coupled with exaltation, are endlessly at play. When the End is not truly an ending but a prolongation of conflict into the future, the articulation of resistance, whose power convinces the subject of their ability and right to win against all odds, overwhelms the narrative and pushes it beyond closure. What I advocate for in the present study is a more nuanced reading of the Apocalypse through a narrative logic of resistance. When resistance inheres a strategy of listening to and keeping the enemy in sight and in mind, a formula for grappling with and engaging difference, it problematizes the definitive End, blending it with a search for liberating qualities. Select works differently located from within Spain, Latin America, and the Latino community in the United States take steps to break free, decolonize, deconstruct, and unhinge acts of social and environmental injustice. The goal of this study is to validate formulas that frame familiar and even predictable archetypal patterns whose narrative logic forces the work beyond the End, postponing it, to propose resistance to oppression through other worldviews. The tension between the End and new beginnings creates a space to radically restructure through the other’s voice. A user-friendly, narrative-driven model for apocalyptic design of this nature, I suggest, might be conceived as the following: (1) recognize the enemy other’s threat and garner evidence from their apocalyptic framework of chaos; (2) insert your goals; (3) listen to, grapple with, subvert, parody, challenge, or assimilate their strategy to overcome the End; (4) claim legitimacy by pushing through to calming waters, new beginnings, communal solidarity, and/or liberation; (5) repeat (when necessary). The point I wish to make is that while the Apocalypse boasts a rich backstory that engages concrete steps with referential qualities, its narrative logic can also be made to appear fresh, new, and exceptional in each episode inciting different reactions to the End. Where exceptions and surprises arise, they often encapsulate unresolved goals in which facing the same monster discourages some from addressing its power but motivates others to subvert, rebel, and resist. That is, the formulas themselves are not constricting predictors of endings, or why some configurations respond to fear with resilience and others yield and comply with the End. It is their narrative objective that makes some stick and others disappear. The underexplored narrative approach of resistance to the Apocalypse in the Hispanic world is the focus of this study, unhinging fixity by rethinking the goals and structures of texts, photos, illustrations, poetry, novels, and films to value previously under-told motivations and endings.⁴ Given its capacity to push both outward and inward at the same time, I argue that the resilient Apocalypse simultaneously performs as an internal defense (a vehicle for mourning) and a counter-discourse to power (a mechanism for resistance), according to its narrative impulse.

Framed by recurring historical events and narrative patterns, the Apocalypse advances in a tension between its real time quality of temporal normativity or familiarity and its eclectic evolution. It morphs and shifts crises to the political, social, economic, environmental, and religious enemies of the day. What is promised is a lifting of the veil to the future to derive consolation, solace, and hope, guaranteeing liberation, judgment, justice, and relief. In this context, resistance through the other’s voice is explored in gilded illustrations of Christians facing death or forced conversion in medieval Spain, chronicles of discovery and genocide in the New World, apocalyptic Baroque letters to church hierarchy, novels whose Indigenous protagonists face violence, land grabs, and executions in Latin America, films whose protagonists confront femicide, inquisitorial torture, deportation, and certain death in Central America, Mexico, Texas, and Philadelphia, photos of immigrants encountering joblessness, racism, and hunger in contemporary Spain, and portraits of the poor, sick, and despairing facing aggravated histories of food, water, healthcare, and housing shortages in Spain, Latin America and the United States. To that end, compelling research from cultural studies to history and politics that addresses Spain and Latin America filters apocalyptic endings through the critical lens of race and ethnicity (Coffey; Daydí-Tolson; Kadir; Luis, Literary Bondage; Monsiváis, Los rituales del caos; Parkinson Zamora; Williams, The Illustrated Beatus). From that vantage point strategically, the Apocalypse is also deployed in related and extrapolated topics on cruelty, violence, antagonism, catastrophe, assisted survival, loss, mourning, torture, monsters, and misogyny (Anderson; Avelar; Cooppan, Mourning Becomes Kitsch; Dimock; Franco; Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition; Mignolo, What Does the Black Legend Have to Do with Race?; Moraña, El monstruo como máquina de guerra; Solomon). These images speak to the face of the resilient Apocalypse in Latin America, Latino/a communities and Spain, located on the back of centuries of abuse, violence, slavery, and subjugation.

In effect, the present critical work advocates for decolonizing the politics of the End and reformulating an incomplete, otherworldly quality into a poetic of persistence, a complex reality of communal solutions and obligations.⁵ Its epistemic power as useful myth resides in the ability to identify those spaces and spell out those cultural practices that link the politics of envisioning the End to a cohesive poetics of addressing, managing, and transforming its power in relation to others. In unpacking whose apocalyptic narrative it is and how race, gender, ethnicity, and social class are deployed, I propose an ethic of survival that redirects away from discrete, exceptional protagonists and events toward unfinished, multivocal, bewildering frameworks. Significantly, a narrative conceived in power differentials in the tension between the End and new beginnings, the Apocalypse never completely resolves itself nor disappears in time and space. Its stunning feature, consequently, is its resilience, the fact that the Apocalypse is unremittingly sought after to vigorously redefine social justice, salvation, and reality over the course of time. It ironically provides future hope against itself, the crushing fear of the End.

Departing from the last conquest of the Iberian Peninsula by Islam and broadening toward the conquest and colonization of the New World with mass genocides of Indigenous populations, the data clearly point to unyielding and repetitive signs of violence, chaos, and resistance in the Hispanic world. From 1492 to 1514, the Indigenous population of Hispaniola alone dropped from 500,000 to 32,000 (Pastor 79). The search for social justice is a powerful motivator in this formula that seeks favorable outcomes and kindness for the just, and unrelenting punishment for perpetrators. Furthermore, the persistence of coloniality to the present day complicates and supports a discursive and performative configuration of a multiple and complex dimension of the human debacle (Eltit 14).⁶ Focusing on the dark side of modernity (Franco) in a landscape largely inscribed by disaster (Anderson), Latin American cultures coexist with violent environmental and man-made End times over unrelenting periods of centuries. Cultural mediations on chaos and calamity build subsequently on the fact that perverse dictatorships and even failed policies in democratically elected governments (high unemployment, devalued currency, overwhelming debt, periods of low or no growth, etc.) paint a portrait of Latin America as one of the most volatile regions in the world (Naím). The history of abuse in Latin America underscores the inequitable distribution of wealth, health care, land, and social services based on race and social class and expanding slums. Coupled with corruption and impunity in patriarchal states where half of a vulnerable population is under the age of fifteen (Galeano), cultural models blend spirituality, terror, life, and death continuously as they confront each other.⁷ Integral to this is a foundation in Spanish history where centuries of marauding invaders, the Spanish Inquisition, Black Legend, whitening social policies, a civil war and an implacable dictator may be said to institutionalize violent finalities. Similarly, the association of Latinos in the United States with illegal immigration and domestic terrorism, the threat of job loss and abuse of the social system, is fundamental to a system of fear and othering. While the reasons are extremely complex politically, culturally, historically, structurally, and economically, and significantly beyond the scope of this study, the goal of this analysis is to investigate inspired formulas for resistance and survival in the face of chaos. Emphasizing lived experience and a persistent nature, much Latin American, Spanish, and Latino literature, film, and art display this generic openness in a public way, encouraging a debate of collective trauma as endemic to reconciliation or the survival process.

APOCALYPTIC RESISTANCE

Certain areas of apocalypticism and doomsday literature had been previously avoided because of their embarrassing association with primitive practices and mystical, nature worship. But emerging fields have supported a resurgence in their interest. For example, the focus of ecology and environmental studies, along with social-justice activism, have given the natural association with the Apocalypse a boost in status rooted in its hybridity and inclusion. The justification for a transatlantic study bridged by shared chaos and violence is rooted in a strategy I offer for keeping the other in sight and in mind to move beyond the End. Facing the other through this formula, the action curiously produces an uncanny displacement or disavowal of self, which ironically produces a more deeply internalized other, one that is eternally in sight and in mind. This strategy of ambivalent misrecognition of the self in the other or the other in the self distills the character of an empire irremediably and perpetually open to the other, its otherness, and othering. In this sense, it engenders exchange, relationship, and proximity even in conflict. Read through philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci’s revolution-restoration (passive revolution), the strategy centers a resolution of objectives by an oppositional movement that is not completely met, but whose crisis keeps the movement afloat by remaining in existence. The forces on both sides then restructure: those in power restructure their power apparatus politically, ideologically, and economically to regain control incorporating and subsuming the demands of others, while those fighting power adjust by appropriating ideas or forces from the opponent enemy. The strategy frames the enemy from the Islamic, Jewish, or Indigenous beliefs, Spanish empire, criollo oligarchy, military, or elite who adjust, restructure, and subsume the demands of the other, while those without power address oppression and terror, grapple with fear and appropriate the other’s ideas to evolve and push through to calming waters in new beginnings. By facing off against each other, the enemies mutually contaminate and leave traces on each other’s cultural fabric. By erasing polarized positions, what unites them is not the oppositional battle but the shared struggle.

Related to a liberating transgression of norms, where women, racialized and ethnic minorities, the poor and other uncustomary protagonists wield their weapons in everyday acts of resistance (J. Scott, Weapons of the Weak), Gramsci’s passive revolution unfolds, characterized by struggles that lead to renewal. Through a restructuring of the power apparatus, appropriating and integrating from opposing camps, the Apocalypse as social formation similarly refuses to disappear as long as, Gramsci might conclude, the forces that develop within it still find room for further movement forward (Gramsci 289). These forces guarantee equal access to social justice even for those suffering social deprivation and powerlessness in patriarchal, asymmetrical colonial matrices of power. If, on the other hand, the power of the empire is firmly planted where the Apocalypse terrifyingly magnifies the consequences of the final state of the world, religious symbolism and political history may be deployed to better contest finalities. In both situations, I believe, the Gramscian theory of transformism rules, where opposing groups come into contact with each other, adapt to each other, incorporate the antithesis and transcend dialectical opposition (Gramsci 294). In essence, by confronting each other, grappling with each other’s positions, appropriating ideas of addressing the End and integrating antithetical forces, they resist and reinvent themselves politically and ideologically through contact. When we inventory these traces as Gramsci suggests, we discover how they creatively reinscribe future movement toward new beginnings. My critical fascination with the Apocalypse is indebted to this quality of open-endedness.⁸ Particularly intriguing is its intentionality, or why certain traces, fears, aversions, and chaotic figurings stick while others are ignored, avoided, or disdained. Its potential to shed new light on the pantheon of chaos, fear, and hatred points toward a process for survival as an ongoing strategy for hope.

In essence, deliberations between good and evil are public rituals, with seemingly contradictory goals of being at once a vehicle of mourning and a mechanism for resistance. The well-established patterns of confrontation, resistance, and comprehension displace apocalyptic narratives from the sole interpretive sphere of the elite to a popular communal realm. Ritual plays an important role in adopting frameworks to combat systemic inequality, because the Apocalypse is periodically summoned to distinguish enemies from within (false prophets, dishonest insiders, and charismatic leaders), from those from without (foreign powers, political operatives, cyber spies, and asymptomatic COVID carriers).⁹ Ingrained in daily, communal patterns and political, social, and religious pronouncements, they are often so familiar that their ties to the Apocalypse have long been forgotten. For example, while the apocalyptic is eclectic, when inscribed in communal creed and prayer throughout history the new beginning is anticipated in formulas that broadly bind believers beyond the End to their potential liberation and way forward out of chaos. The Christian Lord’s prayer (Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done) the Islamic Adhan (the Kalimah or statement of faith) and the Buddhist projected arrival of Maitreya after the dissolution of the world are three such valuable models. But unlike the renovating, hopeful aspects of communal prayer and creed that guide believers as they rely on open sharing through collective adoption grounded in faith and belief, the inserted apocalyptic is generally more mysterious, paranoid, and conspiratorial.

From everyday market exchanges to daily prayers and explosive battle cries, the Apocalypse reveals what it means when the End approaches, comes and goes, and is not truly an absolute ending, from religious crusades to military invasions, civil wars, horrific earthquakes, floods, and wildfires.¹⁰ When we view them not exclusively as a closed chapter on history, the authors of apocalyptic writings often look to the future to console and encourage not only in the face of an End but also in the unveiling of the course of history (Harrington). Essentially, the Apocalypse as strategy for survival problematizes the definitive End. Motivated by the fear, hatred, trauma, demonization, and chaos of the day, it remains historically and thematically ambiguous. While history is not myth, the apocalyptic is incomplete myth continuously renewing its existential narrative in order to survive. This study questions why, at a time when traditions are evolving and beliefs being tested, would opposing forces turn to the other for models indicating a way forward, keeping them in sight and in mind. It asks, Why the resilient Apocalypse now? Asking why it is logically located in the Hispanic world, furthermore, reveals a specificity that lurks in a less rigid abstract. The new monster surfaces, mutates, threatens other mutations, and subsumes into migrating fearful hordes, insurrectionists, domestic and international terrorists, and pandemic variants, illuminating our imaginaries. By its very nature, there will never be a complete resolution of the Apocalypse (at least one that will be remembered), because the End, always incomplete, will never be formulated productively. At this hybrid site of endings, other possibilities/new beginnings and next steps forward are always embedded. The powers that apocalyptic works release in the name of the End, but also of salvation, liberation, and survival, reveal risks and collateral damage disproportionately distributed at the site of confrontation. They insistently oblige observers and participants to engage and not look away.

THE RHETORIC OF THE APOCALYPSE AND NEW BEGINNINGS IN THE HISPANIC WORLD

The arc of Hispanic scholarly narrative, artistic images, and popular culture comprehends apocalyptic resilience, crisscrossing ocean routes guided by Indigenous history, the Middle Ages, the era of conquest and decolonization, to arrive at the present. As the roots of the Apocalypse spread broadly, the other half of the apocalyptic coin of the End is found in the second model explored above, the new beginning that provides hope for justice. What we have yet to comprehensively explore, however, is how rival traditions internalize competing apocalyptic worldviews to arrive at sustainable plans of action, theories about life, and social goals supported by those traces the other leaves behind or imprints on their cultural ethos. Invaluable to this problematizing of the End is Slavoj Žižek’s formulation of the Apocalypse in Living in the End Times. Here he exposes the End as a system comprised of the four updated horsemen of the Apocalypse: the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (e.g., problems with intellectual property or struggles over raw materials, food, and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions (Žižek x). Žižek’s solution exacts change: The thing to do is to change the entire field, introducing a totally different Universal, that of an antagonistic struggle which, rather than taking place between particular communities, splits each community from within, so that the ‘trans-cultural’ link between communities is one of a shared struggle (53). He arrives at this conclusion through Lacan’s formula "1+1+a," where a is the supplement to the antagonistic couple of the formula, rooted potentially in a formula of socioeconomic class, race, religion, or gender that binds them. With the supplement, the Universal may disown the past of the simple relationship 1+1 and because of this disavowal address continuously the relationship between the two. Without the supplement, the two elements would complement each other in a harmonious whole (Žižek 136). One potential application of this formula of the supplement, I argue, is the transcultural apocalyptic link of a shared struggle against chaos. Chaos serves as a motivating force to engage opposing powers who are already in the process of genuinely critiquing each other’s sacred character and truth claims. This transcultural model is put into play in antiquity and thrives into the present day, where the intersectionality of cultures and races organically responds to apocalyptic anguish and coloniality.

Importantly, one answer to the question of why, at a time when traditions are evolving and beliefs being tested opposing forces would turn to the other for solutions indicating a way forward, is found in the apocalyptic supplement of chaos and its potential movement toward new beginnings. Understood from its very inception as the continuous need for the imposition of order over chaos as a future hope of salvation, equity, and survival, the Apocalypse engages familial, community, religious, and private partnerships