Earthquake, Baroque: Severo Sarduy’s Barroco and the Tectonics of a Period Concept

Abstract: Pál Kelemen coined the term “Earthquake Baroque” to describe the seismically conditioned architecture of colonial Guatemala. This article takes Severo Sarduy’s Barroco as an occasion to identify seismic structures—tremors and stabilizations—in other twentieth-century accounts of the Baroque, from fellow Cubans Alejo Carpentier and José Lezama Lima to the Catalanist-turned-Falangist intellectual Eugenio d’Ors to the discourse of “tectonics” that, in Wölfflin’s work, precedes and subtends the theorization of the Baroque.