CLCWeb:
Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal
ISSN 1481-4374
CLCWeb Library of Research and Information ... CLCWeb Contents 4.2
(June 2002)
Thematic Issue Comparative Cultural Studies and Latin America. Ed. Sophia A. McClennen and Earl E. Fitz
<http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb02-2/ortega02.html> © Purdue
University Press
Julio ORTEGA
Author's Profile: Julio Ortega teaches Latin American literature
and directs the Trans-Atlantic Project at Brown University. His research interests
include twentieth-century Spanish American literature and culture and literary
theory. He is the author of a number of books in Spanish, among them Una
poetica del cambio (1994) and El principio radical de lo nuevo (1997).
Currently in English translation are Poetics of Change: The New Spanish-American
Narrative (1986) and García Márquez and the Powers of Fiction
(1989), and forthcoming is his new book, After Wonder: Post-Colonial Writing
and Transatlantic Readings (2002). E-mail: <julio_ortega@brown.edu>.
Towards a Map of the Current Critical Debate about
Latin American Cultural Studies
Translated from the Spanish by Sophia A. McClennen and Corey Shouse
1. In the current post-theoretical scene, where what Ernesto
Laclau calls a "contamination" between theory and the empirical is taking place,
intercultural studies has acquired a distinctive role (vii). Laclau establishes
a positivist solution to the current dilemma: "The destiny of theory in our
century is a peculiar one.On the one hand we are certainly witnessing the progressive
blurring of the classical frontiers which made "theory" a distinctive theoretical
object: in an era of generalized critique of the metalinguistic function, the
analysis of the concrete escapes the rigid straitjacket of the distinction theoretical
framework/case studies. But, on the other hand, precisely because we are living
in a post-theoretical age, theory cannot be opposed by a flourishing empiricity
liberated from theoretical fetters. What we have, instead, is a process of mutual
contamination between 'theory' and 'empiria'" (vii). Probably the first characteristic
element of the post-theoretical period is a prudence, even reticence, before
the temptation to propose another theoretical model as superior, syncretic and
summary relief. At the same time, there is a serious challenge to the critical
possibility of a space of dialogue -- a dialogue less determinate and
vertical, where new reencounters come to play between reading, text, context
and discursive genre. This time that interplay produces another object (a literary
and cultural object conceptualized as process) that shows and demonstrates itself
to be as porous as it is persistent, as dense as it is free. This rush to resignification
is, moreover, in such a fluid state, that it casts a parodic emphasis over recent
theoretical hyper-interpretation. We might conclude that, as the century drew
to a close, the predominance of grand theoretical models was exceeded by their
own conversion into a system of authority. But this would not have been possible
without the intense questioning of the will to truth that these models exercised
from their centralizing position; they wound up as current currency, mere academic
power, and mediatic novelty.
2. Tilottama Rajan affirms in "The University in Crisis: Cultural
Studies, Civil Society, and the Place of Theory" that "theory today has become
an endangered species" (8). Cultural theory has been displaced in this age of
economicist predominance by cultural studies. The conceptual premise of
cultural studies would be based, according to Rajan, on the notion of "absolute
transparency" and on "total communicability." Rajan distinguishes between two
types of "Cultural Studies": on the one hand, the tendency that comprises
post-colonialism, gender, popular culture, and forms of everyday life; on the
other hand, the tendency that includes technology, science, and conceives of
itself as part of the process of globalization. The first dedicates itself to
identitarian politics, the second to economicism. Both forms, ultimately, leave
out literature and theory; they are a simulacrum of the social sciences from
the humanities, and their "presentism" is grounded on the idea of an "end of
history." Although this faith in cognoscente rationality seems to have taken
to extremes the optimism of the legible that distinguishes semiology, it is
also typical of the operativity of a contextualizing reading, whose principle
of articulation presupposes the transparency of objects formed by a disciplinary
field. The demonstrative lesson of this reading implies a political voluntarism
(because it turns its demonstration into a norm) and privileges the heroic role
of the subject among historied objects. But this perspective, characteristic
of the social sciences, also carries nostalgia for a self-sufficient politics:
it turned the document into the original scene of denunciation. In the rhetoric
of denunciation, objects were converted into topics. From the Latin American
perspective, nevertheless, the crisis of the disciplines as methods of monologic
reading has been forging the theoretical experience of critical reading. "Cultural
Studies," dedicated to the media and mass consumerism; "cultural history," dedicated
to the social configurations of memory; and "postmodern" relativism, dedicated
especially to placing in doubt institutionality are some of the critical practices
in tension with models from the academic Archive that, since the 1980s, illustrate
disciplinary limits -- limits, that is, of an objectivity overcome by
the flux of signification of new objects and by liminal readings of the new.
When disciplinary fields tried to reconvert themselves into an archive of genealogies
or into the cultural field of markets and consumption, it was clear that the
normative gaze of the disciplines had lost sight of the objects of anti-canonical
displacement and fluid mixing. Some new perspectives emerged from the boundary
breaking produced by writing, from anti-metaphysical philosophy, the ethnology
of nomadism and speculative psychoanalysis. It was demonstrated again that the
disciplinary limits were not those of social experience and, moreover, that
cultural objects could not be contained by the fields of reading. Disciplinary
authorities shifted to "recycling" with the mediatic functionalism of the "market"
or the identitarian politics of the "marginalized" but these functions were
less explicable each time and more crossed by contrary and residual forces.
3. Dynamized by the new complexity of objects and the fluidity
of subjects, intercultural studies soon distanced themselves from both positivist
documentation and relativist constructivism; and they understood the instrumentation
of some and the skepticism of others as situated readings between objects that
were not always totally legible. This debate has circulated among a number of
Latin Americanist journals interested in a revitalizing critique. Some examples
are: Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (London), Revista
de Crítica Cultural (Santiago, Chile), Revista de Crítica
Literaria Latinoamericana (Dartmouth and Lima), and RELEA, Revista Latinoamericana
de Estudios Avanzados (Caracas). The latent promise of this transition corresponds,
at the very least, to the eruption of new social subjects that were capable
of forging strategies and cultural agencies during the exhaustion of dominant
theories, which had begun to cancel even the notion of Subject. Excluded by
institutional systems, with a cultural practice tested by regional discourses,
migrations of every sort displayed the praxis of a heterogeneous identity --
the position of the subject created in the interpolation of spaces. Identitarian
politics were not enough to map these movements of desocialization. The question
of the subject, its networks of negotiation and its plots of association were
foregrounded. It soon was clear that this was not only a question of the Other
in its margins of exotic and remote otherness. It was a question of the immediacy
of the transient, whose new language cast doubt on traditional ethics now that
an urgent "you" seems to decide the moral fiber of the situated "I." The problem
of the subject has been retraced by Enzo del Búfalo in El sujeto encadenado
(1998), Individuo, mercado y utopía (1998) and La genealogía
de la subjetividad (1991).
4. Certain groups of critics preferred to situate this Subject
as "subaltern" among agents of social stratification; for others the Subject
was cast as an actor of ethnic "resistance" among institutionalized powers;
and in other cases, the Subject was understood as an "acculturated" victim between
"colonial" and/or "postcolonial" forces. A rich bibliography recognizes the
advances in these approaches, even if in certain instances they were willfully
presentist, and on occasion they saw themselves taxed by the good professional
conscience and liberal paternalism of symbolic compensations. The testimonio
and indigenous literature, in addition to the study of the popular imaginary,
have contributed notably to overcoming purist autarchy and ethnological nostalgia
in the name of the intense "de-urbanization"reflected by popular culture. The
work of Martín Lienhard, William Rowe and Vivian Schelling, and Yolanda
Salas are fundamental in this field; but this area still requires more comprehensive
and articulated approaches that can provide a theory of the crisis and also
illuminate the work of popular culture in processing everyday life -- that is
the community of the poor.
5. Other nuclei of scholarly work chose the uncentered horizon
of "Cultural Studies," paying special attention to the costs of modernization,
the role of the mass media in the social imaginary, and contemporary forms of
mass culture. Groups inspired by postmodernism advanced the questioning of disciplinary
tradition, at a time when the Latin American university, feeling threatened,
on the one hand, by neoliberalism and, on the other, by new currents of contextual
analysis, was becoming more disciplinarily conservative. Literary studies in
Buenos Aires moved to emphasize the dramas of nation and nationality. History
became documentary history and, in Brazil, self-sufficient discourse. Only in
Santiago, Chile, after the dictatorship, did the university cross the disciplinary
boundaries opened by theoretical practice. In almost every instance the most
innovative research, interdisciplinary, and creative, took place in research
centers within small critical communities. And although this is not meant to
be a catalogue of all pertinent groups, it is important to mention at least
those that opted to work on studies that focused on the border, contact, or
hybridization (mestizaje) including bilingual literature, migratory sagas,
and more contemporary forms of mixing as a creative space.
6. These and other parallel critical persuasions are characterized
by their common empirical focus, their independent use of theoretical sources
and models, and their methodic consciousness of academic borders. Fredric Jameson
thought that cultural studies was a re-politicization of the North American
academy, but in his enthusiasm he forgot that campus politics can only be classically
liberal. In fact, the political dimension of criticism has been better suited
to casting doubt on dominant models as well as debating institutional domestication
and the conversion of the academy into a market. Also, it has been successful
in providing readings that recover the critical radicalism of works and texts
liberated from the museum of the canon and the archive of origin, returning
them to the procedural power of their indeterminate and never-ending present.
It should be noted that in the fields of Latin Americanism and Hispanism these
contextualizing practices, despite some initial flirtations with authority,
have contributed to renovating this dialogue, moving beyond the monolinguistic
boundaries of recent jargons, autocratic convictions, and the consolation of
areas of specialization. We no longer need concern ourselves with those who
believe that vindicating personal inclinations demands a profitable philosophy.
The biography of the critical profession has yet to be written to include the
militant "isms" of the powers-that-be, as well as the assimilation of minorities
as second-class citizens through bureaucratic compensation -- although this
task probably belongs to the novel. The creativity of criticism is first and
foremost in the strength of its self-critique.
7. Within this fluid and heterogeneous space, critical endeavor
can today be conceived of as an open instrumentation defined by its dialogical
capacity. If its protocol is that of resituated dialogue, then its relevance
is operative, communicational, and its meaning the hypothesis of an articulation.
It is because of this that diverse critical instrumentations have coincided,
which, from philological genetics (based on the updated archive) to constructivism
(de-based in the rhetorical construction), have sought to approximate one another.
Not only has it been demonstrated that all disciplines are the daughters of
their age -- and oftentimes of the priorities of State reorganization -- but
also that artistic, literary and cultural objects say more about themselves
when seen under the mediating light of a reading capable of breaching the borders
of the object, both in terms of historical lineage as well as formal character.
Disputes over interpretation are part of analytical operativity, but they are
equally part of the cultural (and even political) history of such objects when
reread. The relevance of this dialogical perspective has shown itself in the
need to propose new readings of the articulation/intersection between social
practices, symbolic production and narratives of identification and difference.
Granting the circulatory hybridity of these objects it would be vain to propose
a singular method for such an endeavor. Rather, it is more interesting to assume
the creative opening of the field, broadened by trans-disciplinary interactions.
It is furthermore important to recognize the exploratory will of a radical criticism
freed of the fetishism of authorities of theory, transformed into a common currency
by the highs and lows of academic power. Derrida has said that, having died,
deconstruction would live on much like the ghost of the Freudian father, demonstrating
an even greater presence in its absence. Perhaps more accurately, it could continue
to do so as the theses of Marx and Freud have done, circulating as forms of
modern -- or given the case at hand -- postmodern critical consciousness.
8. Even if these excesses might seem caricaturesque, it cannot
be forgotten that only ten years ago, for example, it was widely taken for granted
that the indigenous world of José María Arguedas was nothing more
than an archaic and sentimental national myth. From this point there was but
one step to holding that indigenous peoples could either enter modernity or
disappear. This, however, was a step into the abyss of contradiction: this condemnation,
in effect, proved the critical and moral bankruptcy of those who needed to penalize
such excluded subjects in order to maintain their dominant discourse.
Further, this was done through another myth, that of a West equipped with all
forms of reason, including that of mortal sanction. Owing to its elaboration
within theory, radical criticism today has become more pragmatic, realizing
itself as such through the linking of cultural objects to both the contexts
of their origin and their future. Symptomatically, Arguedas's work has in effect
brought us "up-to-date" thanks to its migratory and fragmented saga of the modern,
its sense of urgency as well as its enigmas. As Doris Sommer has suggested in Proceed with Caution, the bilingual cultural object is the most
fragile and requires the greatest care. Alberto Moreiras, on the other hand,
has provided a historiography of the distinct critical points of view of "Latin
Americanism" that the North American academy has explored and in his book, The
Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies,
Moreiras dramatizes the contemporary importance of José María
Arguedas as a heterodox paradigm (1).
9. Currently, intercultural studies seek to redefine the terms
of this practice. For some work groups, this is undertaken as a repostulation
of American Studies to include the multiple languages of the continent, and
a relocation of relationships of border, region and nation (what they refer
to as the "post-national" as a means of freeing the dominant narrative from
an abusive unity of authority). The discussion of community, nationality, citizenship,
and the role of the mixing and hybridity of identities based not in similarity
but alterity (Ricoeur), has, however, proven to be more complex, despite the
simplification introduced by the project of "globalization." This redefinition
of "globalization" as a producer of differences, is, by its own symmetrical
contradiction, a theoretical necessity of reappropriation. For other groups,
this has meant the reformulation of the long and unequal exchange between Spain
and Latin America as a means of overcoming the regrettable division between
the areas of "Peninsular" and "Spanish American" studies: having become a tired
and fruitless practice, this has dulled and left barren the most relevant texts
-- precisely those texts which are best understood through their modern inclusivity
and mestizaje. It is a painful truth that there are many experts on the
Spanish Baroque, for example, who are completely unaware of its American origins.
This is particularly problematic given the fact that the Spanish Baroque was
stimulated by the abundance and wonder of the Americas, and cannot be understood
without the gold, silver, chocolate, pineapple, birds, colors and flavors of
the laboratory of the New World. And although the notion of a "Creole consciousness" transforms the object into a proof of itself, the practice of mixture (grafting,
hybridism, intersection) can be called by many names, as long as these names
don't domesticate the objects and their open process.
10. In this search for critical initiatives, which also includes
teaching and methodology, Trans-Atlantic studies appears as a distinct possibility,
free from the disciplinary genealogy and liberal parti pris that condemns
the subject to the role of victim -- colonial, sexual, imperial, ideological,
etc. The Trans-Atlantic, then, is a map reconstructed amid its European, American
and African currents, one that therefore redefines the monuments of civilization,
modern institutions, and hermeneutics in debate. As such, more than historical
it is intra-historical time intersected by constantly updated narratives. Its
discourse moves amid islands that reassign names and along coasts that exceed
the process of cataloguing. Trans-Atlantic Studies brings to power distinct
disciplines and different upheavals of the fields of social and humanistic studies.
In England this designates at least two tendencies: studies of new internationality
which foreground postcolonial interlocutors; and Anglo-American Studies, which
now encompass a variety of ethnic and cultural minorities in the United Kingdom
and the United States. Both appear fomented and supported by the principle (and
perhaps the promise) to connect and broaden these spaces through the concurrent
model of dialogue (what some of us know of others) and of the Trans-Atlantic
(what we do not know from one to an/the Other).
11. An illustrative case of these reading operations, which
in situating the object decide its status, is that of Caliban in Shakespeare's
The Tempest. The latest readings of this work and the Caribbean subject
(Caliban: Caribbean, cannibal) have been the terrain of postcolonial theory.
In postcolonial studies the dominant hypothesis has been the political paradigm
of imperialism and its symmetric notion of axis and periphery, as in the ideological
diagram of master and servant, and the ethics of the Other and otherness. According
to Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism, postcolonial studies critique
the notion of "a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory"
(9) and its symmetric notion of axis and periphery, as in the ideological diagram
of master and servant, and the ethics of the Other and otherness. On the other
hand, the postcolonial perspective also implies the historicist view of the
colonial subject as deprived of identity by the brutal forces of the modern.
Through a reductionist derivation, "dependency theory" would later deny that
the Latin American subject had an authentic culture of its own, having been
dispossessed of substance by the dominant culture. However, if we situate ourselves
in an intercultural reading, we can demonstrate that the colonial subject does
not always display such victimization, but rather that the colonial subject
can, at times, negotiate its own margins. This subject is not always confined
to the narrative of the Masters of the moment or to the archive of genealogies.
Further, being a discursive construction first and a political construction
second, it is not transparent to the social sciences. Similarly, we could demonstrate
that in The Tempest Caliban does not learn to speak merely in order to "curse" as he himself says. Greenblatt argues persuasively that Caliban's "profit" here is his moral definition. In his book, Learning to Curse, Greenblatt
affirms that "Caliban's retort might be taken as a self-indictment: even with
the gift of language, his nature is so debased that he can only learn to curse.
But the lines refuse to mean this; what we experience instead is a sense of
their devastating justness. Ugly, rude, savage, Caliban nevertheless achieves
an absolute if intolerably bitter moral victory" (Learning 25). In truth,
this would be a "victory" which would only confirm his dependent and subsidiary
position. Instead, it is more interesting to demonstrate that in learning to
speak, Caliban has become capable of naming. Consequently, he reappropriates
the diversity of his own Island, recovering it from his owner, thanks to the
fact that he, Caliban, knows better the fertility and abundance of the trees,
fruits and flowing waters of nature, a nature which he rehabilitates thanks
to language. That then is the shift in meaning: his passage is from "natural
man" (slave) to "noble savage" (humanized by language). In the face of a postcolonial
reading that would require the most monstrous of him in order to prove its denouncement,
another reading could propose that Caliban is in the process of his own humanization.
12. This is the same colonial Subject that in Guamán
Poma de Ayala's Nueva Corónica (New Chronicle) learns to write
and in Inca Garcilaso's Comentarios reales (Royal Commentaries) learns
to read. This reappropriated Spanish language is a tool for reconstructing cultural
memory and reestablishing shared spaces. Our Subject is, therefore, constructed
through the intense hermeneutics of exchange: European definitions are followed
by American redefinitions. In a certain sense this suggests an allegory reborn
from the "self-taught philosopher." Indigenous and mestizo intellectuals
put this Subject to work not in the lost past but in the future-in-the-making
-- one of dialogue, difference and negotiation. As such, it can be demonstrated
that the mestizo colonial world therefore constituted Spain's true modernity
-- a paradoxical modernity, in effect, that would soon become the political
sign of the new.
13. Following the Seminario Iberoamericano, organized by Hispanists
from Cambridge University (1995 and 1996), the Trans-Atlantic Project working
group at Brown University has sought to raise this field of studies as a new
exploration of intercultural history (see <http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Hispanic_Studies/Juliortega/Transatlantic.htm>).
The representations of the Trans-Atlantic Subject and the re-writing of the
colonial stage, the construction of the Other in voyage narratives, the hybridity
of translation, and the crossings of exile and the avant garde(s) are but a
few of the nuclei of this debate. In the process of defining an agenda for this
dialogue -- which included Doris Sommer (Harvard), Alicia Borinsky (Boston University),
and Beatriz Pastor (Dartmouth College) -- the notion of the Trans-Atlantic was
formulated as the theoretical-practical plot of intersections between Europe
(especially Spain) and our Americas. The topics of study emerged from the interests
of the group and, from the first instant, introduced the present of Spanish
in the United States as a social and cultural mediating force between unequal
spaces. In other forums -- and in particular in the one dedicated to Spanish
in the United States organized at the Casa de América in Madrid (1997)
by the Trans-Atlantic Project from Brown -- we explored the thesis that our
cultural objects are best read by the light of both shores of the language,
in its constant voyage between the migrations of forms and the transformation
of codes.
14. Colleagues from the University of Puerto Rico joined the
working group and convened a colloquium on "The Trans-Atlantic Caribbean" that
demonstrated the current state of this perspective in a region, which from its
origins has been generated through the dynamics of this exchange. "Trans-Atlantic
Mexico," a colloquium organized by the Brown Project and the Division of Studies
of Culture at the University of Guadalajara in 2001, was held with the participation
of colleagues from UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), UAM (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana), El Colegio de México,
the University of Guadalajara, and the University of Buenos Aires, in addition
to the members of the base group. The thesis of these colloquia is that our
countries are not only national creations, but that they are also the product
of cultural interaction with the Atlantic world and its various branches of
a Modernity which cannot be understood without the contradictory constitution
of Latin America. In an age of globality these studies reveal the dramas of
particularity and difference. Perhaps the best to come of these Trans-Atlantic
Studies -- favored by "New History" which works memory like a fertile shore
of the present -- could be the fact that they do not require a set program or
canon: instead, they are an open exploration and a proposal for the reconstruction
of dialogue.
Works Cited
Greenblatt, Stephen J. Learning to Curse: Essays in Early
Modern Culture. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Lienhard, Martín. La voz y su huella: Escritura y conflicto étnico-social
en América Latina, 1492-1982. Lima: Editorial Horizonte, 1992.
Moreiras, Alberto. The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American
Cultural Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.
Rajan, Tilottama. "The University in Crisis: Cultural Studies, Civil Society,
and the Place of Theory." Literary Research / Recherche littéraire
18.35 (2001): 8-25.
Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1992.
Rowe, William, and Vivian Schelling. Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture
in Latin America. London: Verso, 1991.
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993.
Salas, Yolanda. "Nuevas subjetividades en el estudio de la memoria colectiva." Venezuela: tradición en la modernidad. Ed. Carmen Elena Alemán,
and María Matilde Suárez. Caracas: U Simón Bolívar
y Fundación Bigott, 1998. 261-79.
Sommer, Doris. Proceed with Caution, When Engaged by Minority Writing in
the Americas. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.
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CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture: A WWWeb Journal ISSN 1481-4374
CLCWeb Library of Research and Information ... CLCWeb Contents 4.2 (June 2002)
Thematic Issue Comparative Cultural Studies and Latin America. Ed. Sophia A. McClennen and Earl E. Fitz
<http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb02-2/ortega02.html> © Purdue University Press