A Baroque Tomb for Severo Sarduy’s Barroco and Other Writings

Abstract: On the account offered by Severo Sarduy in Barroco , the advent of the Baroque is triggered by the shift from the circular cosmos of Copernicus to the elliptical cosmos of Kepler: a cosmos without a single center. This article shows that this transition, as staged by Sarduy, tracks with the transition from centered to decentered structure that marks the shift from structuralism to poststructuralism. It then performs a symptomatic reading of Barroco , revealing the regional theories of the Latin American Baroque that Sarduy’s general theory attempts to suppress or supersede as the absent cause at work in it.