READING NORTH BY SOUTH

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READING NORTH BY SOUTH

On Latin American Literature,

Culture, and Politics

NEIL LARSEN

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS

Minneapolis / London
 Copyright 1995 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Larsen, Neil.
Reading north by south : on Latin American literature, culture,
and politics / Neil Larsen.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8166-2583-2
ISBN 0-8166-2584-0 (pbk.)
1. Latin America—Civilization — 20th century—Philosophy.
2. Politics and culture—Latin America. 3. Politics and literature—
Latin America. 4. Latin American literature—20th century—History
and criticism. 5. Latin America—Foreign public opinion.
I. Title.
F1414.2.L28 1995
980.03'3 —dc20
94-43194

The University of Minnesota is an

equal-opportunity educator and employer.
For Emil and Yakaira
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 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

A Note to Readers xi

One: Introduction i

I. "Occupation Texts"

Two: Teaching Caribbean Texts:

Outline for a Counterhegemonizing Pedagogy 25

Three: "People without History": Central America in the

Literary Imagination of the Metropolis 39

II. Sui generis

Four: Narrating the trujillato 55

Five: The "Boom" Novel and the Cold War in Latin America 64

HI. Uncivil Society

Six: Sport as Civil Society:

Argentina's Generals Play Championship Soccer 81

Seven: Hegemony or Ideology? Observations on Brazilian Fascism and

the Cultural Criticism of Roberto Schwarz 93

IV. Recolonizations

Eight: Aesthetics and the Question of Colonial "Discourse" 103

Nine: Phenomenology and Colony: Edmundo O'Gorman's

The Invention of America no

VII
 CONTENTS VIII

V. Culture and Nation

Ten: Split Nationalities 119

Eleven: Indigenism, Cultural Nationalism, and

the Problem of Universality 132

Twelve: Nation and Narration in Latin America: Critical Reflections 140

VI. Postmodernity

Thirteen: Latin America and Postmodernism: A Brief Theoretical Inquiry 155

Fourteen: Postmodernism and Imperialism:

Theory and Politics in Latin America 164

VII. "Cultural Studies"

Fifteen: The Cultural Studies Movement and Latin America:

An Overview 189

Sixteen: Transcultural/Subpolitical: Pitfalls of "Hybridity" 197

Seventeen: Brazilian Critical Theory and the Question of Cultural Studies 205

Notes 217

Index 227
 Acknowledgments

Original versions of some of the essays in Reading North by South have ap-
peared in the following publications: chapter 2, "Teaching Caribbean Texts:
Outline for a Counterhegemonizing Pedagogy," appeared in a monograph
published by the Society for the Study of Contemporary Hispanic and Luso-
phone Revolutionary Literature entitled Literature and Contemporary Rev-
olutionary Culture (Minneapolis: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and
Literature, 1984); chapter 4, "Narrating the trujillato," was published in
Spanish under the title ",;C6mo narrar el trujillato?" in Revista Iberoameri-
cana 142 (January-March 1988); chapter 5, "The 'Boom' Novel and the Cold
War in Latin America" appeared in Modern fiction Studies 38, no. 3 (fall
1992); chapter 6, "Sport as Civil Society: The Argentine Generals Play Cham-
pionship Soccer," first appeared as part of the monograph The Discourse of
Power: Culture, Hegemony, and the Authoritarian State in Latin America,
ed. Neil Larsen (Minneapolis: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Lit-
erature, 1983); chapter 8, "Aesthetics and the Question of Colonial 'Dis-
course,' " was published in Spanish under the title "Contra la des-estetizacion
del 'discurso' colonial" in Revista de critica literaria latinoamericana 19, no.
37 (1993); chapter 10, "Split Nationalities," first appeared as the foreword
to D. Emily Hicks's Border Writing: The Multidimensional Text (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); chapter 14, "Postmodernism and
Imperialism: Theory and Politics in Latin America," first appeared in the

IX
 X ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

electronic journal <Postmodern Culture> 1, no. 1 (fall 1990) and has since
also been published in Essays from Postmodern Culture, ed. John Unsworth
and Eyal Amiran (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); an abbrevi-
ated version of chapter 15, "The Cultural Studies Movement and Latin
America: An Overview," appeared in Latin American Literary Review 20,
no. 40 (July-December 1992); chapter 16, "Transcultural/Subpolitical: Pit-
falls of 'Hybridity,'" was published as "Memory and Modernity. Latin
America Meets Cultural Studies" in Twentieth Century/Siglo XX 11 (1993);
and chapter 17, "Brazilian Critical Theory and the Question of Cultural
Studies," will appear (in Spanish translation) in Revista de critica literaria
latinoamericana 20, no. 40 (1994).
Many individuals contributed decisively to this volume. Foremost
among them are those with whom Reading North by South engages in the
sharpest polemics, especially Doris Sommer, John Beverley, Marc Zim-
merman, George Yiidice, and Hernan Vidal. I hope these friends will find
it possible to look upon my criticisms in the spirit in which they are in-
tended — that of Marx's adopted motto, suaviter in modo, fortiter in re. I wish
also to acknowledge the collaboration, influence, and general good agen-
cies of the following people: Roger Zapata, Greg Dawes, Elizabeth Garrels,
Efrain Barradas, Ana Maria Amar-Sanchez, Lynn Stephen, Rei Berroa,
Robert Krueger, Antonio Cornejo-Polar, Norberto James, Daniel Balder-
ston, Rolena and David Adorno, Alberto Moreiras, Marta Bermudez-
Gallegos, Santiago Colas, Flora Gonzalez, Roman de la Campa, Alberto
Sandoval, Patricia Hills, Kevin Whitfield, Barbara Foley, Terry Cochran,
Fred Jameson, Leslie Damasceno, Roberto Fernandez Retamar, Jorge
Rufinelli, Ron Sousa, Wlad Godzich, John Unsworth, Eyal Amiran, Prab-
hakara Jah, Danny Anderson, Rodolfo Franconi, Beatriz Pastor, Raul
Bueno, Rajnath, Jean Franco, Ellen Carol Jones, Stephanie Sieburth, and
Anthony Esposito. I am especially grateful to Jaime Concha and Guido
Podesta for their comments on the manuscript of Reading North by South
and to Biodun Iginla of the University of Minnesota Press for his interest
in and early support of this project. Special thanks to my stepdaughter
Yakaira Nunez for her aid in preparing the manuscript; to Professor Hoi-
brook C. Robinson of Northeastern University for his constant and unfail-
ing support; and to my wife, Emma Luna, and my son, Emil, without
whom — nothing.
 A Note to Readers

Many of the essays in this volume took shape initially as lectures or confer-
ence papers; others as articles or reviews. All are topical or polemical in
nature, and for this reason I have grouped them into parts ("Occupation
Texts," Sui generis, Uncivil Society, Recolonizations, Culture and Nations,
Postmodernity, and ''Cultural Studies") that reflect a particular literary-
critical topic or area of debate. As such, the parts may be read indepen-
dently of each other and in any order desired. Within each part, however, I
have arranged individual essays as chapters in the chronological order of
their composition. (Dates of composition are listed at the end of each chap-
ter.) My intent here is not to "periodize" my work — a treatment it scarcely
deserves — but to give the reader some basis for intellectual-historical con-
textualization as well as to set down my thinking in something approxi-
mating its evolutionary sequence. It is therefore recommended that within
each part readers proceed from beginning to end. For a more substantive
introduction to the essays themselves, see chapter 1.

XI
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 CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

There is a certain sense in which the act of writing and reading about Latin
America, from a location outside it, has never required an apology. At least
this has been so when the "outside" was "inside" metropolitan Europe and
North America. This seemingly natural and spontaneous availability of Latin
America as a subject for discourse is no doubt partly a holdover from the
colonial past and the impression, evident in the earliest texts of "discov-
ery" and conquest, that here was a place so different, and yet at the same
time so integral with itself, so nearly planetary (Orbis novus), that its very
being was intrinsic proof of its noteworthiness.
Certainly, in directing their communiques and progress reports back to
the Spanish and Portuguese authorities, those first "Latin Americanists"
never gave much thought to what, from a strictly intellectual and secular
standpoint, authorized them and not others to convey the knowledge of the
New World. Such authority resided in a sheer, overwhelming act of pres-
ence. (In texts such as Columbus's letter to Luis de Santangel, or Cortes's
Cartas de reladon, we thus have what are, from a certain formal-epistemo-
logical standpoint, postconquest Latin America's first testimonies.) Unsur-
prisingly, the possibility of simply citing the local authorities — indeed, the
very possibility that ultimate authority could be local—did not occur to
"outside observers" such as these.' Even when the speech of a Moctezuma

i
 2 INTRODUCTION

or an Inca Viracocha is re-created, to considerable, often brilliantly dramatic

effect in the narratives of Bernal Diaz and Inca Garcilaso, these are still the
words of characters within a narrative that they themselves can scarcely be
conceived as having read, much less as having written. Colonizer and colo-
nized, "North" and "South," figure not only on a spatial map but — to use
a term employed in one of the essays in this volume (see chapter 2) and
with apologies to Fredric Jameson — on a "hermeneutic map" as well, a
"map" that already plots the South as intrinsically meaningful but beyond
whose coordinates all possibility of meaning is canceled.
Much of what the North reads or writes of the South —or, as frequently
happens, what it does not read or write — continues to derive its authority
from this same wellspring of colonial "common sense." Think of the me-
dia image of Latin America and Latin Americans in their various and cus-
tomary formats, especially "news" and "travel." Here the attraction of the
exotic remains a spontaneous one — but always and only as framed within
a northern gaze at a South that necessarily lacks a reciprocal authority.2 As
this "South," Latin America has a secure, even familiar place within north-
ern mainstream culture — so much so that when one reports to a stranger
a professional or intellectual interest in Latin America, this does not cus-
tomarily evoke any surprise or require further explanation.
But on another, if often unconscious, level, writing and reading "North
by South" has had continually to pose the question of its own authority.
Even the most exoticist of gazes presupposes the exotic as an object whose
legitimacy must at least equal that of the domestic. Thus, in directing its at-
tention elsewhere, the North necessarily concedes something about its own
sense of identity and authority, its own position on the hermeneutic map.
The question of the object's legitimacy—why read this and not something
else? — cannot finally be detached from the question of self-legitimation:
what, at the outset, authorizes or justifies the subject as the reader/writer
of this object? Thus, in reading "North by South," the North, concurrently,
rereads itself.
The question then arises: what is and has been the history of this reread-
ing? What, concretely, have been the modes — or narratives — of self-au-
thorization evoked by metropolitan "readers" of Latin America, both in its
texts and as "text"? How has the North both represented and sought to au-
thorize its own intellectual and "readerly" interest in the South?
1 am unaware of any explicit efforts to pose, much less answer this ques-
tion.3 My purpose here, however, is not to answer it in any systematic way
but rather to reflect from a quasi-autobiographical standpoint—and by
 INTRODUCTION 3

way of introduction to the essays that follow—on the problem of self-

authorization as it has borne on both my own work in Latin American lit-
erary and cultural criticism (reflected in the essays in this volume) and on
such work as generally undertaken within the North American academy.
My sense here— and I think those who share both my interests and my in-
stitutional relation to the field will agree with me at least to this extent—
is that during the past two decades or so a significant revision has occurred
in the way the North (especially the North American and Western Euro-
pean professional reader and critic of Latin American literature and cul-
ture) has sought to authorize itself as a place for reading southern texts.
This is not in any way to suggest that the South does not face the same
necessity for self-authorization in reading itself or that the need to devise
new modes of legitimation has not been just as strongly felt within Latin
America. About this, however, my own range of experience does not en-
able or "authorize" me to say very much.
Like that of many northern Latin Americanists of roughly my genera-
tion, my own inauguration as a reader of southern texts begins with the
"boom." Easily available English translations of Borges, Garcia Marque?.,
Cortazar, and other authors served me as introductions not only to Latin
American literature but to the very presence of Latin America itself as other
than some vague set of tropicalized images first conveyed, in my case, by
mass culture (for example, my parents' Ima Sumac recordings). So far as I
am able to reconstruct it, a public education in the North American mid-
west during the late 1950s and early 1960s operated on the basis of a gross,
metonymic reduction of Latin America (if, in fact, the term was ever used)
to Mexico (more precisely to Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Tamaulipas,
and Nuevo Leon, since it was really only a northern Mexican land- and cul-
turescape of sombreros, saguaros, and hot chiles, together with the generic
siesta and bullfight, that counted as "Mexican").
To Mexico, of course, was added Cuba after 1959. But here the demonolo-
gies of anticommunism and the Cold War quickly succeeded in putting Cuba
on a hermeneutic map all its own. My reading of Borges, followed by Cor-
tazar, Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, and Fuentes, may have done little, at first,
to induce a more integrated, historicized, and de-Disneyfied consciousness
of Latin America. Initial encounters with these authors occurred, signifi-
cantly, as part of an adolescent-modernist cult of Joycean and Faulknerian
hero worship, into which the boom texts themselves, above all Hopscotch,
were recruited less as texts in their own right than as fellow cultists. But
the hook was set, and there followed not only further reading of whatever
 4 INTRODUCTION

was available in English (enter Rulfo, Onetti, Carpentier, Amado) but travel
to the South itself and an anarchic assimilation —first readerly and literary
and only subsequently oral and conversational—of Spanish, with Portuguese
and a previously unimagined and unimaginable experience of "transcul-
turation" to follow.
It almost smacks of conspiracy theory to blame all of this on the boom;
for a somewhat later generation than my own, the Nicaraguan revolution
and the Salvadoran civil war were to become the catalyst for a similar ex-
perience of encounter and transformation. Clearly, my own literary "dis-
covery" of Latin America reflected, without my then being aware of it, an
emergent historical and political conjuncture in which the North-South
articulation was to become increasingly impossible to keep hidden. (For
me, it was the 1973 coup in Chile that first made this articulation fully
conscious.) But, neither, I think, was what now seems the rather narrowly
aesthetic view of the South afforded by the boom texts a pure accident.
The genuine power of these texts to transform a certain type of northern
reader reflects not only what was present in the texts but what was already
present—and absent — in this reader "before reading."4
I think there can be no question that the most influential of these read-
erly predispositions was simply the heightened consciousness of anticolo-
nialism vis-a-vis both Latin America and the "third world" generally. Aijaz
Ahmad, writing in one of the splendid essays of his 1992 work In Theory,
has referred to the years 1965-75 as marking the "rise and fall" of a North
American radicalism produced as a "direct consequence" of anti-imperialist
struggles, especially the Vietnam War.5 It is surely not an accident that this
same decade likewise marks off the period in which the Latin American
boom fictions conquered and, so to speak, decolonized a significant block
of readers in North America. That these years also take in the most radical
phase of the Cuban Revolution makes it plausible to single out the events
in Cuba as, among the various foci of anti-imperialist conflict, the most
decisive in shaping a readerly reception of the boom. Indeed, as any num-
ber of observers have confirmed, the impact of the Cuban Revolution is
inseparable from the boom's conquest of Latin America.6 But my sense here,
both personal and historical, is that Vietnam was the crucial experience
for most North American readers. While it had its adherents from the out-
set in the United States, the Cuban Revolution could not initially break free
of its hegemonic representation within Cold War anticommunist ideology.
It took the war in Vietnam and the massive opposition it generated to shat-
ter, for those like me, the grip of this hegemony and thus make possible both
 INTRODUCTION 5

the political discovery of Cuba and the literary discovery of Latin America
via the boom.7
With reference, then, to the question of self-authorization, we may per-
haps state it as a general thesis here that northern readers of Latin Ameri-
can literature, beginning in the mid-1960s, justified their own readerly in-
terest as a part of a larger movement—and narrative — of decolonization.
On this level, it mattered little or not at all what properties texts such as
Hopscotch or One Hundred Years of Solitude displayed in a conventionally
literary sense (theme, plot, characterization, and so on) so long as their
"southernness" was adequately conveyed. One read them, at least in part,
simply as a way of recognizing as a reader that the South existed and that
this existence directly involved the North. One read them to redress a past
omission, a past history of colonial and imperial neglect and prejudice, of
which the typical practice had been, precisely, not to read the South, to
presuppose a South as written about but never as, so to speak, writing back.
Reasoning in these terms, 1 think it could be argued that reading the boom
was not only reading Latin America but "reading," in the sense just indi-
cated, the decolonizing world itself. And perhaps one could specify even
further and say that by 1968, in North America, reading the boom was also
a way of "reading" Vietnam.
Taking this line of thinking to an extreme, one might suppose that the
specific kinds of literary qualities associated with the boom — say, "magical
realism" — were in fact irrelevant, that what justified a northern interest in
these texts was exclusively their non-northernness. Even their Latin American
origins might, thus conceived, be considered a mere contingency owing to
Latin America's culturally intermediate status between the European/
North American metropolis and the seemingly truer, more genuinely non-
European South of Asia and Africa. But this would be to take too much from
the boom texts themselves and to draw attention from what is, as I see it, an-
other no less crucial aspect of the "North by South" reader's self-authorization.
This has to do with the relationship of the boom to modernism, above
all to what was, at the time of the North's "discovery" of these works, the as
yet unlapsed authority of the high-modernist canon. I had referred earlier, in
a spirit of burlesque, to my own prior need as a reader to bestow a Joycean
or Faulknerian aura on texts such as Hopscotch and One Hundred Years of
Solitude* The infantile and parochial consciousness such a need implied
now seems embarrassingly obvious, notwithstanding the fact that authors
such as Cortazar and Garcia Marquez clearly did, at least early on, regard them-
selves as aspirants to the Euro-North American high-modernist pantheon.
 6 INTRODUCTION

But this need, however illegitimate it may seem now, points to what was,
in my view, a kind of general rule observed by northern readers of the
boom — namely, to recognize the legitimacy of the southern texts but only
insofar as this did not require the reader to question the legitimacy or, bet-
ter, canonicityof the high-modernist tradition itself. The cultural and ide-
ological negotiation enacted here is complex, and its logic needs to be
carefully unraveled. For it is not a matter of the North simply throwing
open the portals of the canon to the South in a simultaneous act of contri-
tion and anti-imperial solidarity—-genuine, on a certain plane, as these
latter sentiments surely were and are. Or rather, if it is an opening to the
South that takes place, it is an opening as much designed to reinforce and
prolong the viability and legitimacy of the modernist canon itself as to grant
legitimacy to a previously extracanonical body of literature.
Missing in the scenario in which the North, swayed by the pressure of
anti-imperialist movements, bestows canonicity on the South (however se-
lectively) is the fact that, at least as I see it, this same high-modernist canon
was itself threatened by the general sweep of social, political, and cultural
insurgency unleashed by the war in Vietnam. It was not just that Cortazar
and Garcia Marquez "reminded" the northern reader of Joyce and Faulkner,
although a huge amount of the routine literary scholarship produced in
the North during this period (and still) reduces to little more than the de-
tailed "proofs" of this sort of resemblance. The important fact is that the
northern reader, whether consciously or not, was prompted to see in the
boom texts a promise to revitalize and revalorize the aesthetic culture of
modernism and the avant-garde. Just as in the immediate postwar years, a
North American modernism, showcased in authors such as Faulkner and
in artistic schools such as Abstract Expressionism had seemed to give new
energy and purpose to the "historical avant-garde" of prewar Europe, so
now a southern, Latin American modernism seemed poised to offer an anal-
ogous transfusion of "frontier" energy to the North as a whole.9 The fact
that certain of the boom author-celebrities, especially Fuentes and Cortazar,
actively encouraged this quasi-revolutionary interpretation of themselves
is not, 1 think, required to explain what was already the eagerness of north-
ern readers for new modernist revolutionaries. With the crisis of North
American imperial culture, if not yet its accelerating decline, now visibly
exposed by Vietnam, the modernist credentials of this culture could not
help but suffer a corresponding loss of validity. Modernism — understood
here in Jlirgen Habermas's sense of the aesthetically enabled experience of
"continuous renewal" — found itself in the ironic position of needing to
 INTRODUCTION /

resituate itself on the map so that what was, in theory, a purely temporal
experience could continue to be possible.10
To sum up what we have been saying, then — the new sort of "North by
South" reader who emerges, approximately speaking in the years 1965-75,
authorizes his or her reading in a manner that is, in the last analysis, pecu-
liarly contradictory. In proposing what we might denote as a North-South
canonical expansion and reintegration, at least with respect to the tradition
of the Latin American boom, the northern reader seeks to justify this inte-
gration directly on a political and ethical plane as an affirmative response
to the historical movements of decolonization and anti-imperialism. The
act of literary recognition is tantamount to an act of self-authorization via
spiritual and vicarious participation in a larger, emancipatory process tak-
ing place in the South. This, to put it bluntly, marks the progressive side of
this new reading. But the process of canonical expansion and reintegration
is, at the same time, a restatement of an exclusively modernist claim to
canonicity itself. A parity of North and South is proposed, but this parity
is strictly literary, defined against a universal aesthetic standard embodied
in modernism. In this way, the new "North by South" reading reveals its
conservative if not regressive side. To coin a somewhat inelegant phrase,
the emergent northern reader of Latin American texts seeks the authority
for reading in a universal principle of canonical decolonization.
One could go on at length about this practice of readerly self-authoriza-
tion, but the important point for our present purposes (and here I will per-
mit my own autobiographical perspective to merge into that of the larger in-
tellectual and institutional life experience) is that, beginning in roughly the
mid-1970s, at least in the North American academy, the ironies of "canon-
ical decolonization" begin to weigh more and more heavily on the north-
ern reader. This is a time during which, partly as a result of the increasing
influence of literary theory (especially poststructuralism), the integrity and
legitimacy not only of the high-modernist canon but of the principle of
canonicity itself come into question." By the early 1980s the question of
postmodernity has begun to take the theoretical wing of the humanities by
storm, sparking a "debate" — and a veritable culture industry of its own —
that is still under way.
Suffice it to say that, by the middle of the decade at the latest, the almost
serene demonstration of faith in high modernism that underpins "canoni-
cal decolonization" and the first self-authorizing readings of the boom has
become a thing of the past, liable to attack both for its aestheticism and for its
"Eurocentrism." Within the field of Latin American literary studies itself,
 8 INTRODUCTION

there is a marked shift away from the boom — which is declared "over" in
any case—and in the direction of other "post-boom" sorts of texts. Chief in
importance among these are the so-called testimonial narratives, which
had begun to draw increasing attention after the publication of Miguel Bar-
net's Biografia de un cimarron in 1967 and the 1970 decision of Casa de las
Americas, Cuba's most influential literary and cultural institution, to grant
one of its annual prizes in the testimonio category. Meanwhile, along with
interest in the "post-boom" phenomenon of the testimonial, and no doubt
partly as a result of it, there is also a veritable re-"discovery" of Latin Amer-
ican colonial literature in northern academic circles.12 The tendency—
noted recently by Doris Sommer13 — for the boom to collapse all of Latin
American literary history into itself such that earlier periods, like the colo-
nial or the nineteenth century, are treated either as nonexistent or as just
inferior versions of the boom, is apparently brought up short, and a kind
of antiboom or "countercanon," crowned by the seemingly non- or even
antiaesthetic texts of the testimonial and the colonial, is inaugurated.14
No one, I think, who has worked within the field of Latin American lit-
erary or cultural studies over the past decade and a half can have escaped
the pull of this new, "countercanonical" trend, whatever his or her individ-
ual interests and preferences. With the controversy over "PC" and the cur-
riculum wars at universities such as Stanford in the early 1990s, the name
of one testimonialista (Rigoberta Menchii) even became a household word
of sorts outside the field proper. And not a little "testimonial theory" has
been produced in the tacit effort to explain, both historically and cultur-
ally, the shifting of "moments" from boom to testimonial. I am thinking
here, in particular, of essays by John Beverley, Doris Sommer, and George
Yiidice, work to which I wish to turn shortly in greater detail. The overall,
and perhaps more controversial, point I want to emphasize here, however,
is that this countercanonical development, notwithstanding what appears
to be its status as a "paradigm shift," indicates not the supersession of the
older, boom-fixated mode of readerly self-authorization but rather its cri-
sis. The "new" northern reader of Latin American texts, corresponding to
the moment of the testimonial, is in many ways still the old reader of the
boom — but a reader who now questions what had before seemed the le-
gitimating basis of his or her own interest in a previously unread "South."
I think this state of crisis can be traced through a metacritical reading
of the testimonial theory and criticism produced in the northern academy.
A significant amount of such work already exists, and no comprehensive
 INTRODUCTION 9

account of it can be offered here. Instead I will limit consideration to a

group of essays by Beverley, Sommer, and Yiidice that have been among
the most widely read and self-consciously "theoretical" contributions to
this area of discussion and debate.
Beverley's essay "The Margin at the Center: On Testimonio" is perhaps
the most ambitious and programmatic in this respect.15 Here he explicitly
evokes the testimonial as a "democratic and egalitarian form of narrative"
(6), in contrast to the boom. The testimonial establishes a "new kind of re-
lation between narrator and reader" (18), one of "complicity," which in-
volves the reader in an "identification ... with a popular cause" (19). This
is, according to Beverley, a radically new relation, absent from ethnographic
"oral histories" as well as from conventional forms of autobiography, which
either lack the testimonial's organic connection to movements for radical
social change or (in the case of autobiography) cast the narrator as specifi-
cally a "writer." In the case of a testimonial narrator such as Rigoberta
Menchii (and it is always, preeminently, Menchu's narrative that seems to
provide the paradigm for most theoretical statements on the testimonial),
the relative privilege and exalted individuality accorded to the writer is re-
fused. Menchu's testimony witnesses a virtual "erasure" of the authorial
function itself, the social constitution of authorship now consisting "not
in its uniqueness but in its ability to stand for the experience of [the] com-
munity as a whole" (23). So radical is the departure here, in fact, that the
testimonial "puts into question" literature itself as an "existing institution,"
inaugurating a "new postfictional form of literature" that reflects an "emer-
gent popular-democratic culture" (26).
Although somewhat less sweepingly, both Yiidice and Sommer effectively
concur in classifying the testimonial as a form of, so to speak, "postlitera-
ture." The former, in " Testimonio and Postmodernism," argues that, again in
Menchu's case, the very representational distance between narrator or speaker
and "community" has been collapsed.16 As a "witness," the testimonialista
nevertheless acts as an "agent," not a "representative," of the collective (17),
while the testimonial itself is no longer "representation" in the semantic
and epistemological sense but a pure instance of "practice" (18). Sommer's
reading ofMenchu is itself predicated on a de Manian deconstruction of the
literature/nonliterature opposition (nonliterary texts simply "presume their
tropes to be true" [33]), so, logically speaking, the testimonial cannot, for
Sommer, assert a claim to being postliterary or postrepresentational—liter-
ature and representation having been reduced to the status of mere "aesthetic
 10 INTRODUCTION

ideologies" at the outset.17 But the testimonial is nevertheless made to stand

out from mere "autobiography" here both by virtue of the metaphor/met-
onymy distinction — the autobiographical / "stands in for others ... whereas
testimonies stand up among them" (39) — as well as by an appeal to con-
cepts of rhetoric and style. Where autobiography (and, one presumes, most
fictional prose as well), because linked to a Western, bourgeois practice of
individual subjectivity, can accomplish its ideological task stylistically, tes-
timonial narration must seek a more active, rhetorical pact with the reader.
"The testimonial," writes Sommer (here echoing Beverley), "produces
complicity" (44). As we shall see shortly, Sommer regards this complicity,
when Menchii's reader is "us" (that is, northern or just the non-Quiche) in
a highly problematic not to say paradoxical light. But, as for Yiidice and
Beverley, for Sommer the testimonial's transformation of the reader-nar-
rator relation, as well as of the relation of narrator to his or her "commu-
nity," qualitatively differentiates it from all traditionally literary activity.
Granting the general impact of the testimonial as something that indeed
suggests a new sort of "literary" (or "postliterary") phenomenon, the the-
oretical intent here must be accepted as both serious and in good faith. But
as someone who has read the same testimonial texts, the theory itself strikes
me as egregiously overstated, not to say overdetermined by concerns that,
in the end, may have very little to do with narratives or experiences such as
Menchii's. My sense here is that the testimonial has become, for Beverley
et al., but perhaps also for the sympathetic northern reader, what certain
scientific methodologies term a theoretical "artifact," as opposed to a gen-
uine object of theoretical investigation. Regardless of what the testimonial
objectively is or is not, its existence as a radically new species of literary/
postliterary discourse must be postulated in order that the truth of certain
other postulates should not be questioned or reexamined. More concretely,
I think that the elevation or countercanonization of the testimonial as postlit-
erary, postrepresentational, and the like, effectively exempts the reader-as-
theorist from questioning his or her own dogmatically modernist precon-
ceptions regarding the nature of the "literary" itself.
Consider, once again, Beverley's stipulations regarding the testimonial
in "The Margin at the Center": the narrator of the testimonial must be "rep-
resentative of a class or social group" (15); the testimonial narrative is "dem-
ocratic and egalitarian," involving the "entry into literature of persons who
would normally be excluded" (16); the meaning of the testimonial "lies in
[its] ability to stand in for the community as a whole" (23); testimonial
 INTRODUCTION 11

"always signifies the need for a general social change" (ibid.), and so on.
All of this, we are told, supports the conclusion that the testimonial is
therefore postliterary, that it "puts into question ... literature as an exist-
ing institution" (22). But wherehas it been established that literature itself
has not been or cannot be "representative of a class or social group"; that it
was not or cannot be "democratic and egalitarian"; that it did not or does
not have the "ability to stand in for the community as a whole"? What "lit-
erature" can Beverley be referring to here? Dante's Divine Comedy, say, or
Dickens's Hard Times would, as measured against the objective limits of
their own historical periods, both seem to me to satisfy the criteria for be-
ing "testimonial," or at least postliterary in Beverley's sense. Of course, they
are fictional and testimonial is not, but Beverley has nowhere shown it to be
the case that "fictions" cannot as fictions do the same things testimonials
do. "The Margin at the Center" implies this, but without argument. The
conclusion seems to me inescapable here that by "literature" Beverley ef-
fectively means the modernist canon and that by "literary" he means
modernist and historically avant-gardist conceptions of the literary as an
absolute autonomy, or agency, of form. And with specific reference to
Latin America, "literature," for Beverley, surely means the boom.
The point is not that Beverley is wrong insofar as he imputes to mod-
ernism in general and the boom in particular the elitist, professionalized,
and individualistic traits that the testimonial is claimed as having super-
seded. On the contrary: it is rather that by instituting a kind of metonymic
reduction of "literature" and the "literary institution" to modernism, he
enforces a mechanical and ultimately false separation between the demo-
cratic properties of the testimonial and the more general and genuinely
aesthetic properties of literature and fictional representation. To be blunt,
the very possibility of a literary realism arising out of the same social and
cultural ground that has produced the testimonial is, as a result of such a
metonymic reduction, ruled out a priori. And the irony here is that, despite
its superficial anti- or postmodernism, Beverley's theory of the testimonial
effectively concedes to modernism an exclusive claim to literary value. Coun-
tercanonizing the testimonial in this way merely reinforces the canonical
hegemony of modernism.
In subsequent work, Beverley has amplified what he sees as the opposi-
tion between the literary and a postliterary culture epitomized by the tes-
timonial— as witness the title of his 1993 collection of essays, Against
Literature. Writing in "Second Thoughts on Testimonio" (chapter 5 of
 12 INTRODUCTION

Against Literature), Beverley concedes that the electoral defeat of Sandin-

ismo in 1990 may force a reconsideration of the testimonial's relation to
both "liberation struggles and academic pedagogy" (87); but the subtly
modernizing artifactuality of the testimonial within the theoretical dis-
course and practice of reading it has generated continues to operate here.
"Testimonial appears where the adequacy of existing literary forms and
styles—even of the dominant language itself—for the representation of
the subaltern has entered into crisis" (92).
The substitution of "modernism" or "the boom" for "existing literary
forms and styles" would, I suggest, make this a substantively true statement.
Unfortunately, Beverley's tendency has instead been to monumentalize the
testimonial/literature dualism even further, issuing in a species of global
"end-of-literature" proclamation. Thus in " 'By Lacan': From Literature to
Cultural Studies" (the introductory essay to Against Literature), Beverley
announces his intention to "produce a negation of the literary that would
allow nonliterary forms of cultural practice to displace its hegemony" (1).
Here the modernist—even, in effect, New Critical — reduction of the liter-
ary to its formal and stylistic constituents is explicitly projected back onto
literary history at least as far as the Renaissance, when the "eurocentric
concept of the centrality of written literature as a cultural form" was pur-
portedly born. Literature is, for practical purposes, reduced to the "cul-
tural form" of the written word — indeed, to "books" — and books in turn
are declared to be, and to have been since the beginning, an instrument of
the ruling class both in Europe and, since colonial times, in Latin Amer-
ica.18 On this plane, even the testimonial becomes less an end point than a
transitional genre, and it is the postliterary, electronic culture of the mass
media that — at least in an earlier version of "Second Thoughts" — now
emerges as the authentic, popular-democratic alternative to the reactionary
and elitist business of reading and writing.19
Thus all roads—even Rigoberta Menchii's—lead to a postmodern kind
of "cultural politics." And yet it would be hard to imagine a more total ca-
pitulation to the formalist dogmas of modernism than this. Everything is
form. The only question is which forms to advocate. The old New Critical
elitists, along with the Frankfut School mandarins, chose books; Beverley
and the "subalterns" choose the mass media and popular culture of course,
and this is supposed to make all the difference. It is as if watching, say, the
fall of the Berlin wall on MTV rather than reading about it in the New York
Times will in itself serve to determine whether a progressive or a reactionary
 INTRODUCTION 13

interpretation will result. It almost sounds sophomoric here to interject that

movies, TV programs, even rock videos are scripted— that is, are instances
of representation — and that this, according to all but the most narrowly
formalist and technified conceptions, makes them intrinsically as literary as
a hardbound volume of Joyce's Ulysses in a university library.
That more people watch MTV than read or ever will read Ulysses is a
sociological commonplace that, contrary to what Beverley asserts in Against
Literature, the Left, with perhaps the exception of a few hard-boiled Ador-
nians, has never spent much time bemoaning. Form, to restate it bluntly,
is secondary. Content is primary. Literature, as we have been intermittently
reminded over the last two millennia, constitutes itself in the dialectical re-
lation between the two, but even here the question of form comes second
and only assumes any true importance in the context of what is being said,
written, sung, filmed, or recorded. We were all, in the northern academies
and probably in the southern as well, carefully drilled by New Criticism
and other Cold War offshoots to avoid this sort of thinking like the plague.
Structuralism and poststructuralism have, if anything, strengthened this
avoidance mechanism even further. As a result, a certain reflexive, almost
instinctual distrust of notions such as representation, character, and plot
still afflicts most of us, and it requires some conscious effort to overcome
it even as the winds of postmodernism blow with gale force. Beverley's
Against Literature articulates — and rather boldly in its way—a thought
that has probably occurred to many of us within this reflexively modernist
un- or semiconsciousness: that in a realm of pure forms and formal effica-
cies, literature itself would one day have to give way to new "cultural forms."
Eliot and his American epigones would have blanched at it (and one can
easily imagine what their reaction to a Menchii, much less to a Madonna,
would have been), but atop Beverley's epitaph on literature it is really their
chickens that have come home to roost.
It is, fundamentally, the same artifactual, subliminally modernist process
of countercanonization that operates in Yiidice's "Testimonio and Postmod-
ernism" as well as in his other work on the testimonial where he advances
similar arguments. 20 Only here the claims made on behalf of the testimo-
nial assume an even grander, explicitly religious character. The relation-
ship of testimonial narrative and narrator (the difference ceases to matter
in "Testimonio and Postmodernism") to the "community" that gives rise to
them not only, as for Beverley, exceeds the institutional structures of "lit-
erature" but transgresses any representational mediacy of whatever sort.
 14 INTRODUCTION

As concretely embodied in Menchu's ritual celebration of the nahual or

totem, the testimonial becomes a
means for establishing solidarity. It projects the absence of domination
through instrumental rationality, put negatively, and the general practice of
love, put positively. It is something akin to the solidarity provided by Jesus
in early Christian lore, whose significance also lies in the body, that is, Christ's
embodiment of love. (Yiidice, " Testimonio and Postmodernism," 27-28)

I am confident that these remarks are sincerely meant and felt. But once
again they suggest to me a prior but unacknowledged ideological need to
reauthorize the very activity of reading the South as a northern reader. The
testimonial — again, it is Menchu's—supplies the pretext for this reautho-
rization, a process that here requires not only its spurious classification as
a novel genre of postliterature but its virtual apotheosis. Testimonial be-
comes a "postmodern" sacrament of communion — for it is above all an act
of transubstantiation that Yudice seems to have in mind in his stipulation
of the testimonial as pure "agency" and "practice." In giving her testimony,
Menchii does not just represent or invoke the village or tribal community;
she herself, or her story, becomes, even constitutes, the community.21
But the obvious question then arises: can a reader not belonging to
Menchu's community, a reader sans-nahual, aspire to the status of com-
municant? Yudice, curiously, does not pose it, thus creating the epistemo-
logical quandary of how a testimonial reader such as himself can know or
confirm for us, as noncommunicants, that the act of communion has oc-
curred? It falls to Sommer, in "Rigoberta's Secrets," to answer here that, as
Menchu's noncommunicant readers, we in fact cannot aspire to such sta-
tus and that, if we are to read Menchii at all, our reading must eschew the
"unproblematized appropriation which closes off distance between writer
and reader, disregarding the text's insistence on the political value of keep-
ing us at a distance" (32). We must read, that is, in the knowledge that we
cannot know Menchu's "secrets." Her insistence on keeping certain things
concealed, although surmised by Sommer to be perhaps no more than a
"metaleptic" device to make us want to know more and to read on, is to be
taken as a kind of gentle warning, the "calculated result" of which is
paradoxically, to exclude us from her circle of intimates. In fact, any way we
read her, we are either intellectually or ethically unfit for Rigoberta's secrets,
so that our interpretation does not vary the effect of reading. Either way, it
produces a particular kind of distance akin to respect. So simple a lesson and
so fundamental; it is to modestly acknowledge that difference exists.
(Sommer, 36)
 INTRODUCTION 15

This is, any way we read it, quite a remarkable statement. Remarkable
in the first instance because it shows that Sommer, unlike Beverley or Yudice,
has grasped that the testimonial, if it is to support the process of its own
countercanonization (whether in the sense of an advent of postliterature
or, in an even more sublime projection, of postrepresentation as such),
must be considered in relationship to a reader, who may or may not prove
"fit" for its unique powers. But the statement is remarkable in the second
instance because although Sommer affirms, at least implicitly, the counter-
canonical quality of the testimonial—participating in what I have termed
its construction as an interpretive and theoretical artifact—she neverthe-
less concludes, at least if we follow through on the logic of her own analy-
sis, that such a quality must make the testimonial inaccessible, in effect,
unreadable as such to "us," Menchu's non-"intimates." For if "we" are "in-
tellectually and ethically unfit" to know Menchu's secrets, if in fact Menchu's
experience sets a strict, nontransgressable limit to "our" understanding, is
not "our" capacity as readers of what she agrees to reveal now in doubt as
well? Once we accept that a text or narrative can keep the reader at an un-
bridgeable "distance," however small, do we not, in fact, question the very
possibility of the hermeneutic process as such? Menchu's testimony would,
in the last analysis, appear to convey to "us" only one meaning: "difference."
And our understanding of this meaning must be the prehermeneutical one
of a species of behavior: "respect."
Thus the "metanarrative" of "canonical decolonization," having once
served to authorize the northerner's reading of the boom as implicitly
a gesture of including the other, now in the antihermeneutical presence
of the testimonial turns into its opposite: reading "North by South" is con-
ceded to be a virtual impossibility, except in the minimal and paradoxi-
cal sense that it functions as a gesture of self-exclusion. At the very most
"we" read as ourselves "marginals, allies in a possible coalition rather than
members" (37).
Let me emphasize again that what Sommer articulates here — in many
ways more perceptively and honestly than other "theoretical" readers of
the testimonial — is not simply her own invention. The need to enact a
gesture of self-exclusion, to declare oneself, as she elsewhere phrases it, "in-
competent" as a reader of southern (or "minority") texts,22 seems to me to
underlie a whole practice of reading "North by South" and exemplifies what
I have termed its current crisis of self-authorization. 23 1 began by linking
this crisis to a range of phenomena: the receding of the anti-imperialist mass
movement in the North in the mid-1970s; the various theoretical challenges
 16 INTRODUCTION

to the modernist canon and to modernism itself; a satiation and fatigue

with the boom, and so on.
But I think it is possible to be less eclectic in attempting to account for
this crisis as ideological in the strict sense. The crucial factor here is the po-
litical: the overall retreat of North American radicalism after the "heroic"
period of Vietnam, corresponding to what Samir Amin has termed the gen-
eral "reflux" of imperialism beginning in the mid-1970s and leading up
through the present to a long series a defeats for anti-imperialist forces on
the periphery itself.24 On a certain level of abstraction, the self-exclusion
enacted in readings of the testimonial reflects the sense among readers in-
fluenced by New Left politics of our own failure as agents of radical social
change, hence of the need to acknowledge that this agency must lie else-
where. This is not entirely a mistaken notion, of course, insofar as it recog-
nizes the primacy of social forces that engage imperialism directly at those
sites where its contradictions are most sharply felt—for example, Vietnam.
But it all too easily falls into the opposite error of a romantic "third world-
ism," in which radical agency of any sort belongs exclusively to the South,
while northern radicalism can safely situate itself on the "theoretical" side-
lines. The testimonial readings I have analyzed here, especially those by
Yiidice and Sommer, seem to me to come dangerously close to this posi-
tion. Here the testimonial and testimonialista (or what is postulated as in
effect their direct identity) certainly look like compensatory projections of
the ex-New Left reader's own post-Vietnam experience of isolation and
alienation — cultural, but also, more fundamentally, political. By attribut-
ing to Menchu, for example, the power to transubstantiate communal be-
ing in the very act of giving testimony, and in declaring ourselves "unfit"
to be her cocommunicants, are we not relieving ourselves of the consciously
political burdens of organizing to resist a common (hers and ours) enemy?
To further concretize this ideological relation, however, we need to fac-
tor in something else. By proposing that the northern reception of the
boom narratives obeyed a logic of "canonical decolonization," I wished to
emphasize the underlying need of reading, in given historical circumstances,
to validate itself as an act of solidarity with an emancipatory movement.
But "canonical decolonization," I suggest, may have worked the other way
as well: that is to say, it could also function as a way of granting to politics
a literary or aesthetic sanction. To understand this latter process, it is first
necessary to observe that, as Aijaz Ahmad has recently argued, the north-
ern, radical, or New Left supporter of anti-imperialist struggles in the South
typically viewed these struggles from a cultural-nationalist, not a socialist
 INTRODUCTION 1J

or communist, perspective.25 This was so even when, as in Vietnam, the

anti-imperialist forces were Communist-led and espoused not only nation-
alist but socialist goals as well.
Albeit with exceptions, no universalizing or world-historical vision of
socialism/communism as a global alternative to imperialism animated the
"imagination of the New Left," at least in North America—a fact sharply
distinguishing it from the "Old" North American Left of the 1930s. But
this then raises the question of what the global outlook of this movement
was, what gave it the sense that, by supporting anti-imperialism in places
like Vietnam or Cuba, it was participating in a world-historical as well as a
revolutionary process? One might argue, perhaps, that this sense was in
fact absent, that, as far as its northern sympathizers were concerned, the
anti-imperialist movement would have achieved its goal as soon as the last
vestiges of colonialism were eliminated and national independence was
everywhere an accomplished fact. Certainly, the virtual evanescence of the
antiwar movement as a mass phenomenon after the withdrawal of U.S.
forces from Vietnam suggests that something like this was the case. Speak-
ing as an onlooker to and sometime participant in the radical ferment of
those times, however, my impression is that northern radicals did have re-
course to a universalizing framework of sorts, if only by default — and that
this framework was supplied by, precisely, modernism. If, perhaps chiefly
as an effect of the Cold War, the spirit of social revolution did not.suffuse
the rebellions of the 1960s, the spirit of cultural and aesthetic revolution
surely did, and it was modernism, given its seemingly global projection
(especially now that, with the arrival of the boom, it in principle included
the third world as well), that offered this spirit its seemingly world-historical
warrant. The New Left politics of solidarity with national liberation and
cultural-nationalist struggles, to the extent that it felt a compulsion to bridge
the imperial divide, to integrate North and South, could, I am proposing,
only do so by laying claim to a modernist discourse of aesthetic utopianism.
It is at least partly because of this underlying and often unarticulated em-
beddedness of anti-imperialism in modernism, of "Vietnam" in the canon,
that the general exhaustion of modernist culture that sets in after the mid-
1970s or so comes to be regarded as tantamount to a collapse of universals,
to an end of "grand narratives," and so on. This, combined with the fact
that class struggles themselves, including anti-imperialism, enter into a pe-
riod of general retreat, climaxing in the so-called collapse of socialism circa
1989. Thus, the vaunted claims for a postmodernism that has done away
with all "foundations" and totalizations, even while carrying over the eman-
 18 INTRODUCTION

cipatory goals of modernism, are, to my mind, false on two counts: first,

because they deceptively replace an avowedly universalist framework with
a covert universalism of "antiuniversals"; but second, because they do noth-
ing to criticize and indeed reinforce the New Leftists' own ideological self-
projection as "world-historical" — because modernist — "revolutionaries."
In any case, by bearing this particular relationship in mind we see that
it is not only the general crisis of radical political consciousness in the North
that foregrounds the peculiar idolatry of testimonial theory but the fact
that this consciousness could only project itself as universal, that is, as his-
torically integral with the South, on an aesthetic and cultural plane. The
act of "discovering" in the testimonial both an "end of literature" and a
cultural frontier of pure, unrepresentable, and unreadable "difference," dis-
closes, by the very conjuncture of these two antipodes, modernism as the
still dominant framework of assumptions. To read the testimonial in this
way is to read into it not only the northern radical's own ideologically am-
biguous relationship to imperialism but what almost seems a nostalgia for
this ambiguity itself—as if, merely by conjuring away a false universal
(modernism or the "literary"), one would thereby be able to produce a
true particular.

But what, then, of the essays that follow? For clearly, as products of the
same historical and institutional forces that have shaped and altered the
general practice of "North by South" reading, they do not evade the ques-
tion of self-authorization any more than the work I have sought to criti-
cize above. This, as it turns out, is a question easier to answer when it is a
case of somebody else's work. But I think I am generally correct in observ-
ing that even the earliest contributions to this volume, whose production
dates from the early 1980s, already sense something illegitimate in the boom-
centered metanarrative of "canonical decolonization" and, for the most
part unconsciously, cast about for some other, more politically sensitive
and self-critical way of situating North and South on the hermeneutic map.
In a sense, all the essays here implicitly concede the precariousness of their
own legitimacy, posing the question of reading "North by South" without
answering it except in provisional and tactical ways. This precariousness is
perhaps reflected in their unremittingly and pervasively polemical tone:
one legitimizes oneself indirectly by delegitimizing someone or something
else.
But having said this, I have no hesitation in acknowledging that the es-
says here assembled do seek to derive their authority from a universalizing
 INTRODUCTION 19

perspective — one capable, in principle, of integrating North and South.

This perspective belongs to Marxism. This is not the place to discuss in de-
tail what it now means, in the wake of the debacle of "existing socialism,"
to proclaim oneself a Marxist.26 Suffice it to say that, while feeling no re-
grets for the passing of welfare-state capitalism in its eastern variety, I share
with Fredric Jameson and others the view that, even if the "death of Marx-
ism" were an accomplished or imminent fact, this would only imply the
necessity to reinvent it.
One readily anticipates here the charge that Marxism is simply another
guise for a northern, "canonical" form of anti-imperialism, that is, one
that gestures at integration and self-criticism only so as to conceal a move-
ment to shore up the northerner's or Eurocentrist's privilege when it is a
matter of "theory" or ultimate aesthetic value. This is something loosely
implied, I think, in the testimonial theory I have examined above. My short
reply to this is that perhaps the richest and most incisive Marxist cultural
critique being produced today is the work of "southern" Marxists, among
them Samir Amin, Roberto Schwarz, and Aijaz Ahmad — all of whom have
had some degree of influence on the work in this collection. I share Ah-
mad's view that, whatever strategic assessment one ultimately makes of
nationalism, opposition to imperialism means opposition to capitalism,
and if northern anti-imperialists have been or are slow in appreciating this
fact — then better late than never.
As will become obvious to anyone who cares to read ahead — or to any-
one who may have read an earlier work of mine, Modernism and Hege-
mony— Marxism for me entails an uncompromising rejection of mod-
ernism as an aesthetic and a concomitant advocacy of realism. I confess to
being an unreconstructed Lukacsian (and Leninist) on this point. The ques-
tion as to what realism is and why, as a rule, capitalist society becomes less
and less capable of producing realist works of art and literature in the course
of its decline is one that, in its broad outlines, has been answered by the
Marxist tradition. However, the question of realism and its fall or possible
rise in relation to imperialism is still, in most respects, an open one. Cer-
tainly it is one that a Marxist such as Lukacs never sought to tackle in any
systematic way, unless one deems it possible to read his criticism of Soviet
literature as tantamount to this. At any rate, if the essays of Reading North
by South point in any one direction, it is this: what are the constituents of,
and the historical conditions of possibility for, realism in an imperialized
world, especially on its southern and Latin American flanks? The caveat
here is that this question receives only a speculative and nonsystematic
 2O INTRODUCTION

treatment in this volume and that my occasional efforts to find exemplars of

such a realism in works by Jorge Amado, Manuel Scorza, Pedro Verges, and
others should not have attributed to them any strongly "canonical" intention.
It is likewise important to clarify here that, although the Brazilian critic
Roberto Schwarz's essay "Culture and Politics, 1964-69" exerted consider-
able influence on a certain number of the following essays (as it did on
Modernism and Hegemony), I have only recently become thoroughly famil-
iar with Schwarz's writings on Machado de Assis. It is evident to me now
that any scientific attempt to build a theory and critique of realism in Latin
America must begin with Schwarz's work on Machado, including his two
book-length studies, Ao vencedor as batatas and Utn mestre na periferia do
capitalismo. (I will reiterate here an assertion I make in chapter 17: that
Schwarz is the most vitally important Latin American critic writing today.)
The scope of such a theory is a vast one, however, and Machado is only
one of its paradigmatic foci. Among the more contemporary areas it might
take in I would include, above all, the large corpus of Latin American films
produced over the past three to four decades by filmmakers from Pereira
dos Santos and Sanjines to Gutierrez Alea, Solas, Solanas, and Puenzo. Films
on the order of La sangre del condor or La historia oficial have become, in
some ways, the most important artistic vehicles for genuinely realistic por-
trayal of contemporary life in Latin America.
In order for the Marxist criticism of Latin American literature and cul-
ture to attain the level of rigor and sophistication of Um mestre na periferia
do capitalismo, however, it will have to rethink and clarify both its own
methodological basis in relation to such trends as "cultural studies" (a
question taken up by a number of the essays in this volume) and, of course,
its scientific and ethical basis in relation to political practice itself. During
the past two decades or so, the Marxist current in Latin American criticism
has enjoyed something of an amnesty, even a vogue, in the North Ameri-
can academy, probably due in large part to considerable sympathy, among
intellectuals and students especially, for antiimperialist and popular causes
in Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and other countries. But this
relative opening should not be taken for granted. In this light I take as ex-
tremely telling a note by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, recently published
in an issue of the Latin American Literary Review composed of short takes
on the future of the field by a variety of contemporary scholars (myself in-
cluded). Entitled "Reflections on my Crystal Ball," Gonzalez Echevarria's
contribution notes that the "most interesting phenomenon in the field of
Latin America literary studies" is the question of
 INTRODUCTION 21

how formerly Marxist oriented critics and scholars retool themselves. This
is not to imply that Marxist literary criticism yielded a large number of
important works in the past. I cannot think of a single major study of Latin
America literature carried out under the influence of Marxism, whereas in
history one can immediately point to Manuel Moreno Fraginal's The Sugar
Mill. Marxism generated a clergy in Latin American literary studies that
vowed to study literature in a social context, but had neither the patience
nor the training to study society. Hence they produced neither sociology
nor literary criticism, but a kind of political journalism that will probably
never be read again. I see many former clerics scrambling to rewrite their
past today and groping for a new language. What new discourse is this
disrobed clergy going to use now? Or will they cling to the old formulas and
finally turn them into the liturgy they were always meant to be? (Gonzalez
Echevarria, 52)

It is a wondrous and rich irony to be lectured on clericalism by Latin

Americanism's ambassador to the Yale School. The talk of "journalism"
here reminds me of Jacques Derrida's rather desperate and disgraceful ef-
forts to fend off the threats to deconstruction at the time of the Paul de Man
scandal. And what a fate it is to have the validity of an entire body of criti-
cism consigned to the oblivion of what Gonzalez Echevarria can or cannot
"think of"! Names such as — to mention only a few—Roberto Schwarz,
Antonio Candido, Angel Rama, Josefina Ludmer, Beatriz Sarlo, Jorge Rufin-
elli, Alejandro Losada, Carlos Rincon, Hernan Vidal, Agustin Cuevas, Alain
Sicard, Jaime Concha, Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, Roberto Fernandez Reta-
mar, Francoise Perus, Jean Franco, John Beverley, Doris Sommer, William
Rowe, and Gerald Martin — all of whom have at one time or another pro-
duced work "carried out under the influence" of Marxism — evidently have
escaped the poor man's memory. Or is it that not a single one of these
works — say, Rama's Transculturacion narrativa en America Latino.—counts
as a "major study"? And what, say, of Mariategui's essay "Literature on
Trial," which surely ranks, along with roughly cogenerational work by Al-
fonso Reyes and Pedro Henriquez Urena, as one of the founding state-
ments of modern Latin American literary criticism? Perhaps it is Mar-
iategui's unfortunate status as a "journalist" — and not a tenured Ivy League
professor — that disqualifies him here?
Not to make too much of a throwaway comment by a critic who has,
without question, at least one "major study" to his own credit (I am think-
ing of The Myth and the Archive), but this should serve as a warning to
critics of Latin American literature working "under the influence" of Marx-
ism of what sort of face the official and unofficial powerbrokers of the
 22 INTRODUCTION

North American academy might at any time turn on them. In any case,
having been imperiously informed that I, along with other Marxists in the
field, must resign myself to the ignominy of "rewriting the past," I will use
this occasion to loudly and without apology affirm this past, to express my
gratitude to those teachers and colleagues of mine, many of them victims
of anticommunism in one form or another, who have shared this past with
me and to declare my confidence that the "political journalism" exempli-
fied, however imperfectly, by the following essays has a future vouchsafed
in the emancipatory class battles—North and South — to come.
 PARTI

"Occupation Texts"
This page intentionally left blank
 CHAPTER TWO

Teaching Caribbean Texts

Outline for a Counterhegemonizing Pedagogy

A number of important questions confront the analyst undertaking the

"study of revolutionary literatures."1 First and most obviously, what is
meant by "revolution"? Socialist, communist, nationalist, anticolonialist,
anti-imperialist, a historical synthesis of these — or is there some sense in
which "revolution" can be considered in itself as a generic entity in His-
panic and Lusophone societies? Such a question, even if it is considered to
be either too intractable or too polemical to be broached when discussing
"revolutionary literature," cannot ultimately be bracketed without affect-
ing subsequent analysis. But even supposing that such a bracketing is tol-
erable, there remain other questions scarcely less decisive. What does it
mean to predicate a text, an author, or a tradition as "revolutionary"? Of
course, there are certain texts, authors, and traditions that designate them-
selves in this way. Others, however, may not, despite their "proximity" to
revolutions, raising the question of where final authority rests in designa-
tions of this type. This, too, is a perennial matter of debate, involving en-
tire generations of "revolutionary" theorists, aestheticians, critics, and au-
thors, and one that would require lengthy discussions to review and clarify.
Only by bracketing, in its turn, this controversy, does it become possible for
us to represent as an object of cognition (analysis, interpretation, criticism,

25
 26 TEACHING CARIBBEAN TEXTS

and so on) a genetically fixed "revolutionary literature." Such are the shad-
ows cast within the illumination of our point of departure.
From an empirical standpoint it might be argued that some underlying
consensus exists with respect to these questions, otherwise the project of
"study" itself would never arise. This may be true. Even supposing it to be
so, however, a final question remains: what, then, constitute the means and
ends of "study"?
This final question, if pursued on its own terms, would, I think, ultimately
prove to contain in altered form all the various bracketed questions that
foreground it. Another way of putting this is simply that the meaning of
activity, no less than the meaning of its object, is subject to a variety of in-
terpretive mediations. Is it possible to identify a mediatory agency that would
explain or allow for the uniting of subject and object of "study" in a mean-
ingful, that is, in a truly cognitive relationship?
Whether the answer is yes or no, the answer itself, if we are to avoid the
pitfalls of philosophical idealism, must be sought in history. Given that the
"study of revolutionary literatures" in essence presumes a sustained and
substantive identity underlying the categories of Nation and Literature and
linking them both to a cognizing subject, the question then becomes: what
is the historical ground for this identity? And here, I think, we can answer
quite specifically: what appears to be a spontaneous and immediately given
identity is, in fact, the product of a historical conjuncture that we know as
the "classic" period of modern, capitalist nation-state formation in Eu-
rope, spanning the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. It is this
historical process that, for the first time, posits Nation and Literature in a
dialectical unity that, retrospectively, takes on the appearance of a method-
ological given. Specifying further, we can, I think, go on to insert the cate-
gory of Revolution into the identity Nation = Literature by further qualify-
ing the historical ground as that of the paradigmatic (Western) "bourgeois
revolutions" of modern Europe, especially those of England, France, Italy,
and Germany. Raised in the context of these concrete historical occurrences,
the questions that confronted us at the outset lose much of their abstract-
ness. We know and can say a good deal about the active insertion of au-
thors, texts, and traditions in the overall process of nation-state formation
as it took place in Europe at this time. Its legacy is the existence today of
discrete, institutionally grounded literary traditions that we securely iden-
tify as those of Great Britain, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, and so on. And
it is with a definite quantum of empirical certainty that we describe the
poetry of Heine or the libretto of a Verdi opera as "revolutionary."
 TEACHING CARIBBEAN TEXTS TJ

Our immediate concern, however, is not with the classic literature of

the "bourgeois revolutions" but with that of the literature of certain "con-
temporary" revolutions in societies such as Cuba, Angola, and Nicaragua.
The fact that, on certain historical planes, these revolutions have much in
common with the "bourgeois revolution" of Europe—that they are, in a
sense, made in the "image" of a European model — is a truth so general,
and at the same time so poor in explanatory power, that it hardly needs to
be mentioned. The crucial question for us is a slightly different one: namely,
do these revolutions represent a unified historical conjuncture (are they, in
a historical sense, truly contemporary with one another?), and if so, does
this conjuncture retain a sufficient continuity with that of the European
"bourgeois revolution" to allow us to represent it according to the logic
of sustained, qualitative identity we have given schematically as Nation =
Literature (= Revolution)? Are the contemporary revolutions of Hispanic
and Lusophone societies such that they repeat the literary/political dialec-
tics of "bourgeois revolution," thus justifying our "study" of them accord-
ing to the traditional categories of what is, in fact, the dominant discourse
of literary historicism?
No one, I think, would dispute that the logic of the identity Nation =
Literature (= Revolution) partly underlies the thinking of those who un-
dertake these revolutions as well as the thinking of those who "study" them.
Notwithstanding this, I will advance the position — without at present
being able to argue for it systematically—that the objective historical
process linking these various social transformations in a more or less inte-
grative conjuncture differs qualitatively from that of the gestation of the
classic nation-state, and that this difference is ultimately determined by
the creation at the beginning of this century of a world-market space
within and over which a variety of immensely powerful capitalist states —
which we refer to, following Hobson and Lenin, as imperialist — struggle
for hegemonic control. It is my view that within this historical dy-
namic, revolution means something more and at the same time something
other than classic nation-state formation, regardless of which social class
is deemed to be the principal agent and beneficiary of revolutionary
change. It will not be difficult to recognize certain key tenets of Leninism
in this view, which is, after all, a fairly commonly held one. In the age of
imperialism, any revolution, irrespective of its immediate class rami-
fications, must raise the specter of social revolution while at the same
time calling forth new strategies of imperialist containment and counter-
revolution.
 28 TEACHING CARIBBEAN TEXTS

But as familiar as this analysis may be to us as students of revolution as

a social and political phenomenon, its impact on the categories of literary
historicism and interpretation when these are brought to bear on the revo-
lutionary phenomenon per se apparently remains to be systematically taken
into account. Precisely stated, the "new" (already almost a century old) con-
juncture of global imperialism implies a radical alteration of the identity
Nation = Literature (= Revolution) — an alteration not in the sense of sim-
ple destruction of identity but rather of a systematic restructuring of both
the categories and the epistemology of literary history and interpretation
in ways that cannot be consistently predicted. It is not that we can no longer
objectively and scientifically speak of a Cuban National Literature that is
"revolutionary"; rather, in speaking this way we designate identities and
dialectics that problematize the discourse of cognitive appropriation in which
the object "revolutionary Cuban literature" is initially posited—a discourse
that fundamentally remains the literary historicism and literary hermeneu-
tics elaborated in the process of European nation-state formation.
In order to illustrate in a more concrete fashion the above points and to
suggest a kind of outline for an altered methodology—given what is not
merely an altered object but an altered subject of "study" — I want to set
forth here some of the more crucial arguments for a course prospectus on
Caribbean literature, a teaching activity in which I am frequently engaged
at the university that employs me. The problems that I have alluded to in a
general and abstract context do, I think, repeat themselves in this kind of
pedagogical practice and often in ways that produce insights of a kind typ-
ically absent from discussions that pass over questions of pedagogy, dissemi-
nation, and the "reception" of literary texts. What follows in a somewhat
schematic format is simply a theoretical reflection on the kind of practical
decision making that has gone into the prospectus.
How does one go about teaching an introductory course on Caribbean
literature? Superficially, it seems easy enough. One simply selects a set of
"Caribbean" literary texts that, in one's real or imagined capacity as an au-
thority, one regards as being particularly significant or even just pleasur-
able or edifying. Immediately the questions arise, however: of what use are
these texts and, if they are judged to be significant, what precisely do they
signify? Their initial grouping under the geographical heading "Caribbean"
might suggest an answer, but it must be immediately rejected as trivial.
Literature is far from being the best illumination of geography, even if it
occasionally has its utilities in this respect. Clearly it is not the "Caribbean"
as a geographical entity that is aimed at here but a more complex unity
 TEACHING CARIBBEAN TEXTS 29

that we frequently designate with a loose reference to "culture." The texts

may, accordingly, be thought of as furthering some sort of properly cultural
illumination.
This kind of thinking, which probably underlies the majority of non-
English literary survey courses taught at an introductory level in the North
American university system, is somewhat resistant to interrogation. Its le-
gitimation is generally of a theological type: "culture," like "art" in another
famous debate, is its own justification. One studies it "for its own sake,"
and so on. It is simply valuable to know these things; they are without any
instrumentality other than the most general and abstract one of acquiring
"culture."
If we adopt a kind of rudimentary semiotic standpoint, however, what
seems to be a purely tautological judgment discloses certain distinctive as-
sumptions. In the first place it must be assumed (and here the nineteenth-
century literary-historicist categories come back forcefully into play) that
the cultural entity designated as "Caribbean" has some preexistent mean-
ing separate from that of the texts themselves — texts that, in turn, relate
to this original meaning as second-order signifiers. Second, and perhaps
most decisively for our purposes, there exists the assumption that the
"Caribbean," as this inherently meaningful object, possesses such meaning
outside and independently of the array or ensemble of codes and narra-
tives that "study," read, and interpret the meaning. The first assumption,
in which we recognize the familiar figure of metonymy, combines with the
second to suggest a kind of hermeneutic map in which the act of reading a
text is conceived as the meeting across a neutral space of a precultural sub-
ject A with a cultural object B, resulting in the transmission of "culture"
(or simply "meaning") from B to A. To read the texts "of the Caribbean" is
to appropriate the "Caribbean" cultural entity as a cognitive value.
The fact that this "map" strikes us as commonsensical, or even as nat-
ural, is perhaps an indication of its having once possessed some historical
validity. There seems, however, every reason to question this validity in the
case of the Caribbean as a historically produced ensemble of social, politi-
cal, and "cultural" subjects. It is difficult to trace the exact outline of colo-
nial and neocolonial unevenness in either purely semiotic or hermeneutic
terms, but this should not prevent us from attempting to articulate a his-
torical experience that has been that of the Caribbean all along. Directly
stated, whatever the Caribbean may "mean" independently of and for it-
self, it has always meant something else, perhaps something quite distinct
and contrary, within the continuous succession of narratives that have given
 30 TEACHING CARIBBEAN TEXTS

meaning to its "discovery," conquest, and exploitation by a succession of

mercantile and imperialist powers. To describe this "map" in semiotic terms,
one must attempt a spatial metaphor that could only be the flip side of in-
sularity: that englobing and containing process that assigns meaning as
part of the very process of appropriation. According to this "map," the Carib-
bean, no matter the meaning it necessarily possesses for itself in an ideally
autonomous space, always already means only one thing: the colonized. As
this precise object of representation, the "Caribbean" signifies, in a truly
active sense, nothing at all. It has already been signified as part of the very
possibility of its representation. The appearance of an autonomous process
of signification, allowing for a transmission from B to A through the neu-
tral medium of literary texts, cannot therefore, if this is the case, be taken
at face value. One must take pains to determine whether this appearance is
not in reality the effect of an englobing ideology that finds it necessary, in
order to achieve its own totalization, to animate and "subjectivize" that to
which it elsewhere denies the status of subjectivity.
Are the literary texts of the Caribbean — postponing for now the cru-
cial matter of their canon — capable on their own of counteracting this
englobing presignification? A certain naive literary faith may persuade us
that they are. It is one thing, however, to set forth theoretically the dialec-
tic whereby texts or works of art "negate" or "distance" ideology and an-
other to show how, when, and where this is actually made to occur. Re-
turning again to the pedagogical problem at hand—teaching Caribbean
texts in a situation that must be presumed to be the "degree zero" of criti-
cal consensus — there seems little practical basis on which to assume such
an efficacy for these, or any texts, if they are simply "assigned" and read
according to an underlying hermeneutic that assumes an untroubled and
"free" intercourse between literary representation and its social, historical,
and "cultural" truth. Here one may attempt to invoke a critical distinction
between texts that are judged to be generally reproductive of a colonializ-
ing master narrative (for example, Zeno Gandia's La chared) and those that
(for example, Pedro Juan Soto's Usmail) consciously work against it. But
however feasible it may be to draw this distinction from a purely theoreti-
cal standpoint, there is no guarantee that such a distinction will go on re-
producing itself outside the space of theoretical reflection in the thinking
and interpretive practice of those who are "taught." This is especially true
if theory simply leaves intact the historical and social conditions that pro-
duce and reproduce the ideology of "the colonized."
 TEACHING C A R I B B E A N TEXTS 3]

The problem here, as I see it, is not with the selection of certain texts or
traditions over others but with the initial and underlying hermeneutic struc-
ture wherein the texts receive focus as simply the objects of an interpretive
synthesis. Given a certain critical consensus, it seems natural and legitimate
to proceed in this way. But what happens when this consensus cannot be
inferred, or, as the case may sometimes be in a classroom, when the as-
sumptions underlying "study" or reading radically diverge? If one's objec-
tive in teaching a Caribbean literature course is the critical and even per-
haps "revolutionary" one of encountering the truth of a historical subject
whose very existence is denied by dominant ideology, how is this objective
to be realized when, through no one's "fault" in particular, it is precisely
this dominant ideology (as "master narrative") that reads the texts or is
read into them? Isn't this, after all, what we mean by dominant ideology or
master narrative: that a given, socially determined consciousness actually
operates as the subject itself whenever a spontaneous reading or interpre-
tation is carried out?
Given, then, that there are no literary texts, no matter how scrupulously
selected for "revolutionary" qualities, that "speak for themselves" (texts
"speak" the language that reads them), what are the pedagogical and her-
meneutical alternatives? Would not the obvious thing be simply to invert
the whole hermeneutic procedure? Instead of "just reading" the texts, and
thus allowing all the spontaneous habits of thinking, "responses," and mas-
ter narratives that add up to the dominant ideology (and that sway instruc-
tors as well as students) to be read into the texts — thereby subordinating
their manifold contents to the single, totalizing representational norm of
"the colonized" — why not attempt to have the texts read the ideology?
That is, why not shift the axis of interpretation 180 degrees to what appears
to be merely the alibi for a readerly innocence — to the narrative of domi-
nant ideology in textual format? It then becomes the role of the literary
texts — whose criterion of selection now becomes much more determinate
and concrete — to furnish the attributes of a reading "subject." Only here
the "subject" is deprived of a spontaneous and personalized innocence and
characterized instead by the openly mediating presences of history, lan-
guage, and "culture."
Rather than further elucidate this hermeneutic "inversion" abstractly,
however, let me attempt to set forth the specific pedagogical and curricu-
lar measures whereby I have sought to test it in practice. As the course's
central text (in a traditional hermeneutic sense) 1 have selected a series of
 32 TEACHING CARIBBEAN TEXTS

short news articles from the November 7, 1983, issues of Time and Newsweek
magazines. The subject of all the articles is the U.S. invasion and occupa-
tion of the island of Grenada. I have selected one article in particular to com-
ment on here: a two-page piece by Time correspondent Bernard Diederich
entitled "Images from an Unlikely War."
There are a number of reasons for selecting such a text given the her-
meneutic experiment we are attempting. The first is simply the generic
popularity of this kind of narrative reporting. By "popularity" I refer not
merely to a quantitative standard (although that is not unimportant) but
more to the qualitative reality of mass-disseminated journalistic narrative
as one of those sectors of the metropolitan "public sphere" in which inter-
pretive power is most decisively asserted and exercised. (Another such sec-
tor is, of course, the classroom itself.) From the standpoint of the Caribbean,
this generic popularity has a particularly ominous meaning because the
dominant representations of the "Caribbean" are themselves of a "mass
media" origin, both as "news" and as a frequent topic of discourse in the
travel sections of large urban dailies. And it should not be forgotten that it
is this journalistic encodement that is beamed back to the Caribbean itself,
whether as Radio Marti or as an AP/UPI news dispatch. Like most "under-
developed" regions of the globe, the Caribbean generally lacks the kind of
information and dissemination mechanisms necessary to counter success-
fully the metropolitan-based information colossus.
The second reason for selecting the Time text has to do with its "sub-
ject." The fact that the U.S. invasion of Grenada, following the overthrow
of Maurice Bishop, took "the world" somewhat by surprise might seem to
be a negative influence on the typicality of its journalistic representation,
particularly in view of an initial military-imposed press censorship. But it
is precisely this quality of unexpectedness and secrecy that struck me as
most fortuitous because of its tendency to evoke spontaneous habits of
representation and encodement and perhaps expose certain fissures or over-
lappings in the code itself. An instance of this kind of inconsistency occurs
in one of the Newsweek articles in which the reporter tells how a wounded
Grenadian militiaman, somehow known to have killed two U.S. Rangers,
is brought into a field hospital staffed by U.S. medical students: " 'The big
psychological problem for me was treating a Cuban who killed two of our
men,' recalled Grace Brooke, one of the student volunteers. 'It was rough.' "2
No mention is made of the student's obvious mistaking of a Grenadian for
a Cuban, as if it were too trivial to mention or, perhaps even more likely,
entirely unnoticed by the reporting and editing of Newsweek itself.
 TEACHING CARIBBEAN TEXTS 33

Time's "Images from an Unlikely War," however, reveals some equally

significant "literary" seams when cast into the hermeneutic arena. The very
first lines of narrative introduction, describing how Diederich and his pho-
tographer make their stealthy "behind-enemy-lines" landing on Grenada,
evoke a literary aura immediately recognizable to anyone who has taken
high school English in the United States. The scene, with its references to
sharks, a picturesque ferryman known as "the Big Fisherman," the tropical-
aquatic local color, and the sights and sounds of the war itself, all within
the first few paragraphs, is unadulterated Hemingway—the Hemingway
not only of The Old Man and the Sea and Islands in the Stream but of the
Spanish Civil War narratives as well. This is an observation of more than
casual importance. It is, of course, a poorly kept secret that all North Amer-
ican journalists, and particularly white male foreign correspondents of
certain generations, emulate a literary father and that this literary father is
Ernest Hemingway. Female correspondents, who often run up against this
brotherhood, frequently attest to this, even as some of them clearly partic-
ipate in reproducing it. If the "location" of corresponding should happen
to be the insular Caribbean itself in the midst of a war, one can well imag-
ine how irresistible this literary homage becomes.
The importance of Hemingway here is not limited, however, to explain-
ing the literary pretensions of journalism. It seems quite legitimate to spec-
ulate whether the authority of the Hemingwayesque Caribbean narrative
over the incidental discursive practice of Caribbean reporting is only one
manifestation of a more extensive representational norm. In my own case,
a few moments of reflection were sufficient to persuade me that a general-
ized "sense" or narrative of the Caribbean as a physical setting is either
directly the result of youthful readings of The Old Man and the Sea or indi-
rectly the effect of a macrotextual and variously mediated reception of what
might properly be called a Hemingwayesque master narrative.
The Caribbean of Time and Newsweek is, on this narrative plane, the Ca-
ribbean of Hemingway—that is, a setting that, by virtue of its emphatic and
almost exaggerated physical presence, falls outside the represented sphere
of action. For to function as a setting in the Hemingwayesque master nar-
rative is, before all else, to be outside of action and, in the larger sense, of
history as action, as agency. The setting is, commonsensically, the place
where "things happen," only here with the additional condition that its
proximity to the action constitutes at the same time its exclusion as inter-
pretant of action, as that which gives the action meaning. As backdrop to
the larger "human events" that are "history," the setting has no role in the
 34 TEACHING CARIBBEAN TEXTS

formation of historical subjects. On this level, which we might refer to as

the ontological dimension of setting, the Caribbean, like a host of other
Hemingwayesque settings, becomes the inorganic sits of history merely be-
cause it simplifies or enhances the properties of epic narration.
Given this form of representational presence, we might ask: what sets
the "Caribbean" apart, enabling it to occupy precisely this representational
space? The answer here may simply be too overladen with narrative tradi-
tion to arrive at in a systematic manner. However, a kind of spontaneous
phenomenological reflection points to two dominant physical sites of al-
most infinite thematic dimension: the island and the paradise. This narra-
tive, of course, is of far greater antiquity than Hemingway, who may sim-
ply represent its most recent rethematization within a North American
sphere of cultural influence. The value of the "island paradise" thematic to
a colonializing or neocolonializing master narrative should, in any case, be
quickly apparent in the capacity of these seductive presences to render af-
firmative what is, in essence, the total negation of the colonized object.
The "island paradise" becomes, in the popular imagination of mercantil-
ism and imperialism, a means of signifying the object of colonization with-
out at the same time signifying its historicity. For everyone knows, or has
at least been told, that islands are places that are uninhabited until they are
"discovered." And if anyone does live there, it is only in the state of complete
savagery that befits a paradise. Put more simply, those found to be living
on islands have no economy—they do not "work."
In the Time article it is this same old story that bounds the journalistic
discourse as such and produces a surface narrative in which the only true
historical agents are the invading U.S. troops (says the Marine officer of
the airport: "We took it") and, parenthetically, the journalists themselves.
For the most part, however, this history takes place literally "above the
heads" of the journalists on the ground, who risk the strafing and bomb-
ing to get a closer view of things. What they—correspondent and photog-
rapher— "see" and report are a series of mundane and somewhat comical
behaviors that do not seem to signify that a war is being seriously waged or
even that a war is really taking place. Meanwhile, of course, a war is taking
place, but its "theater" is somehow displaced and inaccessible. People go
to the beach in red bathing suits, blow trumpets, wander aimlessly (as in
the incident of a madwoman who appears on the streets after the local asy-
lum is hit by U.S. bombs), sit in hotels, engage in a little looting ("May
God bless the United States and President Reagan," one looter is quoted as
 TEACHING CARIBBEAN TEXTS 35

saying), and put out an occasional fire. These are, after all, the residents of
an "island paradise," and not even war can be permitted to interrupt a nat-
ural and unproductive form of sheer physical existence. Except for
Cubans, of course, West Indians do not fight wars, at least not the epic
kind. Here on Grenada, history is elsewhere.
Returning, now, to the initial hermeneutic problem, the question may
arise: if, in fact, we have identified certain features of a "Caribbean" master
narrative in the Time text, how has it been possible to do so, when, by def-
inition, the representationality of dominant ideology, and the master nar-
ratives that give it a subjective dimension, lay claim to the analyst as well as
to the analyzed? What places me, or any of us, in a position to "see" the
code in operation and criticize it? The answer here, I think, is simultane-
ously the answer to the question of how the literary texts of the Caribbean
can be inverted from an objectified, specimen status to that of a "subjec-
tive" agency of reading and interpretation. Texts, to be sure, can never func-
tion as agents in themselves, but what they can make possible (more as
"chemical" reagents or catalysts) is the constitution of a rival or counter-
hegemonic center of interpretive power. One "sees" the code in operation
because one has arrived, both historically and personally, at the limits of
its hegemony in the face of an interpretive rival that, however "underde-
veloped" in one sense, has already taken the first steps toward organizing
itself as an independent subject. To speak in absolutes here is, of course,
immediately to invite accusations of political utopianism — and rightly so.
So long as a counterhegemonic power of interpretation remains merely a
power to read invested in a subject of basically intellectual formation, the
real organizing objectives of counterhegemony appear merely as abstract
eventualities. Nevertheless, it is equally a case of utopianism — of the aes-
thetic kind in this instance—to overlook the potential critical thrust of
literary traditions that, by their very existence as traditions, can help sup-
ply the ground on which to read and interpret against the presently domi-
nant ideological discourse.
Which traditions are these? That, in a general sense, is the question that
most emphatically confronts us as teachers of "revolutionary" literature.
At the outset, however, two clarifications are in order. The first is that these
traditions are historically and spatially manifold and can scarcely be re-
stricted to the Caribbean. The fact that I, or anyone else, is able to read Time
in the way I have — or, for that matter, the fact that we can base ourselves
on some limited consensus in our discussion and study of "revolutionary"
 36 TEACHING CARIBBEAN TEXTS

literature — is made possible by a broadly "literary" and interpretive tradi-

tion going back at least as far as the first openly anticapitalist European
revolutions of 1848. The second clarification is that not all Caribbean liter-
ature falls within a contemporary counterhegemonic tradition that, by its
own logic, must stand as a principle of exclusion as well as inclusion, even as
the specific meaning of these principles shifts with the dialectics of history.
My own immediate interest has been in establishing a rudimentary in-
troduction to this tradition, which is limited to the Hispanic Antilles and
accessible in English translation. But rather than invite the storm of debate
that always accompanies an attempt to establish or revise a canon — espe-
cially when it is a "revolutionary" canon — let me simply comment on the
criteria that have guided my selection of texts from an already circumscribed
field of possibilities. These I have tried to generate, according to the inverted
hermeneutics already sketched, directly out of the logic of critiquing the
Time text, which for purposes of classroom discussion I have also desig-
nated as the "occupation text." It will be recalled that the occupation text
organizes its narrative economy, in common with the Hemingwayesque
master narrative that operates as its "horizon" of Tradition, on the basis of
the "island paradise" setting. Again, these are more than descriptive terms,
although that is the way they present themselves to a reading subject ide-
ally constructed by the master narrative itself. They are in fact the compen-
sating and affirmative presences produced by a norm of negative representa-
tionality—that is, an absent narrative in which a Caribbean social subject
acts in its own right both as economic and as historical agent, as the sub-
ject of its own historical unfolding. The Caribbean texts and, in the broader
hermeneutic sense, traditions, whereby and wherein we hope to synthesize
the attributes of a counterhegemonizing reader of the occupation text are,
then, logically to be selected from those texts/traditions that tend to artic-
ulate this absent narrative, however imperfectly and incompletely. Against
the story of Caribbean paradise, then, what else but the story of the Carib-
bean inferno — the Caribbean of labor, of slave labor, the Caribbean of the
ingenio, the cimarrones, the Haitian revolution? Indeed, one may extend
this narrative tradition (that of Caliban in Fernandez Retamar's famous
poetics but also of the laboring subject who is simply absent from the "is-
land paradise") to include what is literally the narrative of the absent la-
borer— that of the contemporary emigrant, of the "diaspora" as such.
Against the mythological presence of the island — that is, of an isolated
signified cut off on all sides from the agency of signification: the semiotic
 TEACHING CARIBBEAN TEXTS 37

equivalent of a naturally existing colony—one deploys a narrative of what

might be called anti-insularity. Such a narrative would lay out the neces-
sary space for a historical subject to "visualize" its potential autonomy.
This latter narrative strikes me as possessing its ideal representative in the
discursive poetics of Marti. It is not merely his most familiar lines of po-
etry that come to mind here ("Yo vengo de todas partes...," etc.) but the
consistent way in which, throughout both the poetic and the prose produc-
tion, the Caribbean or Antillean social and historical subject is reinterpreted
through a kind of recontinentalization in articulation with that "other"
landmass, that "Nuestra America." Whatever the specific contemporary value
of the nationalist political strategy that Marti built out of this continental-
ism, its value as a counterhegemonizing tactic within the field of interpre-
tive power remains secure.
The recurrent danger in this type of textual deployment is that of stray-
ing from the specific counterinterpretive objective and falling back into
the comfortably orthodox hermeneutic position that passes for "literary
interpretation." Indeed, the apparent subordination of the literary texts of
the Caribbean to the reading of what, by conventional standards, would be
considered both a nonliterary and culturally foreign artifact will seem, in
the context of a traditional classroom approach to interpretation, to be a
kind of perversion of literary truth. In my view, however, the opposite is
true. Given the inherently unequal distribution of interpretive power at
the level of hegemonic discourses, the effect of reproducing a conventional
hermeneutic in the case of a Caribbean or any other "underdeveloped" en-
semble of traditions can only be to impose this same "occupation text"
spontaneously and unconsciously on the textual-cultural object itself. The
Caribbean narratives of labor and "anti-insularity" may, of course, still be
read and even designated as such. But without the simultaneous alienation
(as in the Brechtian "alienation effect") of the Hemingwayesque master
narrative that infiltrates and dominates this reading, these narratives will
fail to assert their counterinterpretive power. They will remain, despite the
contradictory impulses of their specific content, narratives relegated to the
constitution of a "setting" for the historical agencies of a metropolitan su-
perhero. They will remain, in short, the narrative and poetic texts of a Ca-
ribbean that, at the level of its generalized representation and insertion into
the master narratives of the "occupation text," is still the "island paradise"
of the colonizer. Inverting standard hermeneutic procedure by making the
interpretive the interpreted, and vice versa, can, it is true, count as no more
 38 TEACHING CARIBBEAN TEXTS

than a tactical maneuver on the field of interpretive power. The alienation

of the occupation text is not equivalent to its disempowerment. For that to
occur, historical agencies beyond the act of reading and interpretation must
come into play. But interpretation has its part, and it is an indispensable
one. Just as there can be no "revolutionary literature" without there also
being a revolution, no revolution can resist the dialectics of reversal with-
out a revolutionary literature—that is, without the power to interpret itself.

1984
 CHAPTER THREE

"People without History"

Central America in the
Literary Imagination of the Metropolis

With the fall of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua in 1979, and the subse-
quent round of massive U.S. military involvement in the region, Central
America was transformed from a blank space on the conceptual map of
most North Americans into a familiar landmark along the routes of the
world-as-we-know-it on television screens and the pages of daily and weekly
newsprint. The graphic profiles of the narrow isthmus — which runs from
just below the Yucatan peninsula to the northern extreme of the South
American landmass — were recognized by millions who would perhaps not
have been able to spell correctly the names of the national territories com-
prised. These same millions learned exactly what scenes to expect when this
symbol was flashed before them: a subtropical landscape; armed men in bat-
tle fatigues; small, destitute peasant villages; throngs of people in poor, ram-
shackle neighborhoods; a North American reporter in short sleeves framed
by a distant volcano; and perhaps — though more likely to be censored in
later years — one or several corpses lying face down in a gully or street,
surrounded by the curious and the grief-stricken.
For those old enough, these images possessed a ghostly familiarity. A gen-
eration before, one had learned to expect similar scenes after being prompted
by the tiny map of another narrow and vertical territory with a prominent
eastward bulge in the middle. This map, of course, had a North and a South,

39
 4O ""PEOPLE WITHOUT HISTORY"

indicated by a dual color scheme, and the men in fatigues often spoke in
familiar accents. And as the war in that exotic but increasingly familiar land
escalated in scale and intensity, a certain mechanical imagery—B-52s and
helicopter gunships—came to displace the semipastoral visual landmarks
of guerrilla conflict and counterinsurgency. But the Vietnam that, after 1968,
one typically saw and imagined from an aerial perspective was still the same
sort of space, the setting for the same cast of characters, that was later to be
evoked by media references to El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. In
more senses than one, then, Central America, and its recognizable stock of
narratives and images, came to justify the slogan that pronounced it "an-
other Vietnam."
The historical differences were — and are — both real and crucial. Al-
though if, in fact, history did not precisely repeat itself in Central America,
the outcome for the inhabitants of the region has been no less devastating.
But insofar as one can adopt the standpoint of a purely cultural, or sym-
bolic, criticism, one encounters an ongoing process not, strictly speaking,
of repetition but of assimilation. For "Vietnam" has scarcely disappeared
from the mass cultural consciousness of contemporary imperial society.
Even if the actual geographical and historical entity that still bears that
name has largely been erased from the world of "World News Tonight"
and the time of Time, we continue to embark on the ideological journey to
that space with undiminished regularity. Just the representational vehicles
have changed. These are now mainly fictional and include the novel and,
most important, the Hollywood feature film. Thus, as governmental and
academic apologists busy themselves with the task of eradicating its real
historical meaning from the public memory, leaving us only with the faint
impression of a "tragic mistake," those who write and publish narrative
fiction and produce movies give us "Vietnam" in all its lurid physical pres-
ence. Whether we visit a Vietnam redeemed a la Sylvester Stallone and other
white male power fantasists or a Vietnam "the way it really felt to be there"
(unless you were Vietnamese), as in Oliver Stone's Oscar-winning film Pla-
toon, matters little. The historical referent has lost everything but the shell
of its authentic content. For all practical purposes, Vietnam ceases to exist
as a collectively remembered history and takes on an exclusively cultural, ide-
ological reference. It names only that symbolic terrain upon which the stock
characters of imperialist mythology act out for the thousandth time their
moments of pseudoheroism, pseudobetrayal, and pseudoenlightenment.
"Central America" and its symbolic subsets—"El Salvador," "Guatemala,"
"Nicaragua," and a vaguer place that at one point might simply have been
 "PEOPLE WITHOUT HISTORY" 41

called "With the contras" — quickly seemed to take up an analogous, if not

homologous, place in the "political unconscious" of North American im-
perialism. Some indication of this may be seen in the modest proliferation
in the 1980s of both literary and film narratives by North American au-
thors and directors that took "Central America" as their putative subject.
In what follows, I propose to analyze and compare four of these narratives:
Roger Spottiswoode's film Under Fire (1983), Joan Didion's travelogue Sal-
vador (1983), Oliver Stone's film Salvador (1985), and Denis Johnson's novel
The Stars at Noon (1986).

Under Fire and Salvador are in many ways the same movie. Both feature as
protagonist a young, male, North American photojournalist thrust at great
personal risk into a Central America in a state of violent insurrection. Po-
litically naive about the events taking place around them, they dedicate them-
selves, apart from their respective love interests, to the quest for "good
shots." This quest takes them across hostile lines of fire on a sort of general
tour of the front. Much of the action in both films reduces to what might
be termed photo-swashbuckle: the long telephoto lenses are unsheathed
with lightning speed, followed by the sound of rapid-fire exposures. Ulti-
mately, however, both protagonists undergo a seeming crisis of conscience.
Price, hero of Under Fire, which takes place during the final days of the suc-
cessful anti-Somoza insurrection in Nicaragua, is himself briefly jailed and
beaten by Somoza's National Guard. His search for "Comandante Rafael,"
a legendary FSLN commando, takes him to the insurrections in Leon and
Matagalpa, where he witnesses somodsta terror firsthand. When he is fi-
nally taken by FSLN cadres to the secret headquarters of Rafael, Price's
growing sense of moral outrage is put to the test: Rafael is dead, killed in
action only days ago, but Price's FSLN guides want him to take a staged
photograph of the corpse to prove to the people that he is alive, thus con-
founding government reports of Rafael's death and giving the insurrection
its final push over the top. Price finally agrees, and the desired result is ob-
tained, although, as we shall see, with unforeseen tragic consequences.
Boyle, the somewhat more bohemian and postmodern hero of Sal-
vador, arrives in El Salvador sometime in 1980 as a broke freelancer look-
ing for work and thrills. His previous connections with the Salvadoran mil-
itary get him and his lumpen companion (played by James Belushi) out of
an initial brush with the death squads, and he proceeds to renew an old af-
 42 "PEOPLE WITHOUT HISTORY"

fair with Maria, a poor but beautiful Salvadoran woman. Reagan has just
won the 1980 election, however, and the Terror, masterminded by a Roberto
D'Aubuisson character named Major Max, escalates, claiming the life of
Maria's younger brother Carlos and threatening Maria herself, who lacks
an identity card or cedula. In the ensuing chain of events, which includes
the murder of Archbishop Romero and the American churchwomen, Boyle
realizes he must give up drinking and whoring and rescue Maria by mar-
rying her and bringing her back to the States. Like Price, he understands
the necessity of getting out from behind the camera lens and "taking sides,"
even if it is only a moral gesture. A tragic surprise awaits him as well.
Both films make use of the same narrative technique: a series of real
events, already familiar to the audience from the reports of the news me-
dia, are re-created before the camera of the photojournalist/hero. In Sal-
vador these include the already mentioned assassinations of Romero and
the churchwomen, as well as the dismissal of Carter ambassador Robert
White ("Kelly" in the film) and the 1980 election campaign of ARENA. Un-
der Fire re-creates the urban uprisings in Leon, Matagalpa, and Managua;
the departure of Somoza; and the FSLN victory. The murder of Price's jour-
nalist friend Alex, an ex-rival in love who has returned to Nicaragua hop-
ing that Price can arrange an interview for him with Comandante Rafael,
is obviously modeled on the on-camera killing of ABC newsman Billy Stew-
art by National Guard troops on June 20, 1979. In the film, Price is able to
shoot pictures of the assassination, elude what seems to be an entire bat-
talion of Somoza's troops, and eventually publish the photographs, thus
delivering the coup de grace to Somoza's already crumbling public image.
The intended effect here is obviously to foreground the familiar — and
perhaps over familiar—journalistic narrative by focusing on the character
of the journalist himself and showing how he is drawn into the events and
ultimately made to sacrifice the vaunted professional code of "objectivity"
in the interests of a higher moral goal. In this way, we may surmise, the
North American public will be able to attain a more "humanized" and con-
crete political understanding of events that, in the context of mere reportage,
become dangerously abstract and even vulnerable to the propagandistic
distortions of official government accounts. By restructuring the journal-
istic narrative around the familiar, sympathetic, and neutral figure of the
gringo photojournalism the film narrative is meant to perform a kind of
mediating function. The Central American situation is represented to us
in "terms we can understand" and "identify with."
 "PEOPLE WITHOUT HISTORY" 43

Though in no way original to these films (one thinks immediately here

of Haskell Wexler's 1960s film Medium Cool), this narrative method seems
in principle legitimate and well chosen. It ought to work, and, within the
parameters of a certain limited awareness that news reports do not tell us
all there is to know, perhaps it does. But from the standpoint of the events
in their wider and deeper historical interconnectedness—that is, from a
standpoint that grasps the violent upheavals in Central America as being
the result of class conflicts linked to the imperialist penetration of the re-
gion as well as to the opposed interests of rival imperialisms — the critical
content of these films is essentially nil. How and why is this so?
The answer lies in the fact that the estrangement of the journalistic nar-
rative achieved by foregrounding the human and moral dilemmas of the
journalists themselves can only lead to an abstract moral judgment and
leaves intact the deeper and more serious ideological distortions of a merely
journalistic point of view. The belief that there is a "human story" behind
the news that the code of journalistic impartiality and objectivity must of-
ten obscure amounts to little more than a truism and a cliche, adhered to
by the journalists themselves and designed to draw attention from what is,
on a more fundamental plane, really being obscured. For the reality here is
that the very accepted standard of "objectivity" adhered to by the typical
North American and European journalist in the practice of reporting (the
imperialized third world in particular) is already conditioned by an ideol-
ogy much less obvious and much more falsifying than anything that can
be compensated for by a "human interest" story.
The sources of this ideology are, clearly, much older than the modern
practice of journalistic reporting itself and would have to be traced back to
the beginnings of the present-day capitalist world system in the period of
European "discovery" and political-economic penetration of Asia, Africa,
and the "New World." Its essential content, however, is perhaps captured
in a phrase of Mary Louise Pratt's, who, in describing the travel writings of
nineteenth-century British explorers in Africa, remarks that such writing
"narrates place, and describes people."1 Making more explicit use of Georg
Lukacs's classic critical essay "Narrate or Describe?," to which Pratt's phrase
implicitly alludes, we might expand this quite precise and ingenious con-
ception by specifying that the imperialist representation of the "New" (that
is to say, the radically "other" and "uncivilized") World involves a ban on
its historicity except insofar as the land itself is about to become the site of
the heroic exploits of the European interlopers.2 In the travel literature
 44 "PEOPLE WITHOUT HISTORY"

analyzed by Pratt, this stage of active, "epic" activity is still to come; the
travel writers themselves are merely the surveyors. The people they en-
counter only exist for them as features of a variegated landscape that
awaits the arrival of History in the form of European political, commer-
cial, and cultural practices. The local residents are "peoples without His-
tory." Hence their active life and their fundamental social relations both
among themselves and with the European newcomers can only be repre-
sented as a static and frozen object, obeying, at best, a natural, organic law
of development rather than a dynamic, fully social and historical dialectic.
"Primitive," non-European society is portrayed as possessing no internal
source of motion. Lukacs uses the term "naturalism" to describe the liter-
ary method of portrayal based on this (false) understanding of society as
an inert body, governed by "natural" (as opposed to historical) laws.
The dominant method of present-day journalistic writing is itself heav-
ily influenced by naturalism, and this influence is particularly strong in the
reporting on the third or, better said, the peripheral, superexploited world
of the global capitalist system. This world remains for the journalist, as for
the explorer, a world essentially "without History," a world that appears to
the metropolitan centers, where real History is assumed to take place, as
spatially but not temporally linked. (Pratt cites the work of Johannes Fabian,
who describes this temporal duality as a "denial of coevalness.") "Nicaragua,"
"El Salvador," "Vietnam," and so on are essentially just "places on the map,"
spaces empty of History.
It is this underlying ideology, this naturalizing false consciousness, that
neither Under Fire nor Salvador is able to supersede, despite their gestures
toward a certain limited media self-criticism. The real events joined together
as the "adventure" of the photojournalist hero (in the formula, more or
less, of a modern "docudrama") do not take on any truly historical dimen-
sion as a result of this narrative method.
What links events together, apart from the mere coincidence that the
hero happens to be there to witness them (for example, Boyle's presence as
a communicant in the national cathedral on the day of Romero's assassi-
nation), is merely their brutal and gruesome sensationality. It is thus dou-
bly ironic that despite the obvious criticism aimed by these films at reporters
who equate news with violence (see especially the trip to the body dump at
El Playon in Salvador), the films themselves succumb to the same fascina-
tion with brutality and death. (Such fetishism is, not coincidentally, a typi-
cal feature of naturalisms both old and new.) This equating of History with
 "PEOPLE WITHOUT HISTORY" 45

salient acts of violence—to the point of ignoring the less obvious and more
crucial realities, including violence's more subtle day-to-day forms — is sim-
ply repeated in these films in the artistic guise of the journalist-protagonist's
"experience." The additional fact that the Central American characters never
appear except as either the perpetrators or the victims of violence only
serves to reinforce the prevailing ideological denial of peripheral historic-
ity. Of course, violence is a real and fundamental aspect of history, and
nothing is to be gained by simply omitting its portrayal. But the violence
portrayed in Salvador and Under Fire has no genuinely historical character.
Violence here, as in the standard Hollywood product, appears on the one
hand as a purely physiological phenomenon (hence the great attention to
detail) and on the other as an abstract moral category. It appears to exist
separately from the characters themselves and their social relations. There
is no portrayal in either film of violence as internally and vitally connected
to the nature of imperialism. Violence preexists society in "Central Amer-
ica" as if it were a kind of sinister Nature. But, then, such is to be expected
of a "people without History."
The framework of this same naturalizing ideology appears at a much
higher resolution in Joan Didion's much-read travelogue, Salvador. First
published in part as a series of articles in the New York Review of Books in
1982 and subsequently in an expanded book form in the following year,
Didion's book recounts her own stint as a journalist in El Salvador cover-
ing the events of spring and summer 1982.3 It can, in a certain way, be read
as a theoretical outline for the films themselves. Here once again we are
told the story of a hard-boiled, somewhat cynical North American free-
lance (Didion is by profession a novelist and playwright) dispatched to this
previously unheard-of place to observe and make sense of things. The swash-
buckle and the love story are missing, but in their place there is an appar-
ently equally heroic will to look into the "heart of darkness" and speak its
name. From the airport to the hotel and back—with brief side trips to the
fighting in Morazan and to the U.S. Embassy—Didion wields the big stick
of interpretation. Such is the unavoidable task since, apart from the fact
that "terror is the given of the place" (14) — an unintentionally frank ad-
mission of the book's own central literary preconception — "the place brings
everything into question" (35). A search for halazone tablets takes Didion
to a San Salvador shopping mall, a place eerily identical to its North Amer-
ican originals but deemed insignificant because "this [i.e., Salvador] was a
story that would not be illuminated by such details, ... a story that would
 46 "PEOPLE WITHOUT HISTORY"

not be illuminated at all,... perhaps even less a 'story' than a true noche ob-
scura [sic]" (36). Even the most superficial links between the North American
imperial metropolis and this Central American outpost are thus discarded
outright as unimportant, without bearing on the thing itself that Didion
has come to seek out.
This thing is "terror," the sheer physical actuality of violent death. On
to the front! "The only way to get any sense of what was happening was to
go up there" (39). "There" is Morazan, site of current military activities.
Upon her arrival, however, Didion is largely disappointed: no action, just
hot, dusty, sleepy villages. Again, no violence, no story. "The least equivo-
cal fact of the day was the single body we had seen that morning on the
road ..., the naked corpse of a man about thirty with a clean bullet-hole
drilled neatly between his eyes" (45; emphasis mine). Witnessing a local
fiesta that she can only liken to an operatic farce, Didion reflects that if
"Salvador" has a History at all, it is "resistant to heroic interpretation" (72).
(A self-evident matter, of course, since only the white explorer/journalist
can play the hero's part.) Here History has been reduced to the minimum
fact of occasional violence. Traced back to its origins in European colo-
nization, this History becomes "blanker still" — again, only naturally since
History itself can only begin to be spoken of at the moment of coloniza-
tion. "History is la matanza and then current events, which recede as they
happen" (71). El Salvador's is a "frontier history" tending to a "cultural
zero" (73).
But imperialism, meanwhile, has completely receded from even this
"frontier." It—described by Didion in a perversely liberal twist of phrase
as "the American effort" — is a "dreamwork," a "misapprehension of the lo-
cal rhetoric" in a "political tropic alien to us" (92, 96). It is as if the entire
operation, from the billions in weapons and training to the rigged elec-
tions and the tacit logistical support for the death squads, "were taking
place not in El Salvador, but in a mirage of El Salvador" (96). The "Ameri-
can effort" is simply a hopeless muddle, the doings of clownish officials
trapped by their own "rhetoric." One can almost hear in such phrases the
familiar liberal-apologetic refrains of "well intentioned" and "tragic mis-
take." (Somehow, of course, Didion is able to see through the veil of impe-
rial solipsism to the hidden reality.) One recalls here Boyles's comment to
Colonel Hyde, the fascistic, cigar-chomping U.S. military liaison in Stone's
film: "I don't want to see another Vietnam. I don't want to see America get
another bad rap."
 "PEOPLE WITHOUT HISTORY" 47

II

Despite its mildly cultist air of intellectual cynicism, Didion's Salvador shares
with the two Hollywood narratives we have analyzed an essentially ethical
and liberal "humanist" attitude toward the realities of imperialism as be-
held at the periphery. In all three works, "Central America" is imagined as
the victim, in its Historylessness, of an abstract Evil manifesting itself on all
sides as a generic Violence. A world "abandoned by God" has become in
its turn a world inhabited by a sinister metaphysical presence. From the
Paradise that the texts of "discovery" and early colonization typically evoked
in their descriptions of this green and fertile quadrant of the New World,
"Central America" has become a metaphor for Hell. As sojourners through
this infernal, subhistorical terrain, the journalist-heroes represent both the
necessary promise and the essential impotence of a redemptive course of
action. Acts of personal sacrifice on the part of both cinematic protago-
nists appear to justify their individual immunity to the surrounding at-
mosphere of damnation — enabling them, as it were, to "see" into its be-
nighted heart — but they are unable to transcend it. (It is true that Under
Fire allows for a faintheartedly providential interpretation by concluding
with the success of the insurrection, but the presence of the ubiquitous
CIA mercenary cheering the Sandinistas and Marcel Jazzy's woeful predic-
tions before his execution render this hopeful note rather ambiguous.) As
Didion's more explicitly political discourse hints, the saviors were to have
been the U.S. government officials themselves—as dreamed in some long-
lost hallucinatory dawn of the Alliance for Progress — had it not been for
the "rhetorical" defect that has canceled their miracle-working powers. The
sixties-ish journalists seem to represent what remains of the mythical past
of liberal-Utopian imperialist "benevolence." Excluded (temporarily) from
the official posts of imperialist power, they, like the real beneficiaries of the
liberal ideology they artistically embody, exploit their privileged position
in the news media like any loyal opposition. Meanwhile, of course, the fun-
damental historical legacies of imperialism — poverty, dependence, and re-
pression— preserve their reified moral abstraction as features of the land-
scape. They are beyond help, for how can those condemned to a subhistorical
existence hope to alter their own situation?
In Denis Johnson's 1986 novel The Stars at Noon, this underlying met-
aphor of Hell becomes conscious allegory.4 The setting is Nicaragua. The
time is 1984, "the real 1984, just before the elections would be postponed
 48 "PEOPLE WITHOUT HISTORY"

again" (16). The protagonist is again the familiar freelance, female in this
case (about which more later) and, like Boyle, down and out. The name-
less feminine voice recounts in some 180 pages a minimalist, yet somehow
still superfluous, plot in which, no longer able or inclined to maintain her
journalistic cover and holding a large quantity of black-marketed and worth-
less Nicaraguan currency, she attempts to escape the country in the com-
pany of a British oil company executive. The latter is pursued by both Nic-
araguan and Costa Rican agents for having revealed the whereabouts of
extensive oil deposits in the region. Upon finally reaching the Costa Rican
border, the Englishman is captured and presumably locked up or killed,
and the heroine takes up prostitution in a Costa Rican brothel.
An inexplicable encounter with a North American "consultant" and prob-
able CIA agent adds some minor complication to what is finally a sense-
less, artistically void story line. But this scarcely detracts from what is clearly
the aesthetic raison of the text, to be found in its purely descriptive, stream-
of-consciousness prose for which the plot serves as a simple pretext. There
emerges from this endlessly glib and caustic discharge what is more or less
a full-color retake of Didion's postmodern "Salvador." (The narrative be-
gins in a Managuan McDonald's.) Only, where Didion is content to allow
the Inferno leitmotif to suggest itself to the reader indirectly (as in her visit
to "La Puerta del Diablo"), Johnson makes of it the scarcely hidden "key"
to an "interpretation" of what is in reality a completely shallow instance of
pseudoambiguity. One citation here is as good as another. In the McDon-
ald's scene, for example, the narrator, pursued by a lecherous Sandinista
official, flees into the ladies room and delivers the following tirade:
I looked for toilet paper, but there wasn't any toilet paper and there never
would be toilet paper—south of here they were having a party with
streamers of the stuff, miles and miles of toilet paper, but here in the hyper-
new, all-leftist future coming at us at the rate of rock and roll there was just
a lot of nothing, no more wiping your bum, no more Coca-cola, no beans
or rice: except for me they got no more shiny pants, no more spiked heels.
No unslakeable thirst! No kissing while dancing! No whores! No meat! No
milk! South of here was Paradise, average daily temperature 71 degrees
Fahrenheit. (4-5)

The original crossing from Costa Rica into Nicaragua is likewise described
by the protagonist as being "ejected from Paradise" (18). Her status in Hell
is that of "observer-tormentee" (23). "To observe is my designated agony,
the sharpest punishment is just to watch" (30). Of her English companion
and lover, she writes:
 PEOPLE WITHOUT HISTORY 49

I had to observe him. In fact they were upping my voltage, weren't the little
demons, doing away with whatever was formerly unimagineable, putting
before me for observation the most horribly tormented soul of all, the
humanitarian among the damned—dressing him in a blue suit, grooming
him presentably, handing him an appointment book— Believe me, looks
deceive; among these souls he would have liked to help, with their diesel-
blackened nostrils, their gnarled, arthritic hands and shrivelled guts, their
faces rubbed away against the wheel of need, among these he was most
definitely the pick hit, the big contender, the one to watch. (79)
Later, in a climax of postmodern sensibility, the heroine describes the sight
of drying sheets in her cheap, purple-walled motel as "beauty ..., the most
frightening business going in Inferno '84" (96). "This is Hell," she screams
to her lover. "It's Hell, how many times do you have to be told?" Once is
too many, thinks the unfortunate reader.
Such self-conscious and artistically inept allegorization is, however, less
important for itself than for the ideological shift for which it creates a kind
of aesthetic interference. This is a shift sharply to the right. All pretense at
a moral critique of imperialism is now dropped. But its surface realities
undergo yet another reification. They become fully aestheticized, the bare
phenomenological content of what is formally no more than the vehicle
for a pseudoallegory. No longer constrained by the unwieldy necessity for
an ongoing, parallel rationalization of imperialist immorality, the narra-
tive voice gains by this aesthetic distancing a certain freedom of expression
it previously has lacked.
What it has to express here are the characteristic accents of outright im-
perialist and neofascistic barbarism. Again, one citation is as good as an-
other. The heroine's Sandinista pursuer in the McDonald's scene is "an in-
competent, small-time official in a floundering, greasy banana regime"
(6). "Honestly," she confides, "they're all pimps" (8). The guards at the Man-
agua long-distance telephone company are "terrorists" (28). Unable to make
her call, the narrator "longed for the sight of U.S. tanks further chewing
up the streets of this slovenly capital" (29). Minimally distanced by the fic-
tional cover, the narrative voice repeats to us the then familiar rationales
for the contra war on Nicaragua: "They're not going to let anyone vote," it
says of the 1984 election. "They'll postpone it again. And they'll blame the
U.S." (79). The books in a Managua bookstore are "tracts, rationalizations,
biographies, whitewashes, smears, like La muerte de Sandino, the sad testi-
monial of Somoza's murder of the rebel" (41). The victims of the terror (if
not the main characters themselves, persecuted by sinister bureaucrats and
secret police) have now become the opponents to the Sandinista regime, as
 5O PEOPLE W I T H O U T HISTORY

in the description of a hanged contra suspect in Matagalpa. On their flight

south to the Costa Rican border, the fugitives "would survey the scene and
check out the roadside pedestrians, looking for the face that might have
half a brain behind it" (104). After being overcharged by young garage me-
chanics for a spare tire, the heroine has to be restrained "from strangling
the larcenous little shits" (120). And, finally, as their flight reaches its end,
she breaks down to her companion:
I told him I wanted to see everything destroyed before I had to look at
any more of it.
He didn't talk at all.
And the Englishman kept his thoughts to himself even after we were
stopped ten miles down the highway with the walls of grass growing on
either side of us, in the line of cars waiting to get out of this horrible land.
Someday the Marines would come down from the sky and strafe this
convoy of hopefuls. Would come in a plague of U.S. gunships like big
lightbulbs in the nighttime, sowing down on them all a lot of Dow chemicals,
drifting and winking leaflets full of unintelligible threats and bribes, and
high-caliber Catling tracer-bullets— And giant fire bombs. (140)
Reading The Stars at Noon, one is reminded alternately of the celebra-
tion of "War, the World's Only Hygiene" in the writings of the futurist/
fascist Marinetti and of the descriptions of "dirty Jews" and Eastern Euro-
peans in the tracts of Nazi propagandists. All that separates it from an open
call for the annihilation of the inferior race is, of course, its crude fiction-
ality. Perhaps one could, were one so inclined, attempt the awkward task of
"interpreting" this "novel of uncommon power and beauty" (as the dust
jacket declares it) as an arcane exercise in extreme, postmodern irony. But
fictions, despite what we are often taught, are not self-generating, and one
must ask whether the postmodern, minimalist aesthetic that dominates
Johnson's novel is not itself the product, at least in part, of a late imperial-
ist culture that has assumed an aestheticizing, existential posture toward
the outward signs of social and ethical decay. In any case, an ironic reading
presupposes an unstated point of view contrary to that openly expressed
or portrayed. No such contrary perspective can be inferred from The Stars
at Noon, however, which even the most charitable reading could only char-
acterize as a fiction governed by outright philosophical nihilism.
The novel's one apparent gesture of cultural or political consciousness
is the use by its white male author of a female protagonist and feminine
narrative voice. Reviews of the novel made much of this "innovation,"
despite the long tradition of male-authored, female-narrated fictions.
Does The Stars at Noon suggest some effort to "feminize" what is typically
 PEOPLE WITHOUT HISTORY 51

a fictional subgenre of male heroics? Certainly the actions of the heroine

are anything but heroic in the orthodox, "masculine" sense. These amount
to little more than willful self-prostitution. But beyond the occasional
pointed references to female genitalia and the menstrual cycle, there is
nothing in Johnson's portrayal of his main character to suggest the social
or historical outlines of the feminine. Rather, the feminization of the pro-
tagonist-narrator suggests a perverse bid to compensate for the torrent of
racist and sexist vitriol that the author channels through her character.
The fictional narrator of The Stars at Noon is made to articulate the deeply
misogynist ideology that her manipulated actions as a character elicit in a
sexist reader.
To acquire some palpable sense of the immense gulf that separates nar-
ratives such as these from both the day-to-day experiences of contemporary
Central Americans and the deeper historical realities that they articulate,
one might turn to the so-called testimonial narratives by such nonprofes-
sional authors as Guatemala's Rigoberta Menchu and Nicaragua's Omar
Cabezas — to mention only two of the best known of Central America's
modern narrative voices.5 Although they fall short of achieving the epic
range and depth of great modern realism on the order, say, of a Sholokhov,
an Achebe, or even a Carpentier, the testimonial narratives take a neces-
sary first step in claiming for an indigenous, plebeian voice the right and
the ability to contest the imperial dogma that would reduce it to the status
of a "cultural zero." As Adolfina, the heroine of Salvadoran novelist's Man-
lio Argueta's 1980 novel Un dia en la vida, says, after recounting her expe-
riences during a farm workers' occupation of the national cathedral in San
Salvador:
The worry persists, even if one is sure that so many hardships cannot be
eternal. We are doing what's necessary so that they won't be eternal. For a
few days the persecutions in our town and region were suspended. But they
will return. But each time they will find us more powerful in our response.
What with the despair of our mothers, sisters and grandparents, what we
farmworkers have done revives us.6

Is it not the exclusion of precisely this "response," spoken of by Adolfina,

that underlies our modern-day imperial fictions of "Central America"?

1988
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 PART II

Sui generis
This page intentionally left blank
 CHAPTER FOUR

Narrating the trujillato

In the sphere of official political reality, the regime of Dominican dictator

Rafael Leonidas Trujillo — known as the trujillato—is History. Although
certain sectors of the most reactionary private opinion may still long for
the days of el Jefe, the parameters of legitimized public consensus in Santo
Domingo, narrow as they may otherwise be, universally exclude such nos-
talgias. A claim to political legitimacy in Dominican society today is neces-
sarily a disavowal of any complicity in the long night of 1930—61.
But behind the veil of official truths, the spectral image of Trujillo and
of daily life under his particular system of paternalist fascism refuses to
be laid to rest. No doubt the genocidal horrors of the White Terror in
neighboring countries such as Guatemala and El Salvador (only recently
brought to the attention of the world by direct North American efforts
to crush popular insurgency in this region) have helped recall similar
atrocities to several generations of Dominicans — at least to those who
were ever able to forget. Moreover, life without Trujillo for what is proba-
bly the vast majority of Dominicans may not be greatly altered. It is clear
that the plundered wealth of thirty years has not found its way back into
the pockets of the truly dispossessed. A perhaps more discrete disposses-
sion continues apace, causing levels of suffering that even the tirano him-
self might have found difficult to excuse. Overt political repression has

55
 56 NARRATING THE TRUJILLATO

perhaps taken on subtler forms in certain social quarters. But no compla-

cency is indicated here either. The example of U.S.-directed counterinsur-
gency in Central America is a baleful and bloody warning to all neighbor-
ing lands and is surely intended as such. Trujillo had no monopoly on
terror. Chomsky and Herman in The Washington Connection and Third
World Fascism cite a 1971 report by Norman Gall in which it is alleged that
the number of political murders linked to government forces in the period
following 1965 exceeded that of any comparable period under the dictator
himself.1
This haunting persistence of a trujillista past, which, despite its air of ir-
remediable archaism, refuses to withdraw its emotional claim on the pre-
sent, appears to reflect itself in a likewise persistent, if unstated, literary
phenomenon — namely, the absence of a truly definitive and convincing
narrative portrayal of life under the trujillato. Probably no work of Domini-
can literary narrative written since the 1930s with any pretension to real-
ism fails to allude either to Trujillo or to the multiple manifestations of his
power. But on the whole the historical semblance of this period—its un-
derlying configuration as a narrative in the imagination of both a popular
and an intellectual unconscious — remains fragmented and disjunct. The
trujillato seems to hover in the mind of present-day society as a kind of ex-
periential content without final form, at best a myriad of lurid and hor-
rendous anecdotes strung together on a thread supplied by the biography
of the dictator himself. For all that recent historiography may have tran-
scended this tendency to the anecdotal and the strictly biographical, draw-
ing many of the crucial objective developments of the years 1930-61 out
from under "la sombra del caudillo," such departures appear limited to a
narrowly analytical sphere.2 The living, felt connection of past to present,
the representation of the past as, in Georg Lukacs's phrase, "the concrete
precondition of the present," is not the work of the academy alone but of
culture itself, especially its literary arm.3 But the present situation of Do-
minican society, conceived in the broadest subjective dimensions, seems in
obscure ways to obstruct this process of collective historicization, even as
it demands it.
Such, at least, is the thesis I wish briefly and provisionally to explore in
the course of commentary on two rather disparate narrative texts: Juan
Isidro Jimenes Grullon's Una Gestapo en America and Marcio Veloz Mag-
giolo's De abril en adelante. My criteria for this selection will hopefully be
clarified in the course of what follows.
 NARRATING THE TRUJILLATO 57

Una Gestapo en America is what would now be popularly termed a "testi-

monial" narrative—a new literary genre made popular in the past two
decades by the widely read diaries of Ernesto "Che" Guevara (as well as
many "revolutionary" testimonials inspired by them), the testimonial "nov-
els" of ethnographer-turned-author Miguel Barnet, and the many recently
published narratives, more reminiscent of Una Gestapo en America, writ-
ten by victims of fascism in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina.4 What is "new" in
this genre is of course not the production of such texts — the literary his-
tory of Latin America is replete with such testimonial tracts, going back to
the days of colonization. Rather it is the well-established procedure of ac-
cording to them a literary and aesthetic status as narratives, regardless of
their ostensibly documentary purposes. The argument has been made, no
doubt with some justice, that the increasing publication and critical accla-
mation of testimonial literature have had the desirable effect of introduc-
ing to an intellectual and literary readership a range of voices and social
and historical perspectives typically excluded from purely fictional, bel-
letristic traditions.
"Literary" or not, Una Gestapo en America has surely done as much as
any text to expose to Dominican and Latin American readers the depths of
fascist atrocity reached already in the initial years of the Trujillo regime.
Republication of the book in 1962, as, in the wake of Trujillo's assassina-
tion in 1961, many of the jealously guarded secrets of power were first be-
coming general knowledge, was especially important in this respect. Jimenes
Grullon's testimonial is representative in numerous ways of the type of
narrative that has since that time generally informed the contemporary
portrait of the trujillato as an era of particularly aberrant corruption and
violence, henceforth stigmatized by its seemingly inexhaustible sources of
malice.
Written shortly after Jimenes Grullon's release from Trujillo's prisons in
1935 and his subsequent flight into exile, Una Gestapo en America recounts
a sequence of abuses witnessed and directly suffered by the author follow-
ing his arrest in 1934. One of a group of leading santiagueiios arrested for
conspiring against Trujillo after a betrayal by former accomplices, Jimenes
Grullon details the days of confinement and forced labor at the prison (orig-
inally built by U.S. Marines) at Nigua, transfer to the somewhat less severe
surroundings of the Fortaleza del Homenaje in Santo Domingo, trial and
 58 NARRATING THE TRUJILLATO

conviction, brief return to Nigua, and finally a "pardon" of sorts in Octo-

ber 1935. However, as expressed in the book's parenthetical subtitle, Vida,
tortura, agonia y muerte de presos politicos bajo la tirania de Trujillo (Life,
torture, agony, and death of political prisoners under the tyranny of Tru-
jillo), the narrative is less the personal statement of its narrator than that
of an extended brotherhood of internees, many of whose deaths by execu-
tion or a combination of torture, overwork, and disease are carefully and
pathetically recounted. Jimenes Grull6n gives frequent vent to his private
thoughts on a wide variety of political, social, psychological, and philosoph-
ical topics, but this is often part of an effort to reconstruct the commen-
taries of his ex-cellmates as well. Thus, although primarily a straight se-
quential and anecdotal account of the author's period of imprisonment,
the narrative often reverts to an almost Platonic form of extended and rather
abstract dialogue, with Jimenes Grullon usually emerging as the Socratic
master of rational argument. Less frequent are the author's recountings of
events that he has not personally witnessed but which have either been re-
lated to him by other inmates or prison guards or have taken place prior to
his confinement. Curiously, Jimenes Grullon often shows the greatest nar-
rative and dramatic skill in his rendering of such scenes. The episode listed
in the index as "Aventura, persecucion, suicido y macabras exequias postu-
mas de Enrique Blanco" (Adventure, persecution, suicide, and macabre post-
humous rites of Enrique Blanco) (144-47) is one such vivid account, as are
the rending details of the executions of an Argentine labor organizer (222-
23) and a preso comun known as "el Ciclon" (328), communicated to Jimenes
Grullon and his companions by the occasionally sympathetic guard. Such
incidents, told with a minimum of condemnatory and adjudicating ver-
biage, truly "speak for themselves."
Overall, however, the historical portrait of the trujillato that emerges in
these pages is disappointingly flat. Despite numerous and lengthy specula-
tions concerning the real sources of Trujillo's power over individuals and
society alike (some of them quite acute, as we shall see), Trujillo and his
troupe of hirelings and sycophants are represented as the uniform mani-
festations of an evil that is above historical particulars, even outside them,
and to be explained, if at all, as a function of Trujillo's pathological abnor-
mality (214-15). Trujillo himself appears at one extreme as a clownish mad-
man, buried beneath an outlandish assortment of imperial regalia:
Let us observe him in the unfolding of his daily and most conspicuous
projections What do these suggest? First, a delusion of grandeur so
 NARRATING THE TRUflLLATO 59

intense that it is only comparable to that of a paraplegic; second, an

exorbitant love of ostentation, of pomp, of medals— Nothing could be
more extravagant and ridiculous than to see him appear in public functions
with his waistcoat and the lapel of his jacket hidden behind a plethora of
medals; or to experience how the sound of his steps shipwrecks on the
polyphonic jingling of the rnetal he wears. (215; my translation)

At the other extreme he is a gigantic, Dantesque Satan, devouring his

victims amidst a landscape of blood and fire (243). Fiallo, Leger, and other
henchmen are extensions of this caricatured evil, again despite the au-
thor's and his companions' clear grasp of the need for some rational mode
of explaining the complete sycophancy of so many of their countrymen.
In fairness it must, of course, be admitted that circumstantially and ex-
ternally imposed limits on Jimenes Grull6n's perspective account for much
of the text's historical flatness. Few individuals, perhaps not even Trujillo
himself, could foresee the pervasiveness and sheer capacity for entrench-
ment of a power viewed by most at the time as a temporary usurpation.
Add to this the author's imprisonment, subsequent exile, and effective iso-
lation from the daily, more subtle realities of the trujillato—a set of circum-
stances that clearly explains up to a point the general paucity and fragmen-
tary character of the literature concerning this period—and the lack of
historical depth seems natural enough.
But, as always, the most decisive limitations are those already intrinsic
to the text itself in the form of its particular ideological premises, silences,
and links to a given class purview. If the trujillato presents itself as a phe-
nomenon essentially recalcitrant to the historicizing, narrative operations
of Jimenes Grullon's text — as a historical state of exception, suggesting a
repetition of past "barbarisms" rather than an unfolding of present-day
"civilization" — is this not the result of the historical self-deceptions pre-
sent in the author's oppositional stance? The trujillato cannot be securely
located in the present because the oppositional subject that contemplates
it is itself still reliving the past. Jimenes Grullon's narrative models here, as
must be unmistakably clear to anyone acquainted with this literature, are
those of nineteenth-century liberalism. The echoes of Hostos and Marti
are overt and acknowledged. Less audible, but just as influential, however,
are the positivist credos of Sarmiento's Facundo and the tragic sentimen-
talities of Echeverria and Marmol. The Trujillo of Una Gestapo en America,
despite the analogy to modern fascism in the title, is a nineteenth-century
tyrant, execrated and opposed by tragic heroes cast in a neoromantic mold.
 6O NARRATING THE TRUflLLATO

None of this should come as a surprise, given Jimenes Grullon's own

class background and what was still at the time the predominantly elitist
and "high society" cast of his opposition to Trujillo and his North Ameri-
can backers. All of this, as the author's subsequent politicization and em-
brace of Marxism indicate, was shortly to undergo radical change. Indeed,
the signs of this evolution are repeatedly evident in the "Platonic" inter-
ludes, where Jimenes Grullon sustains what is at times an ideological posi-
tion that distances him greatly from his initially elitist liberalism. (One may
of course have legitimate doubts as to just how much of this is the result of
astute post factum revisions, designed to give the author's opinions a kind
of pseudoprophetic truth.) His critique of the oppositional strategy fol-
lowed by his fellow conspirators climaxes toward the end of the text:

Our orientation was toward the personal exploit, without concern for
pointing out the tasks that ought to immediately follow so as to guarantee
the liquidation of the regime and the advent of a popular government. As a
consequence, the success of the enterprise left unresolved the unknown that
was the future— This clearly exposed the fact that the movement was
intrinsically obedient to the state of desperation in which one lived and still
lives and not to the impulse to produce the revolutionary transformation of
sociopolitical methods and institutions. This error had its source in the
background and the attitude of the organizers, almost all of them men tied
to caudillismo and nineteenth-century liberal-democratic ideology. With few
exceptions, all belonged to the political parties of the past, parties that the
dictatorship sought to destroy. The movement's roots, then, were of an
archaic sort It gave the appearance of being a kind of spasm — perhaps
the last — of a traditionalism in full decline— Since Trujillo was the fruit
of this traditionalism, the struggle suggested an altercation between an
indignant father and his monstrous and traitorous son. (301-2; my
translation)

These remarks show remarkable dialectical insight — even if they are

the result of subsequent rewriting. What is even more remarkable about
them, however, is their complete variance with the basically neoromantic
narrative configuration in which they are embedded. At the end of his or-
deal, Jimenes Grullon comes to a self-critical realization that should now
enable him to see through the various fetish concepts of power and reveal
its true, historically conditioned features. But this moment remains a mere
insight — the story that the recipient of this insight tells, though of great
personal honesty and both dramatically coherent and satisfying, is implic-
itly falsified by its own theoretical reflections.
 NARRATING THE TRUJILLATO 6l

II

At first glance, Marcio Veloz Maggiolo's "protonovel" De abril en adelante

appears to bear little on these questions.5 As a stylish exercise in experi-
mental narrative modes, with its obvious debt to Cortazar, Veloz Maggi-
olo's work seems more engaged by the challenge of producing a Domini-
can Rayuela than in the solution of artistic and narrative problems specific
to recent Dominican history.
At the same time, this novel, insofar as one can make out an unequivo-
cal ideological thrust at work in its many fragmentary and aleatory episodes,
seems at some level to propose its own appropiateness as a statement on
the April Revolution of 1965 and the various historical conduits leading
into it. Among these conduits is the trujillato itself, particularly its collapse
and the considerable period of ideological confusion that then ensued.
The reader of De abril en adelante will recall the predicament of the
novel's polynomial hero: how to write a novel that, in addition to impress-
ing the would-be novelist's literary friends and enemies, will aesthetically
encompass the whole of Dominican history in the elaboration of a single
archetypal moment of invasion and resistance, repeating itself in a series
of reenactments culminating in the events of April 1965.
It will also be recalled that the hero/would-be novelist fails to get be-
yond the opening sentences of this text. In its stead we read the "proto-
novel"— a battery of transcribed dialogues and monologues spoken by the
members of the protagonist's cenade, interlaced with narrative episodes cen-
tered on the character of Colonel Aguirre, a powerful trujillista official and
the hero's father.
Colonel Aguirre is the source of considerable trouble for Veloz Maggi-
olo's narrative — trouble for the narrator-protagonist, a convert to the left
and aspiring member of its privileged, intellectual wing, whose members
distrust him because of his family connections; and trouble for the narra-
tive as such, which, after creating in Aguirre its most convincing and his-
torically compelling character, cannot decide how to finish him off. There
are (at least) two contradictory accounts of his death: as a suicide during
the days of April, convinced as he is that the U.S. intervention will fail and
leave him at the mercy of his enemies; and as a martyr, killed in a previous
attempt to spark a military revolt against Trujillo. By the novel's end it is
apparent that Colonel Aguirre is the hero of yet another novel-within-a-
novel with not one but multiple endings. Open reference is made to his
 62 NARRATING THE TRUJILLATO

importance as a "paradigmatic" character (181). But this is a paradigm

with no uniform horizontal dimension — or with an undecidable variety
of these.
How much one can or should credit these narrative loose threads with
some supreme and ineffable aesthetic purpose, some impossibly profound
reflection on the illusions of narrative closure, is of no particular interest
to us here. At one level at least, intentionality aside, De abril en adelante
must be read as a genuine effort to generate some sort of narrative model
artistically adequate to the experience of the trujillato as seen looking back
through the lens of 1965.
Here, as in Una Gestapo en America, the effort fails. The Colonel Aguirre
paradigm (clearly a rough attempt at producing a character endowed with
Lukacsian "typicality") shows interesting narrative possibilities but proves
at length to be deficient, unable to make the transition from abstract idea
to artistic reality. Colonel Aguirre's complexities—-those of the trujillato
itself viewed in its totality of interconnections—exceed the basis for his
unity as a character. He collapses into the familiar narrative dualisms of
Jimenes Grullon's necromantic model: neither his capacity for evil nor his
tendency toward good can be derived from the historical material itself,
and in the end history too collapses into the abstract ethical space that sep-
arates the two poles. Like fimenes Grullon forty years before, Veloz Maggi-
olo enjoys a considerable theoretical awareness of the task before him. Yet
here too theory cannot get beyond itself, and the abstract insight into ap-
propriate form fails to penetrate the content as such. Veloz Maggiolo's nar-
rative never succeeds in surpassing this reflexive-theoretical stage. The aes-
thetic dogmas of modernism and the avant-garde encourage us to proclaim
this esoterism as legitimate and valuable for its own sake. But however this
may be, modernism, with its essential hostility to historicism and epic-realist
narrative, finally does no better than neoromanticism in resolving one of
the most crucial objective problems of modern Dominican literature.
Is this problem, then, without solution? Clearly not. If the elements of a
solution were not immanent in the artistic means generally available, the
problem would not assert itself so persistently in the course of the texts
themselves. That Dominican literature possesses the intrinsic resources for
a realism of high quality is not a matter for debate, as can be seen most re-
cently in the example of Pedro Verges's remarkable novel Solo cenizas hal-
lards (bolero).6 Verges's novel in many ways accomplishes for the period
1961-65 what remains to be accomplished for the longer, equally crucial
period that precedes it. But may not this curious inversion itself be a re-
 NARRATING THE TRUJILLATO 63

flection of the extent to which public perception and private remembrance

of the Trujillo period, transfixed as they are by the supremely fetishized
image of the dictator, still suffer from an absence of perspective — a per-
spective that is somehow easier to acquire for the fallout years after the
strongman's physical disappearance?

1986
 CHAPTER FIVE

The "Boom" Novel and the Cold

War in Latin America

i
One of the collateral if perhaps somewhat fortuitous benefits of the cur-
rent preoccupation with postmodernism in the humanities is that it has
now become much more difficult to sustain what was for decades the dom-
inant mode of apology for modernism itself and the underlying ideology
of its "canonicity": the idea that modernism and modermYy were consub-
stantial categories, that modernism was somehow already precontained in
the raw and immediate experience of contemporary life. To defend, say,
the Joycean interior monologue or the surrealist principles of montage it
was once necessary only to declare the fidelity of the aesthetic device to
"modern" life itself. Modernism had succeeded, for a time at least, in lay-
ing ideological claim to being the realism of our (or its) time. Given this fun-
damental premise, one might or might not concede the existence of a mod-
ernist "politics." But even supposing one did, such a politics tended to be
viewed as likewise consubstantial with "modernity" as such, rather than,
say, as the expression of some particular group or even class interest. Above
all, one thinks here of the Adornian and generally left-formalist theory of
aesthetic negation as constituting a new sphere for emancipatory activity
after the decline of "politics" in its traditional modes.

64
 THE "BOOM" NOVEL AND THE COLD WAR 65

Although one can still encounter serious efforts to produce a theory of

modernism as both a lived immediacy and as a kind of teleological neces-
sity (see, for example, Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts into Air)
this sort of thinking must now confront the sense among intellectuals and
cultural consumers generally that modernism has failed to keep its Utopian
promises — and that contemporary experience may not after all be of a
piece with modernist aesthetics.1 For some, no doubt, the same premise of
consubstantiality now restates itself, mutatis mutandis, as the relationship
of postmodernism to posftnoderm'f}'. But modernist burnout has also made
it easier to begin to think about the politics of modernism without in turn
feeling obliged to erect modernism into a metapolitics with its own unique
pertinence to contemporary experience. Perhaps, after all, modernism did
serve the interests of some while effectively thwarting those of others. And
perhaps there were, or are, other modernities, unexpressed and unsuspected
in canonically modernist aesthetic categories and practices. In any event,
the relation of modernism to both modern experience and to other aes-
thetic and cultural practices has come increasingly to be seen as hegemonic
and exclusionary rather than transparent and totalizing.
One of the many areas opened up for critical investigation by this line
of thinking is the historical connection between modernism and the anti-
communist politics of the Cold War. (In precise fact, this connection was
already being drawn by, among other Old Left intellectuals, the Lukacs of
the early 1950s [see, inter alia, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism and
the epilogue to The Destruction of Reason]. But the — as one might put
it—one-two punch of Cold War thinking itself, together with the gener-
ally promodernist stance of the New Left, had until recently kept this ques-
tion outside the limits of acceptable discourse.) Serge Guilbaut, in How
New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, argues, for example, that the rise of
Abstract Expressionism in the United States after World War II was less the
result of some spontaneous shift of aesthetic sensibility on the part of artists
and critics than the product of a self-consciously political drive to decan-
onize the old Popular Front realism of the 1930s and replace it with a de-
politicized art compatible with the U.S. imperial elite's new image of itself
as the guardian of aesthetic culture.2 A similarly political connection is un-
covered in Lawrence H. Schwartz's Creating Faulkner's Reputation? Here,
Schwartz analyzes the shift in Faulkner's literary fortunes from relative ob-
scurity in the 1930s and early 1940s to the superstardom of the 1950s and
after as a function of the same Cold War cultural campaign to delegitimize
the left-leaning social and proletarian realism that thrived in the pre-Cold
 66 THE "BOOM" NOVEL AND THE COLD WAR

War United States through the creation of a new, distinctly "apolitical" and
purportedly authentic "American" novelist. Guilbaut and Schwartz em-
phasize the key role played in both instances by the New York Intellectuals
gathered around the Partisan Review, as well as, in the case of Faulkner, by
New Critics such as Allen Tate and Cleanth Brooks. James Murphy, in his
recent and valuable study The Proletarian Moment, argues similarly that
the current neglect of the proletarian fiction of the 1930s stems directly
from an institutionalization of the politically aggressive promodernism of
the New York Intellectuals.4 And one should note here as well Barbara Fo-
ley's important new reading of the North American proletarian novel itself
(see Radical Representations) in which she has shown that the initial recep-
tion of works by authors such as Erskine Caldwell, Josephine Herbst, Mike
Gold, and Richard Wright, not only by left-wing but by more "mainstream"
critics as well, was generally enthusiastic.5 If this major body of literature,
stigmatized for its supposed aesthetic crudity and propagandism, later lan-
guished in the shadow of modernists such as Faulkner, this, she shows, was
at least as much a result of the Cold War conversion of formerly friendly
critics and publishers as it was of any properties intrinsic to the novels
themselves.
What these and other studies point to is certainly not, let it be said, a
conspiracy theory of modernism as an anticommunist plot but rather to
the tendency for cultural and literary institutions on the "Western" side of
the Cold War divide to promote the canonization of modernist works —
many of which long predated or had no direct relationship to the aggres-
sively anticommunist policies of the post-World War II years. These works
suited the cultural dictates of the Cold War not so much for what they said
or represented but for what they did not say or represent, for their scrupu-
lously maintained neutrality as purely self-referential languages of form,
or what Guilbaut calls their "political apoliticism." The politics of the Cold
War do not create modernism. To suppose this would be to fall into an ob-
vious historical fallacy. But it bears considering whether or not it is the
politics of the Cold War that create the institutional and cultural forces
that in turn have inculcated into several generations, including my own,
the creed of a modernist consubstantiality with contemporary life — of mod-
ernism, even, as historico-aesthetic telos.
The question I wish to pose in the present essay is whether or not
something analogous to the aesthetic-political change traced by Guilbaut,
Schwartz, Foley, and others in the United States takes place in Latin America.
More particularly, can a correlation be drawn between the global ideological
 THE "BOOM" NOVEL AND THE COLD WAR 6/

demands of the Cold War, above all the elevation of anticommunism into
a virtual touchstone not only for political but for virtually all cultural prac-
tice as well and the canonization of Latin American modernism, especially
modernist narrative?
Straightaway, however, some clarification is required. "Modernism" is
in some ways an unaccustomed term in the sphere of Latin American liter-
ary discourse. Its Spanish cognate— modernismo—refers to a literary move-
ment appearing in Spanish America at roughly the turn of the century,
mainly in poetry, and with affinities for French symbolism and Parnas-
sianism. By any account, however, modernismo would have to be deemed
a pre- or at best protomodernist phenomenon, if the more Eurocentric
or metropolitan designation is maintained. Vanguardismo probably comes
closest to translating the English term. But the lexical difficulty aside, there
remains the question of whether there is a Latin American modernism di-
rectly assimilable to some metropolitan, or would-be global, modernist
canon. Much of Latin American critical debate over the last three to four
decades has dwelled on this general issue, often claiming that such an as-
similation does considerable violence to a modern Latin American body of
literature that, while not quite outside the orbit of canonical modernism,
nevertheless turns on its own unique substrate of contemporary, lived ex-
perience. For a time, the preferred term became "magical realism," in ref-
erence to a mode of literary narrative that, while resembling modernism in
its penchant for formal experiments, also differed from it by virtue of its
purportedly mimetic relationship to a Latin American reality that was said
to exceed traditionally realist modes of representation.6
But with the proviso that its Latin American variant typically declares
its autonomy of form having first declared its autonomy of content, I think
it can be agreed that, at least in the narrative sphere, a Latin American
modernism has its origins in the works of authors such as Borges, Mario
de Andrade, Asturias, Carpentier, Rulfo, and Guimaraes Rosa. There can
also be little dispute that the so-called boom phase of Latin American fic-
tion that, beginning in the 1960s, follows on the work of the latter — com-
prising works by, inter alia, Fuentes, Cortazar, Vargas Llosa, and Garcia
Marquez— fully merits the modernist designation. Indeed, as Gerald Mar-
tin has recently written, the "boom" should be regarded not only as the
"product of the fiction that had gone before" but even more so as the "cli-
max and consummation of Latin American Modernism."7
But I would, in fact, go even further and maintain that it is only after the
onset of the "boom," and the vastly enhanced visibility of its representative
 68 THE "BOOM" NOVEL AND THE COLD WAR

authors and works both within the Latin American ambit itself and inter-
nationally, that the pre-"boom" modernists themselves come to be tacitly
regarded as belonging to a uniform literary current. It is now a standard
"truth" of Latin American literary historiography that without a Borges,
no Cortazar, without a Rulfo or Asturias, no Garcia Marquez, and so on.
From a certain narrowly philological standpoint, this is undeniably true.
But the effect of the genealogy here is not only to register the inheritance
per se but also to make it appear to be the fulfillment of a kind of literary
destiny: we needed Rulfo so that we could get a Garcia Marquez, thus real-
izing the true latent possibilities of the Latin American literary genius.
That is: the "boom," if I am right about its effective success in rewriting
Latin American literary history with itself as telos, might be seen as achiev-
ing, vis-a-vis its literary prehistory, what the rise of Faulkner, or of Ab-
stract Expressionism, achieve in their respective North American spheres:
the decisive and a priori exclusion from (or marginalization within) the
canon of nonmodernist works, movements, and so on.
But does this elevation of modernism to a hegemonic position likewise
obey, even if only indirectly, a Cold War political logic? Here the analogy
to North American developments appears much more problematic. Cer-
tainly, the standard theories of the "boom" would not appear to support
such a view. These theories can, very schematically, be classified as belong-
ing to three different types. The first, and probably still the most com-
monly alleged theory may be termed the aesthetidst. Typically advanced by
the "boom" authors themselves, the aestheticist account of the "boom" ex-
plains it as simply the discovery of a new literary language in which to ex-
press Latin American reality with, for the first time, complete authenticity.
Cortazar, Fuentes, and Vargas Llosa all made notorious pronouncements
to this effect, and there has been no lack of critics to echo it back. But we
would scarcely expect to find any emergent historical or political critique
of modernism in this version of the "boom" since, in keeping with what
is obviously its own modernist self-understanding, the aestheticist theory
takes as its point of departure the idea of an immanent formal rupture that
must, finally, be accepted on faith. Any attempt at a historical or political
explanation of this aesthetic rupture would only rob it of the claim to for-
mal immanence. Moreover, even if one were inclined to give some cre-
dence to it, it would have to be observed that the formal "revolution" had
already in large measure been carried out by pre-"boom" modernists such
as Borges, Asturias, and Guimaraes Rosa.
 THE 'BOOM NOVEL AND THE COLD WAR 69

A second theory of the "boom" that has gained some currency holds
that, as the term "boom" itself implies, the "aesthetic" revolution was re-
ally nothing more than a major expansion of Latin American literary com-
modities into domestic and international markets. Its best-known advocate
has been Angel Rama, whose essay "El 'boom' en perspectiva" (The 'boom'
in perspective) remains one of the most informative pieces of criticism
ever to be written on the subject. Here Rama equates the "boom" with the
emergence in Latin America of a larger reading public, together with the
production and the marketing tools required to service it. The "boom"
marks the "absorption of literature within the mechanisms of consumer
society," and along with it the appearance of the author not only as profes-
sional but as media star.8
This is certainly a useful corrective to the aestheticist myth, but it will
likewise not take us very far in the exploration of the links between the
"boom" novel and the global politics of the Cold War. Rama regards the
political orientations of the "boom" authors — ranging, at different times,
from socialist to liberal to conservative—to be, by reason of this very plu-
rality, of secondary importance. What mattered was exclusively the new
reading public; the "boom" novel was such by virtue of its ability to com-
mand this new market, to supply it with a set of self-images that, for what-
ever reason, met a preexisting demand. That is, Rama here adopts what
might be called the vulgar sociological standpoint, according to which phe-
nomena such as market trends, demographic shifts, and changing consump-
tion and work patterns are separated from questions of both politics and
aesthetics. (This, of course, is not by any stretch to imply that Rama's work
as a whole is limited to such a standpoint.)
Finally, there is the theory that sees the "boom" novel as the literary
manifestation of the new political consciousness generated in Latin Amer-
ica by the Cuban Revolution. This we might designate the revolutionary-
historicist tendency. The Colombian critic Jaime Mejia-Duque, for exam-
ple, concedes the significance of both the purely formal and the commercial
aspects of the "boom," but regards these as "overdetermined" by the new
political reality supposedly inaugurated in 1959.9 The fact that, particu-
larly after the Padilla affair of 1971, many of the "boom" authors withdrew
their initial support of the revolution demonstrates the "constitutive am-
biguity" of the politics of the "boom" but does not negate the objective
historical connection.10 The "boom" is, in Mejia-Duque's words, "something
exterior to [the] revolution, but not foreign to it" (ibid.; my translation)."
 70 THE BOOM NOVEL AND THE COLD WAR

More recently Gerald Martin, while not discounting the "market" theory,
has taken a similar position, seeing the "boom" as
a confused and contradictory moment, marked deeply by the Cuban
revolution— The sense of diverse ideological alternatives offered by Cuba
and the various social democractic experiments of the day, combined with
the new cosmopolitanism bred by a consumption-oriented capitalist boom
and an expansion of the Latin American middle classes (nouveau read?) —
buyers and consumers of novels—created a period of intense artistic activity
throughout the subcontinent. (Journeys through the Labyrinth, 204-5)

Within this theoretical trend there might also be included those more neg-
ative assessments of the "boom" — see, for example, Fernandez Retamar's
Caliban—that indict the "boom" novelists as being too "exterior" to the
revolution—but without ceasing to insist on the Cuban experience as the
historical precondition for the aesthetic developments as such, however
they are to be evaluated.
From the standpoint of basic methodology, it is this latter, revolution-
ary-historicist approach to the "boom" that I think brings us closest to the
complex truth of the phenomenon itself. Here, at least, in contrast to the
aestheticist approach, an effort is made to historicize and politicize mod-
ernist aesthetic categories, but without thereby succumbing to the vulgar
sociological tendency to treat the aesthetic aspect as intrinsically arbitrary.
But the insistence on the Cuban Revolution as the principal historical de-
terminant of the "boom" novel has always seemed somewhat dubious to
me. The profound subjective impact of the revolution and the events it
unleashed on Latin American intellectuals and artists certainly cannot be
denied. And in a sense it is through Cuba, especially post-1961, that the
Cold War exerts its most direct influence on Latin America. But how does
one proceed from the anti-imperialist, and later would-be socialist, revo-
lution to the modernist "revolution" in literary form (or, if one prefers, the
uncontroversially capitalist revolution in book publishing and marketing)
without converting the analogous term here into the thinnest of abstrac-
tions? Such a notion does not answer but merely begs the questions: what
was there particularly "modernist" in the Cuban Revolution, and what par-
ticular anti-imperialist or socialist objectives were furthered through the
consecration of modernist narrative as the authentic mode of contempo-
rary Latin American literary expression?
In this regard it will be useful to give an account of still another critical-
theoretical approach to the "boom," in this case belonging to the Latin
American historian Tulio Halperin Donghi. In his wonderfully incisive and
 THE BOOM NOVEL AND THE COLD WAR /I

lucid essay "Nueva narrativa y ciencias sociales hispanoamericanas en la

decada del sesenta" (The new narrative and Spanish American social sci-
ences in the 1960s), Halperin notes the curious contradiction between the
initially pro-Cuban, and generally radical anti-imperialist, stance of the
"boom" authors and the fact that the same authors "elaborate a literature
that scarcely alludes to the dramatic conjuncture from which it stems"
(149)." The "boom" novel, according to Halperin, "rests on a renunciation
of a certain image of the reality of Spanish America as historical, that is, as
a reality collectively created through a temporal process whose results are
cumulative" (150). He attributes this renunciation in part to the fact that
attempts to create a historical novel in Latin America had been predomi-
nantly the work of the pathological-determinist view of history embodied
in naturalism — a view that, given the political effervescence of the 1960s,
could only seem perversely out of date. But the "boom," in Halperin's ac-
count, answers naturalism not with a deeper historical realism but rather
with an adoption of "new techniques," that is, with modernism. This, in
the politically charged atmosphere of the 1960s, leads to the "paradox" that
"this literature, neither militant nor escapist, and seeming to evoke what
was once viewed as Spanish America's historical calvary as if its governing
fatalities had entirely lost their potency—this literature is nevertheless rec-
ognized as being the most akin to a mass readership increasingly militant
in spirit" (154). And he continues:
The readers of Garcia Marque?, were those who found it easy to believe that
a landowner from Rio Grande, educated in the political school of gaucho
factional disputes and in the no less ambiguous one of populism, was in
fact the unexpected Lenin required by his country to lead the revolution to
victory, or that the Chilean propertied classes were prepared to swallow,
and even savor as delectably traditional in flavor, the revolutionary
medicine wisely prescribed for them by Dr. Allende. (155)

But, continues, Halperin, alluding to the violent military repression of the

1970s, "there is no need to be reminded of what bloody horrors were ef-
fectively required in order to destroy a set of illusions too pleasing to be
easily renounced; 'magical realism' now appears as an echo of a time in
Spanish America whose magic those horrors have dispelled for ever" (ibid.).
With some extrapolation, the emergent picture here is that of a mod-
ernism that, while remaining, as the Old Left might have put it, "right" in
essence, nevertheless finds itself for a time in the peculiar historical con-
juncture of being "left" in appearance. Unlike its North American ana-
logue of roughly a decade earlier, this modernism refuses the mantle of
 /2 THE BOOM NOVEL AND THE COLD WAR

"political apoliticism" and, at least at first, openly encourages an image of

itself as somehow engage. Why? Perhaps because, putting it bluntly, the
Latin American "boom" modernist is an anti-yanqwi nationalist before he
or she is an anticommunist. When the populist illusions of the 1960s are
dispelled by the brutal reaction of the 1970s in Latin America (in fact the
death of Che in 1967 can be taken as the symbolic inauguration of a pe-
riod of counterinsurgency and repression that begins as early as 1964 in
Brazil) the seeming right/left aphasia of the "boom" vanishes with it. (It is
at this point, some have argued, that the moment of the "boom" passes,
giving way to that of the more politically motivated "testimonio," or "testi-
monial novel.")12 But Halperin adduces another factor here as well. This is
that, again in contrast to the North American situation, the modernism of
the "boom" appears to answer not the elite need to counterhegemonize a
tradition of increasingly left-tending realism but rather the outwardly pro-
gressive impulse to overcome a much older tradition of naturalistic por-
trayal in Latin America. It was in and through this tradition — stretching,
conservatively, from Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Facundo to the novels
of the Mexican Revolution and even, perhaps, into Spanish America's scat-
tered experiments with "socialist realism" itself—that the neocolonial intel-
ligentsia had articulated its deep-seated pessimism regarding the capacity
of the masses to overcome their purportedly pathological "backwardness"
and usher Latin America onto the threshold of modern civilization. In nov-
els as otherwise diverse as Cambaceres's En la sangre, for instance, and Re-
vueltas's El luto humano—the former a frankly reactionary screed, the lat-
ter a supposedly progressive, even revolutionary one—there operates much
the same reduction of human agencies in Latin America to the irresistible
working out of a naturally, even racially or biologically predetermined trag-
edy. It is against this background, Halperin argues, that the flight from his-
torical portrayal into the modernist "boom" novel's Utopias of form and
language can appear liberating. The key factor in Halperin's own rather
tragic view of Latin America's literary destiny, however, is that the moment
of authentic, historical realism is missing. While, in Halperin's view, the
Latin American social sciences do effect a rupture with naturalist histori-
cism — for which he above all thanks the pathbreaking work of the Peru-
vian Marxist Jose Carlos Mariategui — no such breakthrough occurs in lit-
erature. If the "boom" enacts a "revolution," it remains, for Halperin, a
"Revolucion Boba" — a "fool's revolution," that "solves" the basic difficulty
by resolutely turning its back on it (164).
 THE BOOM NOVEL AND THE COLD WAR 73

II

But is the literary breakthrough into a modern historical realism in fact an

unrealized moment in Latin America? Here I think that Halperin, although
correct insofar as the particular "boom" authors he has in mind do not
work either out of or against such a tradition of realism, nevertheless risks
error by omitting what may be one of the grand exceptions to the rule
here — the literature of Brazil. To be sure, the naturalist tradition finds as
firm an anchor here as elsewhere in Latin America. One thinks, above all,
of Euclides da Cunha's vastly influential work Os sertoes. So, indeed, does
modernism, as witness the examples of a Mario de Andrade or what is
perhaps the Joycean urtext of Latin American modernism, Joao Guimaraes
Rosa's Grande sertao: veredas. But then what does one do with a Machado
de Assis? One might argue the case for a nineteenth-century anomaly here,
perhaps, were it not for the strong claims to realism attributable in turn to
a whole series of twentieth-century authors as well, among them Lima Bar-
reto, Rachel de Quieros, Graciliano Ramos, and Jorge Amado.
Without at this point exploring any further the case to be made for a
Brazilian exceptionalism, I do nevertheless wish to devote additional con-
sideration, in light of my original query regarding modernism and the Cold
War, to one of these authors in particular — namely, Jorge Amado. My rea-
sons for this are several. First, I would maintain that Amado's narrative fic-
tions of the 1940s and 1950s, specifically from Terras do sem fim in 1943
until publication of Gabriela, cravo e canela in 1958, represent one of the
greatest achievements of modern historical realism in Brazil — if not in
Latin America as a whole. To say this is not to discount the serious flaws
that distort some of these works, perhaps especially his more orthodox so-
cialist realist novels (Seam vermelha and the urban trilogy Os subterraneos
da liberdade). These flaws notwithstanding, however, I think Amado's
work of this period effectively refutes the postulate of Latin America as
condemned to choose between a naturalist, pathological realism and a mod-
ernist antirealism.
This is not the place to engage in a lengthy analytical presentation of the
sources and specific configuration of Amadian historical realism. Suffice it to
suggest here that Amado's intense personal involvement in the class struggles
that lead up to the "revolution" of 1930 and subsequently usher in the
period of the fascist-inspired "New State" of Getulio Vargas, together
with his strong literary debts to Brazil's "Northeastern," and distinctly
 74 THE BOOM NOVEL AND THE COLD WAR

antimodernist, school of rural proletarian realism, are what ultimately

make possible the qualitative departure of a work such as Terras do sem
fim, together with its sequel in the "cacao cycle," Sao Jorge de llheusr. that is,
the fully epical portrayal of Brazil's evolution, out of a state of semifeudal
land tenure and rural clientelism (the Brazilian term is coronelismo] into
one of modern, dependent capitalism. What, in the naturalist tradition,
presents itself as the iron subjugation of human agency to the prehistorical
factors of environment and "race" — and, in the later "boom" novel ap-
pears as the "magical" incongruity of life in the traditional, "backward"
sector with the other, increasingly urbanized and hypermodern Latin Amer-
ica— emerges in Amado's fiction as the economically determined distor-
tion suffered by human beings who do live in thrall, not to "nature" but to
commodities, in this case, to a single export commodity: cacao. Amado is
obviously not the first, or the last, Latin American novelist to grasp the re-
ality of neocolonial, dependent capitalism. But he is, I would argue, one
of, if not the, first to discover the most effective artistic means for portray-
ing this reality as something fully historical and dynamic — as, in the final
analysis, the cumulative product of human agencies.
This fact alone makes Amado an interesting foil to the various versions
of the "boom." But there is still another reason for bringing Amado into
the picture here. And that is that Amado himself undergoes a suspiciously
"boom"-like transformation at a very discrete moment not only in his own
literary and political career but in Cold War historiography as well.
The story merits telling in some detail.'3 Amado had spent the latter
half of the 1930s in militant opposition to the Vargas dictatorship, an op-
position that resulted in several jailings, in exile, and even in the public
burning of his works in the capital of his native Bahia province, Salvador.
In the 1940s he formally joins the Brazilian Communist Party and is elected,
in 1945, to the Chamber of Deputies on the Party slate. Renewed repres-
sion sends him into a European exile in 1948, from which he is not to re-
turn until 1952. In 1954 he publishes the militantly socialist realist trilogy
of underground life under Vargas, Os subterraneos da liberdade.
In February of 1956 there occurs an event, however, that was to shake
not only Amado's political convictions but the ideological foundations of
the international communist movement of the time: Khrushchev's "se-
cret" speech denouncing Stalin, delivered at the Twentieth Party Congress
of the Soviet Communist Party. The speech itself turns out to be a vague,
obviously self-serving harangue in which Khrushchev advances the absurd
thesis that all the ills of Soviet society up to the present moment are to be
 THE BOOM NOVEL AND THE COLD WAR 75

blamed on the individual Stalin and the mystical "cult of personality" that
he had somehow been able to instigate. But few, if any, party loyalists around
the world seem to have been in a position to perceive this at the time,
awed, as most were, by the supreme political and ideological authority of
Khrushchev himself. In fact, I would propose, this becomes a turning point
not only for international communism but for the conduct of the Cold
War itself, insofar as the "East," still represented by the USSR (the Sino-
Soviet split, although brewing, is still some seven years away), now adopts
an increasingly defensive, conciliatory position in the face of the "West's"
unrelentingly aggressive anticommunism. (A few years later, Khrushchev
promulgates the doctrine of "peaceful coexistence" between socialist and
capitalist states.)
Amado is, by all accounts, devastated by the sudden political turn. His
personal friend and fellow communist Pablo Neruda records in his mem-
oirs that the "revelations [in Khrushchev's speech] had broken Amado's
spirit— From then on he became quieter, much more sober in his atti-
tudes and his public statements. I don't believe he had lost his revolution-
ary faith, but he concentrated much more on his literary work, and elimi-
nated from it the directly political aspect that had previously characterized
it."14 For several months after the speech, Amado maintains a political si-
lence. Then, in October of 1956 he publishes a letter in a Brazilian party
newspaper calling for open discussion of the Khrushchev report and con-
demning the "cult of personality." Although he remains a party member,
from this point on Amado begins to withdraw from political life and, as
Neruda noted, devote all his energies to his literary career.
The result, published in 1958, is the novel for which he is still probably
best known: Gabriela, cravo e canela. Set, like the earlier "cacao cycle" in
the southern Bahian port of Ilheus, Gabriela is the ludic, mock-epical and,
as some have termed it, "picaresque" love story of Nacib, a local Syrian
merchant, and the novel's heroine, a beautiful "cinnamon"-skinned refugee
from the drought-stricken Northeast whom Nacib first hires to be his cook.
Through the vagaries of this cross-class and inter-"racial" liaison — from
premarital to marital and finally to postmarital — Amado weaves the nar-
ration of the changing sexual and gender mores of Ilheus as it gradually
undergoes the transition (previously portrayed in Terras do sem fim and
Sao Jorge de Ilheus) from coronelismo to modern commercial capitalism.
The novel ends with the landmark legal conviction of one of the local ca-
cao "colonels" for the murder of his adulterous wife — the first time in lo-
cal memory that such a conviction has been obtained. But the story Amado
 76 THE "BOOM" NOVEL AND THE COLD WAR

had previously told through epic means, in which a series of personal des-
tinies is presented in such a way that their determination by historical and
economic factors is made tangible and concrete, becomes, in Gabriela, a
kind of domestic idyll, or, to adopt Doris Sommer's term in Foundational
Fictions, a "romance."15 No longer depicted as necessary, if likewise tragic
and contradictory in its outcome, the transition to modern capitalist de-
pendency, symbolized by the fall of the colonels and the rise of the port-
based trading houses, becomes, in Gabriela, a subject for farce. Politics re-
cede into the background, to be replaced in the foreground by the theme
that is to characterize Amado's fiction from 1958 on: the exotic, eroticized
piquancy of Bahia's Afro-Brazilian culture, most often as epitomized in
women, music, and food.
With Gabriela, Amado achieves almost instantaneous acceptance by the
Brazilian bourgeois literary establishment. His past sins, above all his or-
thodox socialist realist or "Zhdanovite" phase, are forgiven, and he is wel-
comed into the literary circles and salons that had for years excluded him.
The record here is dramatic indeed. Up until 1959, Amado, despite be-
coming both nationally and internationally famous, had received only two
literary prizes: the Premio Graca Aranha in 1936 and the Stalin Prize in
1951. In 1959 alone he receives for Gabriela four major awards, with more
to follow in 1961. And, most dramatic of all, in April of 1961 he is unani-
mously elected to a seat in the Brazilian Academy of Letters — a seat for
which, in a historical first, he is the sole and uncontested candidate. Sales
of Gabriela are unprecedented for a Brazilian work of fiction. Critics, from
the Catholic conservative Tristao de Athayde to the existentialist Jean-Paul
Sartre hail the Party "dissident" Amado as a literary genius. And, as Wag-
ner observes, those who rush to valorize Amado's new departure invariably
discover in Gabriela a wealth of "advances" in literary form and technique
(246). Only a few old communist stalwarts object to the political apology
clearly being enacted in Amado's new novel.16 Even high-level Brazilian
politicians, including presidents Juscelino Kubitschek and Janio Quadros,
eager as they are to plug into Amado's mass readership, declare themselves
fans of Gabriela.
Do we not thus have in Gabriela what may virtually be the first "boom"
novel? Many of the requisite characteristics seem to be there: the self-con-
sciously "literary" concern for new formal techniques, the mass sales, the
conversion of the author into a national celebrity. It must be admitted that
Gabriela, despite its retreat from Amado's earlier epic and politically im-
passioned mode of narration, is still a work concerned with the historical
 THE BOOM NOVEL AND THE COLD WAR 77

portrayal of Brazilian society at a decisive phase. Amado the realist remains

very much present in this work despite the new tone of preciosity and far-
cical remove from history as "grand recit." The obsession with purely for-
mal experiments and "language" has not reached (nor will it in Amado's
subsequent work) anything like the extreme of, say, Garcia Marquez's El
otono del patriarca. There is no Joycean or Faulknerian imprint here. It
would perhaps even require some imagination to characterize Gabriela as
a work of "modernism" in the full sense of the term. But there can be, to
my mind, no doubt about the novel's distinctively Cold War modernist
subtext: above all, the careful retreat from the objectives of social or social-
ist realism and the avoidance of any open signs of political engagement.
Needless to say, Gabriela will not satisfy the revolutionary-historicist the-
ory of the "boom" novel by sheer virtue of chronology. Amado was certainly
to become a supporter of the Cuban Revolution, but in the years 1956-58
the crucial historical experience for Amado is clearly the Cold War itself and
its political impact on the very considerable left-led mass movement in
Brazil. But perhaps this suggests a closer link between the canonical "boom"
novel and the Cold War than is typically thought to exist. Certainly none
of the standard "boom" authors duplicate Amado's history of intense po-
litical activity. Nor do they, like Amado, emerge into modernism out of a
prior tradition of historical and social realism. The new political and ideo-
logical reality that in 1956 rushes upon an author such as Amado, with
catastrophic effect, becomes, tor the somewhat younger and more politi-
cally disengaged figure of a Fuentes or Cortazar, something more in the
nature of a horizon of ideologically unquestioned assumptions. The bud-
ding "boom" novelist is more likely an existentialist—via readings of Sartre
and Camus — than a militant Leninist. But if the Cuban Revolution results
in a sudden, seemingly left-wing inflection within the generally rightward
evolution, then its effect, it seems to me, is largely superficial and tempo-
rary. As Halperin justly notes, it seems not to have induced the new phase
of historical realism that might have been expected if the ideological im-
pact of Cuba were really as profound as is sometimes claimed. What Cuba
elicits from the "boom" is, I would argue, a somewhat more militant ver-
sion of a Latin American nationalism that just as easily supports a Peron
or an Omar Torrijos as it does a Fidel.
The value of rereading the "boom" through a technically postcanonical
novelist such as Amado is, at the very least, that it gives us a clearer pic-
ture of what was politically at stake in the generation of a literary moment
about which there has grown the myth that it was both inevitable and the
 78 THE "BOOM" NOVEL AND THE COLD WAR

expression of a Latin American essence. By looking at Gabriela as a virtual

"boom" text—but also within the context of the Amadian historical real-
ism with which it breaks — the myth of essence, or what we have also
termed the myth of modernism itself as consubstantial with a raw, pre-
political level of contemporary experience, is more easily shattered. And
shattering this myth remains, in my view, a vital task. For if, as we are told,
the Cold War is over, its ideological and cultural legacy is still very much
with us.

1992
 PART III

Uncivil Society
This page intentionally left blank
 CHAPTER SIX

Sport as Civil Society

Argentina's Generals Play
Championship Soccer

The recourse to "authoritarian" forms of state power in the southern cone

of Latin America must be understood primarily as a structural response to
a "crisis in hegemony" internal to the social formations in question, but
externally provoked by the longer-term global crisis of overaccumulation
of capital that dates, at the latest, from the final period of the Vietnam
War. Many, if not most, of the policies of military rule in the southern
cone can in fact be explained as requirements of the imperialist "solution"
to global capitalist disequilibrium whereby the latter's most damaging ef-
fects are transferred to the dependent economies of the periphery. As Andre
Gunder Frank has noted in a recent study, this transfer solution involves
the forceful integration of precapitalist sectors in Africa, Asia, and Latin
America into production for export via the world market.1 But, he goes on
to say,
where the entire population was already participating in the international
division of labor and the process of capital accumulation, as in the southern
cone of South America, repressive state power is the principal instrument
used to enforce a substantial cut in the wage rate and a reorientation of
production and employment toward the world market. (246)

The role of the "third-world state" is thus in all instances prescribed as one
of mediation between national and dependent capital and international-

Si
 82 SPORT AS CIVIL SOCIETY

dominant capital. How such mediation translates into domestic, economic,

and political policy is a question that cannot, however, be answered with-
out reference to the conditions, both conducive and obstructive, that char-
acterize the individual economic zones that fall under the aegis of a spe-
cific state power.
In the case of the states of the southern cone, the "reorientation" process
could not and cannot continue to take place without the accomplishment
of major political changes resulting in the restructuring of fundamental
sectoral alliances and subordinations within the existing system of class
power. The radical nature of these changes, as measured by the violent and
"emergency" means necessary to bring them about initially, reflects the fact
that, especially in the case of Chile and Argentina, the pre-"authoritarian"
regimes were embarked on a course of national capitalist development char-
acterized generally by commodity production for an internal market ("im-
port substitution") and the necessary correlate of this, a rising wage level.
Both Peronism and the various tendencies converging in Popular Unity,
whatever their many and important differences, reflected this type of na-
tional capitalist development strategy at their political-economic core. Both
presupposed the existence and continued reproduction of a system of in-
ternal class alliances and of an ideological formation capable of constitut-
ing this "consensus" on a national scale. In short, both presupposed the
existence of a definite social and ideological reality theoretically described
by the interlocking concepts (in Gramscian analysis) of "hegemony" and
"civil society."2
The events surrounding each successive coup or "golpe militar" (espe-
cially those of 1973 and 1976) have become well known. But the general-
ized tendency to view the authoritarian regimes born out of these events
as accomplished facts, resting securely on a foundation of absolute military
force, betrays both a lack of understanding and a certain unwitting com-
pliance with the military regimes' own insistence that, if not precisely le-
gitimate, their power is at least beyond question. On the level of political
immediacy this may be quite true. If, however, one is able to view the event-
form of the "golpe" as in essence a brief but extremely concentrated civil
war ending only in a military solution, there then opens up a space for his-
torical interpretation of succeeding events as the struggle to establish a sta-
bilized social consensus. It is by means of this consensus that provisional
military supremacy (domestic terror) becomes definitive political victory.
And it is this definitive victory that remains at issue in the states of the
southern cone. The main threat to their existence is not now military, or
 SPORT AS CIVIL SOCIETY 83

even, in a certain sense, political. It is social. As states they remain funda-

mentally incomplete unless and until they are able to represent their power
as if arising out of a "natural" condition of society itself, as a power that is
legitimate. What is absent in these social formations is precisely an operant
form of civil society.
The political and economic consequences of this aspect of post-World
War II authoritarian rule have been amply characterized and assessed, es-
pecially with regard to the pre-1973 experience of Brazil (1964) and Ar-
gentina (1966). How the exercise of state power without the mediation of
civil society affects the general process of cultural life in the southern cone
is a question that has largely come into its own in the 1970s and 1980s. It is
within this problematic that the following analysis locates itself. Unable to
rely on the "normal" hegemonic function of such mediating institutions
as parliamentarist parties, labor unions, and universities, because, in ef-
fect, the contradictions internal to society have become so sharp as to dis-
pel the possibility of a social authority residing anywhere but in the state
itself, the state must confront the implicit dilemma of its own newfound
position with respect to the discourses of "culture."3 Culture reveals the
operating principle of civil society in its proven ability to establish a recog-
nized form of social authority arising supposedly from within the nonco-
ercive practices that define the limits of the "cultural." Culture presents it-
self ideologically as a realm of freedom. Thus it is not the power of society
(more precisely, the power over society) that, for example, determines the
reception given a work of literature. "Values" are said to determine this,
the "values" inherent in culture, whether "universal" or national. The au-
thoritarian state of the southern cone signifies in its very existence not
only the readiness to dispense with culture but the necessity to invade and
occupy its territory. Through forces completely external to it, culture has
acquired a political significance that requires, in accordance with the in-
terests of the ruling minority, that it be stripped of its mediating power.
For it has in fact come about that even those values formerly upheld by of-
ficial culture, values expressing the hegemony of a national-capitalist rul-
ing bloc, have become too broad, too popular even as such, to tolerate the
legitimacy of the ever-shrinking minority in whose name and through whose
agency capital exercises its domination.
And yet the practical realities of class rule as encountered in the social
formations of the southern cone have prevented an easy, straightforward
solution to the problem of culture. Experience indicates that the impe-
tus to deploy a new type of capitalist hegemony based on the uncontested
 84 SPORT AS CIVIL SOCIETY

dominance of national monopoly in alliance with imperialist capital — an

impetus deriving from the above-described internal logic of the authoritar-
ian state and essentially equivalent to the hegemonic form of classical
fascism — consistently runs up against the absence of any popular base of
support for such change. The considerable gap that exists between the en-
visioned program of the military regimes in the southern cone and the ac-
tual policies they are constrained to follow on a day-to-day basis suggests
that the logic of the authoritarian state is itself a contradictory one. The
need to achieve equilibrium, to hammer out a new form of consensus able
to relieve that state of its "emergency" profile, points unfailingly in the di-
rection of a fascistic form of mass state worship. The "doctrine of national
security," a North American invention that first appears in Brazil in the
wake of the 1964 coup and that is now given official expression in the
"laws of national security" on the books in practically all the states of
South America, is the most blatant attempt to realize this impetus.4 But
the very fact that "national security" — the elevation of the interests of the
state above all others — must be legally imposed already shows up the ulti-
mate failure of the authoritarian state in the pursuit of its most fundamen-
tal need: advancing to a new form of civil society whereby the hegemony
of the new ruling alliance of capital can be sustained without continual re-
course to coercion and terror.
The position of the authoritarian state with respect to the hegemonic
domain of culture thus remains, by practical necessity and historical cir-
cumstance, a provisional and crisis-ridden one. The dangers to its power
implied in the mass, democratic aspect of culture are countervened by the
insecurity of doing without the mediational discourses and institutions of
civil societyithat present themselves ideologically as culture. Absolute dom-
inance is thus paradoxically transformed into a kind of enslavement to the
immediacy of all those aspects of social life that cannot, for a variety of
reasons, be subjected to control by coercion. (The power to decide the life
or death of any given individual nevertheless fails to control the interpreta-
tion that "public opinion" attaches to the exercise of this power.) Because of
the very nature of its power, the state is cast in the role of spectator before
the events that, seemingly at any moment, might conspire to undermine it.
The complex of events, policies, and discourses that stems from the host-
ing of the World Cup soccer championship in Argentina in June 1978 rep-
resents a near textbook instance of the state's ambivalent conduct in the
face of its contradictory social and ideological position. A reading of the
press reports coming out of Argentina in the first half of 1978 gives the
 SPORT AS CIVIL SOCIETY 85

impression of a regime nervous with expectation over the outcome of both

the games themselves and the international media coverage accompanying
them. The ruling comite militar, chaired by commander in chief of the armed
forces and soon-to-be president General Jorge Rafael Videla, had, as became
well known, staked a great deal (including approximately $700 million, or
10 percent of the national budget for that year) on the games.5 Hopes that
the international competition would lend an air of legitimacy to the mili-
tary regime in the eyes of the world, not to mention in the eyes of Argen-
tines, were inevitably frustrated by the equal likelihood that a large dose of
publicity would only worsen the regime's chances of cleaning up its repu-
tation. This dilemma, and the fact that it is so obvious even on the level of
the journalistic and the circumstantial, is utterly symptomatic of the deeper
level of contradiction described above. The simultaneous elation and anxi-
ety evidently undergone by the comite militar at the prospect of hosting
the World Cup merely accentuated the sense of urgency already plaguing
the generals in their efforts to resolve power splits between the various
branches of the armed forces.6 It is highly significant that these splits, es-
pecially the feud between Admiral Massera and more doctrinaire fascists
in the army and the air force, with Videla as would-be mediator, concern
the adoption of some policy with respect to the "return to civilian rule,"
and the possible role in the government of the traditional, provisionally
suppressed political parties on the right and the center.
Massera holds out for the inclusion of the military in an official party also
composed of right-wing Peronists, trade unionists, industrialists, and mem-
bers of the Radical Party "united by a broadly social democratic ideology".7
He demands the immediate dismissal of Martinez de Hoz, minister of
the economy and architect of the "monetarist" policies of export promotion
and protectionist trade restrictions. Meanwhile, according to Latin Ameri-
can Political Report, "the army is presumably still counting on building up its
own base of political support which will make the political parties irrele-
vant."8 The issue, in so many words, is the need to reestablish civil society,
new or old, and the difficulty of doing so without any real capacity to ef-
fect these changes by means of the traditional mechanisms of civil society.
In its confrontation with this state of events, the World Cup seems to
promise an almost narcotic remission from the nagging pains of ruling
without cultural mediation. The games, the publicity, and the mass forget-
fulness hopefully to be inspired by it all — might these not represent a kind
of momentary and godsent escape into the lost world of consensus and
normalcy?9
 86 SPORT AS CIVIL SOCIETY

To what extent these longings were realized is indicated in an account

in the Latin American Political Report dated June 30, 1978:

The successful staging of the World Cup competition has constituted an

important propaganda victory for Argentina's military government, both
inside and outside the country. The extent of the triumph took everybody
by surprise, and the final victory of the Argentine team set the seal on the
mass euphoria that had prevailed throughout the championships. The
government was quick to capitalize on this mood by declaring last Monday
a public holiday, and it will doubtless seek to derive further political
advantage from the event.
The political function of this spontaneous outburst of pent-up feelings
was to release some of the tensions accumulated over the last few years of
political crisis and particularly during the 1974-76 period. All the social
classes seem to have been touched by the phenomenon, and the
government will presumably be stressing the themes of national unity and
social solidarity achieved over the last few weeks.
The key question now is whether the government can take advantage of
the political space which the World Cup has created to make headway in
other areas. There must be some doubt on that score. The sectors of the
armed forces who have been demanding political and economic reforms
have already suggested to Martinez de Hoz that there should be a small
across-the-board wage increase, to keep the peace among the wage earners.
This would be particularly useful now that relations with the unions are
running more smoothly. The unpopularity of the economic team among
some sectors of the population will be a crucial issue. This was brought
home forcefully by the bombing of the house of finance secretary luan
Alemann, who had voiced opposition to the World Cup. There have been
all kinds of stories of immediate political reforms in the euphoric aftermath
of the Argentine successes, but these are largely speculative. The economic
situation will improve, but not at a rate that will enable real wages to rise
very quickly.lo

What is clearly intimated here, as well as in other sources, is that the "mass
euphoria," "national unity," and "social solidarity" unleashed by Argenti-
na's unexpected athletic triumph, while undoubtedly a political boon of
sorts for the regime, only displaces the cultural contradiction onto a new
plane. There remains the danger that the upsurge of nationalism among
the popular sectors will exceed the ability of the state to exploit and con-
trol it, perhaps even to the point of fueling the opposition. Use of the games
as a pretext to demand wage concessions from Martinez de Hoz, as well as
the bombing of Alemann's house, must surely have conveyed this sense of
uncertainty to the hard-liners in the comite militar.
 SPORT AS CIVIL SOCIETY 8/

On the evening of June 25, 1978, the day of the final game, Videla deliv-
ers a short speech to guests assembled at a special farewell banquet (cena
de clausura). The guests include high-ranking officials of the various pro-
fessional soccer organizations connected with the finals, Admiral Massera,
Brigadier General Orlando Ramon Agosti representing the air force, and
then-president of Bolivia, Hugo Banzer. A transcript of the speech appears
on the following day in the Buenos Aires daily La Nation under the head-
line "La significacion del torneo destaco el general Videla" (General Videla
points up the meaning of the games).
The speech itself is, in a sense, exactly what one might expect given the
speaker and the nature of the occasion: short, officious, highly formal, and
markedly "apolitical." As a "literary" document it suggests nothing so much
as the perfect predictability and banality of a cliche. Its presence as a text is
minimal, almost to the point of self-effacement. It is precisely the kind of
text that most literary scholars would regard as safe to ignore.
But read in the context of the social/ideological problematic that we
have been at pains to describe alternately as the absence of civil society and
the ambivalence of power in the face of hegemonic culture, Videla's dis-
curso yields a surprising crop of interpretive possibilities. Its foremost fea-
tures in this respect are both its officiality as a discourse of power and its
claim to exercise an undisputed authority to interpret: "la significacion ...
destaco el general Videla." This connects to the equally suggestive matter
of the speech's relation to its subtext, the latter being not only the soccer
championship itself but a certain a priori mass registration of it as "signifi-
cant." This relation is one of absolute subordination and is quite in keeping
with what has already been theoretically described as a relation of specta-
torship. It would in fact be imprecise to describe Videla's speech as com-
mentary since this discursive genre implies an inherent, if limited, range of
freedom to select its object. Videla is no sports commentator here — not
only for the obvious reason that he never engages in or even invokes a nar-
rative of the "play-by-play" type (a distinctive feature of North American
discourse of power) but also because neither the rules nor the "ups and
downs" of the game (neither its langue nor its parole) have any bearing on
the signification that the head of state must "destacar" or highlight. It is the
event as an outward form, a preexisting meaning offering a whole array of
possible articulations to the more pressing question of how political soci-
ety itself is to be interpreted, that concerns the discourse of power. Publi-
cation of an official interpretation is no mere act of ceremony or protocol;
 88 SPORT AS CIVIL SOCIETY

in a situation of "mass euphoria," with no securely existing channels of

cultural mediation in place, other interpretations, dangerous to the narrowly
based power bloc, are evidently possible.
How are these generic rules, which in effect constitute the path connect-
ing the discourse of power to a specific ideological and political conjunc-
ture, reflected in the text? Before answering this question, a cautionary ob-
servation must be made: the events of the World Cup, as has been said, speak
for themselves. The discourse of power is in no position to discover their
meaning because their meaning is already self-evident to everyone before
the events themselves. The final victory of the Argentine team comes as a
surprise, but it is a surprise that, nevertheless, everyone is prepared for.
Why is this? The answer is that the code of soccer, including the relation of
the game to its spectators (its meaning as spectacle), functions with the rel-
ative autonomy that is the proper space of culture. The "meaning" of soc-
cer is apparently spontaneous. It is cultural: interpretation is built in. It is
this spontaneity of the cultural that the authoritarian state desires so fer-
vently to appropriate, in the hopes that it will somehow rub off and supply
the secret ingredient of the state's hegemony.
This again explains why the interpretive role of the discourse of power
is limited to "pointing out" or "highlighting" — to "destacamiento." But it
also reveals the overwhelming contradiction implicit in the decision to "take
note" of what has already been signified. In its drive to disguise itself as cul-
ture, as civil society, the state must nevertheless reveal to everyone exactly
what it is doing. Before it can lay claim to the spontaneity of the cultural
codes, it must say to all concerned: "I am the State. By virtue of my author-
ity and power, I wish to point out to you the significance of what everyone
already knows to be significant." In the meantime, of course, the fact that
its claim to spontaneity must be mediated — and in this case mediated in
the form of a mass-distributed text — is all that is needed to expose this
same claim as completely illegitimate. Failure is thus already inscribed in
the very textual form of the project.
Our reading of the Videla text must consequently reject the assumption
of a purely instrumental or expressive relation of text to authority. The dis-
course of power, in the case at hand, does not, in other words, simply ex-
press power. Rather, it expresses the contradiction inherent in its exercise
under the specific historical conditions in which the authoritarian state it-
self arises.
Read in this way, the text is in a position to highlight its own deepest
significations, which are precisely its absences: the things it does not say,
 SPORT AS CIVIL SOCIETY 89

the themes it does not employ, and the subjects about which it is silent. We
shall limit our reading here to what, from a historical point of view, may
be the most informative of these shadows of negation. This is the almost
total absence of the thematics of traditional Argentine nationalism and in
particular of what we might call, adopting the terminology of Ernesto La-
clau, the traditional popular-democratic interpellations of Argentine cultural
nationalism."
By all rights, Videla's speech should be an orgy of national chauvinism.
Argentina has, after all, just won a surrogate war. (This is especially the
case if one recalls the national embarrassment then being suffered by the
military over the Beagle Channel dispute with Chile.) True, the rules of in-
ternational courtesy and protocol supposedly governing the conduct of the
"cena de dausura" impose certain restrictions—but remember that this
speech is to serve as the official comment of the regime on the victory in the
semiofficial mouthpiece La Nation.
But instead of a speech that shares in the "mass euphoria" of the home
team fans, Videla delivers what might be described as a caricatured paean,
chivalresque in tone, to the universal code of sportsmanlike behavior. The
masses, referred to as "el pueblo argentino," are only mentioned once: they
are the last in a long list of recipients of official gratitude. The chief of state
thanks them (is he, in fact, one of them?) for their courteous reception of
the nation's honored guests, not failing to remind them that even the "peo-
ple" must be accorded a certain degree of honor and heroism. After all,
they have a past of which they are "proud," the "possibility" of a "promis-
ing" future, and a present that, by dint of heroism, they are able to live
happily ("heroica alegria"). No other nongeographic reference to the na-
tional entity is made, with the exception of "el hombre argentino" (Argen-
tine man) — evidently a species of Homo sapiens, newly evolved in the eyes
of the world by virtue of its capacity to organize and host the World Cup.
The true heroes are, it becomes clear, those select individuals who make
up this species. (It is unclear, at best, whether the "pueblo argentino" has
the required genetic traits.) They are the holy knights who have scrupu-
lously carried out the terms of their " compromise" (bond of obligation) "with
enthusiasm, creative imagination, and even sacrifice" (5). Most notewor-
thy among them is "general de division post mortem \sk] don Omar Ac-
tis," who has given his life in pursuit of "a noble task, the only purpose of
which was to heed the common good" (ibid.). The heroes are the organiz-
ers and promoters of the games — military men with keen eyes for oppor-
tunities for personal enrichment.
 9O SPORT AS CIVIL SOCIETY

The chivalresque code that dominates the "discurso" culminates in the

presentation of a trophy representing " caballerosidad deportiva" — sports-
manslike behavior but literally the "knighthood of sport." Allusions to the
Holy Grail, already conjured up by the "World Cup" itself, are clearly not
unintended. Videla appeals to God that the trophy may "constitute a sym-
bol of peace" — not the false peace of'tregua" or "truce" (what, in a word,
may actually be said to exist), but the real peace that, "conquered day by
day... deserves to be lived" (5). It is this peace that alone permits the "full
self-realization as person" of "el hombre todo" — the "total man" — a spe-
cial kind of being who evidently dwells in even greater proximity to the di-
vinity than his slightly more earthy companion in the hierarchy of being,
"el hombre argentine." And so ends the discurso.
What can be said of a discourse of power that marks the occasion of an
extraordinary swelling of "national feeling" with what amounts to a ser-
mon on chivalresque notions of honor and the virtues of a militarist aris-
tocracy that only coincidentally bears the attribute of "argentino"? And what
indeed can be said of this when one further considers the dogging need of
the authoritarian state power to assume the "civil" mantle of "social soli-
darity" so as to acquire the "spontaneous" hegemony of the cultural? Pre-
cisely this: that the narrowness of power, its effective and necessary exclu-
sion from the ruling bloc of all those sectors of society that in the course
of history have come to be the bearers of nationalism and its traditional
symbols and thematics, overwhelms decisively the contradictory drive to
articulate popular democratic discourses. The nationalism of the "popu-
lar" classes, and even that of the industrial bourgeoisie, cannot, in the final
analysis, be accommodated and thus proves to be more of a danger than a
help.12 Is it not significant that in the course of Videla's address the very
concept of "lo argentine" can only arise in the contextual presence of "for-
eign guests"? The "world" extends its "vote of confidence" to the abilities
of the "Argentine man"; its representatives are received cordially by the "Ar-
gentine people": Argentina, "focus of attraction of world attention," offers
itself up as one huge playing field for the international order. Are we wrong
to think that the authoritarian state is here merely giving textual testimony
to its own inherent logic as a social and ideological power—to the fact
that alliance with imperialist capital is currently the exclusive ground of its
institutional necessity?
If it is indeed true that the resort to popular based-forms of nationalism
has been foreclosed in the case of the authoritarian states of the southern
 SPORT AS CIVIL SOCIETY 91

cone (and perhaps in much of the rest of Latin America), what must be
the response of oppositional forces? No political observer of Latin America
can have failed to note the tendency of the left to take advantage of the de-
cidedly antipopular character of authoritarian regimes by joining in alliances
with former rivals, in particular with Christian Democratic and other "dem-
ocratic" representatives of national industrial capital, a sector that has
found itself largely excluded from the organs of state power. Examples of
such a policy are to be seen in the partial unity of program between Popu-
lar Unity, as well as groups to its left, and the Christian Democratic Party
in Chile and, in Argentina, in the general persistence of Peronism as the
supposedly unique working-class alternative to military rule. The success
of the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua in bringing down the Somoza
regime, having mobilized the masses with nationalist populist ideology,
obviously encourages the outlook of a general revival of populist-based
power, buttressed by a broad appeal to nationalism.
But there are strong grounds for the rejection of this strategy. In the
first place, authoritarian state power's lack of access to popular democratic
nationalism may not be permanent. In the same study cited previously,
Gunder Frank has suggested that the economic model of "export substitu-
tion" and of increased integration into the world market of local third-
world economies — one that up until the early 1980s had not permitted
the "return of civilian rule" in the southern cone — may in fact be in the
process of developing new institutional forms capable of articulating a
broader range of capitalist interests.13 The process of the "abertum" in Brazil
in the late 1970s appears to corroborate this in some ways. In other words,
the danger always remains that relying on alliances of a "democratic na-
tionalist" character unwittingly prepares the way for fascism — at the very
least leaving the masses unprepared for new developments in imperialist
strategies of domination.
Second, there is the example of previous history itself. The populist/
nationalist-based states that have established themselves since World War
II in the southern cone on the foundation of massive working-class and
middle-class support have, in every instance, given way to authoritarian
military regimes when crisis conditions in global capitalist relations have
so dictated. The ability of populist forms of class alliance to resist imperi-
alist policy is, despite the best of intentions, structurally inadequate. This
is because nationalist populism, no matter how anti-imperialist its mass ap-
peal, cannot break decisively with imperialism and, in the final analysis, does
 92 SPORT AS CIVIL SOCIETY

not have the outlook of doing so. The best that can be achieved is probably
typified by Sandinista-led Nicaragua, where even the modest reforms won
by workers and peasants have measured themselves more and more against
the "necessity" of "promoting development" and securing foreign invest-
ments. There is, of course, a way forward—but it is a way that points beyond
the combination of "national liberation" and economistic/developmentalist
ideology that has dominated the movement so far and that continues to
present itself as the only "serious" opposition to authoritarian state power
throughout the Americas.

1983
 CHAPTER SEVEN

Hegemony or Ideology?
Observations on Brazilian Fascism and the
Cultural Criticism of Roberto Schwarz

Attempts to devise a generalized theory of the literary and cultural trans-

formations brought about by fascism in the southern cone have by and large
centered on the concept of a "crisis in hegemony." In its basic outlines, this
line of thinking regards the recourse to state terror and massively brutal
repression common to the successive praetorian regimes in Brazil, Chile,
Uruguay, and Argentina as proof that the rule of imperialist-backed capi-
talist elites could no longer base itself on a "consensus" politics, however
restricted. The traditional "ruling bloc" faced the alternative of an inexorable
shift of hegemony toward subaltern and opposed class interests, or rule by
force. In selecting the latter course, however, the ruling bloc was also acting
decisively to forfeit any immediate mode of regress to the "normal" conditions
of capitalist rule. To paraphrase Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bona-
parte, the social and political circumstances stemming from the empower-
ment of a modernized capitalist class had proved finally too dangerous to the
rule of capital itself. The projection and mediation of state power through
nonstate institutions — often denoted simply as "civil society" — could
not continue in the old liberal or populist ways. The state would now have
to project itself directly as the final arbiter in all aspects of public life.
This meant, among other things, that the state would have to produce a
kind of literary version of itself, typically in the form of official decrees

93
 94 HEGEMONY OR IDEOLOGY?

and speeches by the head of state in which the representation of the national
reality was reduced to a primitive allegory of Good versus Evil, the Nation
versus Communism, and similar oppositions. Hernan Vidal and others have
commented extensively on this "literature." But what of the literature of
those defeated and silenced by the fascist praetorians? Here the discussion
has centered chiefly on the literature of exile. Such discussions, however,
typically provide only a partial answer — losing sight of the degree to which
this "vanquished" literature remains a literature not fully realized, a con-
tent without, perhaps, a fully elaborated and autonomous form (for exam-
ple, testimonial literature). Given that the "crisis in hegmony" in effect un-
dermines the very social and ideological basis upon which a literature of
seemingly self-sustaining forms and conventions had erected itself, what
was now the function of traditional literary producers and consumers?
In an essay addressing this problem, Vidal has sought an answer in
what he calls the "homeostatic" function of literature.1 According to Vidal,
the "crisis in hegemony" that leads to the fascist seizure of power has the
corresponding effect of producing a schism — "una escision" — within the
social-psychological substance of culture itself, one that affects "daily ex-
perience as much as it does the most abstract concepts of nation and na-
tional culture" (29). "What we have is a process of daily life" that the mem-
ory of the fascist seizure of power "converts, initially, into a sensorial and
emotional experience that is hugely problematic" (16). It is this traumatic
experience of schism — the sudden and violent shattering of "civil soci-
ety"— that the literature of the fascist period must seek to portray, but to
do so in such a way that some vision of restored equilibrium and totality is
projected. "The social function of literature becomes fundamentally homeo-
static ... oriented toward the recovery of a new social equilibrium through
the re-creation of a new system of relations within the symbolic universe
of national culture" (22).
Vidal is careful to observe that the fascist state, too, is compelled to carry
forward its own version of homeostasis. It is, however, typically frustrated
in this quest by its simultaneous reliance on "subterranean" acts of terror
and repression that renew the sense of schism. The fascist "paradigms" —
the "monumental," the "vertically disciplinary," and so on — prove inef-
fective when confronted by those — for example, the "melodramatic" and
the "grotesque" — deployed by the "democratic" intelligentsia. In the con-
ceptual terms of "hegemony," the "homeostatic" function becomes "the task
of reconstructing an image of the popular-democratic" (43)—a task fac-
ing both of society's fundamentally opposed class interests and in which
 HEGEMONY OR IDEOLOGY? 95

one or the other must ultimately prevail. The relevant theoretical frame-
work belongs here not simply to Gramsci but more directly to Ernesto La-
clau, who finds in so-called popular-democratic interpellations — the Al-
thusserian "constitution" of popular-democratic subjects — the very arena
of political class struggles. That is, "homeostasis" takes on not merely a de-
scriptive but also a normative meaning. Restoring the shattered unity of
the quotidian, of "national culture" — a return to a sociopsychological nor-
mality— is deemed the prerequisite for overcoming fascist oppression.
I consider there to be serious errors in this theoretical approach. On the
whole, this particular conceptual usage of "hegemony" has had the effect
of thrusting the objective, practical reality of class struggle so far off into
the margins of political and cultural discourse that it becomes, for all in-
tents and purposes, theoretically suspended. Rather than confront these
errors directly on a plane of theoretical abstraction, however, I want to ex-
amine the "crisis in hegemony"/"homeostasis" model in light of develop-
ments in Brazilian culture and politics after 1964. More particularly, I want
to contrast the essentially neopopulist and ethically liberal strategy of op-
position underlying the prevalent "hegemony" analysis with the rather dif-
ferent cultural politics that emerges in an essay by the Brazilian critic Roberto
Schwarz.
Although published in 1978, Schwarz's essay "Cultura e Politica 1964—69:
Alguns Esquemas" was, according to its author, written between 1969 and
1970.2 This, it must be admitted, makes for a decisive limitation of its con-
clusions, since Schwarz was then able only to glimpse the beginnings of
the extreme repression of the "linha dura" years (1968-75) and, as he him-
self has suggested, failed to foresee the range and tenacity of Brazilian fas-
cism at full throttle. However, the subsequent tendency toward a limited
political and cultural liberalization after 1975, culminating in the so-called
abertura of 1978 (largely as a result of the massive industrial strikes begin-
ning in that year), does restore a poignance to Schwarz's commentary, even
if it does not obviate the need for certain revisions. ("O tempo," writes
Schwarz in his 1978 introductory note, "passou e nao passou." [Things have
changed, but not that much.])
The continuing relevance of "Cultura e Politica" lies in Schwarz's obser-
vation that, at least during the initial phase of military rule in Brazil (Schwarz
does not use the term "fascism"), "despite the existence of a right-wing
dictatorship, the cultural hegemony of the left is virtually complete" (127).
Although the generals move immediately to suppress all left cultural activ-
ities with any directly mass character — for example, the Movimento de
 96 HEGEMONY OR IDEOLOGY?

Cultura Popular in Pernambuco (where Paulo Freire's famed pedagogy was

being developed) and the Centro de Cultura Popular in Rio de Janeiro —
the publishing, teaching, and theatrical activities of opposition intellectuals
are initially left free of major interference. "Having broken the links be-
tween the cultural movement and the masses, the Castelo Branco govern-
ment made no attempt to prevent the circulation of doctrinal or artistic
left-wing material, which flourished to an extraordinary extent, albeit within
a restricted area" (127-28).
According to Schwarz, this "cultural hegemony" leads indirectly to the
radicalization of an entire generation of students who in turn come to trans-
gress the populist and nationalist constraints of the licit culture by calling
for armed struggle against the regime. This, of course, the military cannot
tolerate, and there follows the savagery of the linha dura. The theaters are
closed, censorship instituted, and the classrooms invaded by police spies.
Foqtiismo, like electoral populism, its dialectical twin, proved tragically in-
adequate to the political demands of the time.
For us, the key point here, however, is that the move to suspend the re-
stricted autonomy of the cultural intelligentsia and its corresponding in-
stitutions comes as a result of a transgression of orthodox populist ideol-
ogy for which the cultural institutions themselves had come to provide a
fortuitous platform, since the established political opposition was totally
compromised by its populist line. This point can now be seen to be rein-
forced by the fact that, without the occurrence of any major shifts in the
composition of the ruling capitalist bloc in Brazil, under circumstances of
an abertura and a "redemocratization" in which the generals doff their tu-
nics and reappear as civilian "social democrats," the "cultural hegemony"
of the left has once more been permitted. The cultural-institutional pro-
ducers of a populist ideology of "national culture" thus ultimately submit
to the hegemonic pull of the ruling bloc, after an initial phase of severe
discipline.
What all of this suggests, vis-a-vis a normative aesthetic and cultural
model based on the idea of homeostasis, is that the homeostatic function,
the restoration of equilibrium and "wholeness" to what is, in Vidal's the-
ory, essentially a national-cultural collective unconscious, can in fact be
provisionally achieved without any fundamental alteration in the relations
of class power. Fascism can achieve a certain hegemonic mediation, a cer-
tain "quotidianity" — in which case, perhaps, one no longer calls it fascism,
but in which case, nevertheless, the basic economic and political ends of the
fascist "schism" are preserved. Schwarz indirectly suggests — and there is
 HEGEMONY OR IDEOLOGY? 97

considerable indication as of the time of this writing that he is correct —

that it is possible for a "homeostatk" discourse of national identity with a
definite allowance for limited collective participation to produce and re-
produce itself even as the radicalized and potentially revolutionized sector
of society is subject to political repression and exclusion. This is the "para-
dox" of Brazilian fascism but a paradox only if it is presupposed that the
unilateral liquidation of a "left" or even simply "democratic" oppositional
culture is a functional necessity in order for the fascist "revolution" to take
place and only if it is erroneously believed that the "other" of fascism coin-
cides with some vaguely abstract situation of "democracy," "civil society,"
or "respect for human rights," and not with what the fascist seizure of power
is concretely designed to avert, namely, the transfer of effective power from
one class to another, from bourgeoisie to proletariat.
What gives Schwarz's late-1960s critique of culture its renewed timeli-
ness, despite its miscalculations regarding the then immediate conjunc-
ture, is its willingness to lift the populist veil that has now been so inge-
niously put back into place by the theoretical efforts of Laclau and others
and to demonstrate the political determinations of the cultural. Schwarz's
first move in "Cultura e Politica" is to show how the prevailing political
line of the Brazilian Communist Party under Goulart—an alliance of work-
ers with the "progressive" national bourgeoisie against imperialism and
the pro-U.S. oligarchy—underlies an entire phase of cultural and literary
production, accounting for both its great democratic strides as well as its
decisive and ultimately disastrous unpreparedness for the events of 1964.
"This mistake has been at the centre of Brazilian cultural life since 1950"
(130). Even after 1964, it is this particular politics, this particular practical
and theoretical guidance of the class struggle, that continues to exert its
special "hegemony" in the ironic and, consciously or unconsciously, melan-
cholized productions of left-wing theater groups (for example, the Teatro
Arena under the direction of Boal), radicalized film directors (for exam-
ple, the tropicalismo phase of Cinema Novo), and progressive architects
who applied the principles of a collective, proletarian architecture to their
designs of private bourgeous dwellings — "a moralistic, uncomfortable sym-
bol of the revolution that didn't happen" (145). To specify this level of po-
litical determination is not to fall into a reductionism or an essentialism,
as contemporary populism, anarchism, and liberalism might have it, but
rather reflects a recognition that, in the "epoch of socialist revolutions"
described by Lenin, the political determinations take on a definite primacy.
What we may perceive as a primarily cultural reality—as an experiential
 98 HEGEMONY OR IDEOLOGY?

"quotidianity" and psychological "symbolic universe" — is now, more than

ever, a function of what the contending classes, organized into parties and
states, do or have already done. This remains true even when the results
are not what one would have wished — when, as a result of "enganos politi-
cos" (political self-deceptions), which are perhaps, at times, unavoidable,
events take a sinister and unexpected turn.
What Schwarz's political reading of culture highlights is how, ironically,
the contemporary appeal to concepts of hegemony and civil society, and to
their cultural-aesthetic cognates in notions such as "homeostasis," ultimately
serves to depolitidze the experience of fascism. In place of a political analy-
sis and critique that at least raises the question of populism and its (to say
the least) contradictory status as a strategy of opposition to fascism, we
find instead a kind of ethical narrative, centered almost exclusively on no-
tions of civil liberties and human rights. This is openly declared in Vidal's
essay, which has the unmistakable virtue of clarity and forthrightness. The
concept of homeostatic function, with its goal of restoring what Habermas
would call the "ethical totality," represents an effort to translate this ethi-
cal, basically subpolitical, narrative into the terms of an aesthetic.
The danger that such a homeostatic culture might simply take on the
function of restoring a subjective sense of equilibrium after the directly re-
pressive measures have done their job has already been raised in reference
to events in Brazil. But the question remains as to what, in opposition to
homeostasis, the essentially political and self-critical class analysis of cul-
ture that emerges in Schwarz's essay implies for aesthetic practice. Here,
unfortunately, Schwarz has relatively little to say. In the late 1960s theatrical
work of Boal and Teatro Arena, Schwarz sees, for example, a contradictory
development in which the departure from certain bourgeois theatrical con-
ventions in the direction of a kind of Brechtian practice of representation
based on social gestures is nevertheless still reined in by a celebration of the
"people" that never poses the question of its actual defeat. There is passing
reference to the Cinema Novo films of the middle or so-called aesthetic of
hunger period — Pereira dos Santos's Vidas secas, Guerra's Os fuzis, and
Rocha's Deus e diabo na terra do sol—in their attempts to reflect a critical
consciousness of the populist "engano" — a political radicalism that is, how-
ever, supplanted by the more self-consciously aesthetic radicalism of the
later tropicalista phase (for example, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade's Macu-
naima). Schwarz sees what are already tropicalista influences in Rocha's
Terra em Transe— a problematic film to be sure but arguably one of the
most probing artistic representations of the "engano" itself. However, no
 HEGEMONY OR IDEOLOGY? 99

sustained effort is made to generalize the lessons of these artistic develop-

ments for a consciously revolutionary and postpopulist aesthetic. It is cu-
rious, and perhaps also, in its own way, symptomatic of what is still the
powerful ideological attraction of populism even within Schwarz's radical
skepticism, that "Cultura e Politica" does not expressly call for a new real-
ism capable of making socially and emotionally palpable (concrete or "typ-
ical" in Lukacs's sense) the still hidden levels on which the illusions and
deceits of populism unwittingly prepare the ground for the fascist "schism."
Schwarz's conjunctural criticism, however, has the powerful advantage
over more recent and ambitious analyses of reflecting critically upon the
reality that it is the content of a particular hegemony—not merely its for-
mal structuring as an articulation of the diverse social components of the
"popular-democratic" — that determines its strategic value. Because, on the
whole, the cultural forms and practices analyzed by Schwarz do not exceed
the implicit limits of populism; because they maintain a basic ideology of
nationalism that serves the general, if not always the particular, needs of
capitalism; because they fall short of making palpable the ways in which
populism disarms workers both physically and ideologically; because, in
fact, they do not exceed the boundaries of bourgeois ideology in its essen-
tial content—for these reasons they are able to coexist with fascism or at
least to enjoy a grant of limited autonomy. Nothing of this political deter-
mination remains in the reading and projection of antifascist culture ac-
cording to the virtually de-classed concepts of homeostasis and hegemony.
Here, "hegemony" comes to displace the very category of ideology per se,
as itself an ideology of "ideology," devoid of any class content.

1988
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 PART IV

Recolonizations
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 CHAPTER EIGHT

Aesthetics and the Question of

Colonial "Discourse"

In a widely read essay, Rolena Adorno has proposed what she considers to
be the "emergence of a new paradigm" within the area of Latin American
colonial studies.1 Adorno explains, with estimable clarity, that we are expe-
riencing a transition from a "literary-historical model that studies the trans-
formation of aesthetic ideas in time to a discourse model, according to which
the colonial setting becomes one of cultural practices studied for their syn-
chronic, dialogical relations and interactive properties" (11). Whereas, pre-
viously, "aesthetic" categories had led to the depreciation of the typically
"hybrid" texts of the colony, effectively blotting them out of the canon, the
new category of "discourse" — "formal (but not tied to a form as such) and
ideological (but not limited to the dominant ideology)" (18) — puts an end
to all such recolonizing hierarchies. Put differently, "discourse" creates the
conceptual space required for the "other" of the colony, that is, "all sub-
jects with the exception of the European" (19), to exist fully as an object of
critical knowledge.
On a descriptive level, Adorno is surely justified in observing the signs
of this "paradigm shift" within the field of colonial studies. But one must
question here what is evidently her estimate that this change is an entirely
positive one — as if it did not bring along with it a whole series of method-
ological problems and ideological traps. In particular, I would question

103
 1O4 AESTHETICS AND COLONIAL DISCOURSE

(1) the precipitate reduction, directly proposed here by Adorno but also
typical of the "new paradigm," of aesthetic categories (as likewise those of
what she denotes as "literary history") to the status of a colonizing ideol-
ogy vis-a-vis the "other" and (2) the correlative reduction of historicism as
such to what Adorno terms "chronology" and "linearity." Such reductions
are the products, as I see it, of a falsifying dualism, apparently implicit in
the "new paradigm," that counterposes the aesthetic to the historico-mate-
rial. Taking exception to this, 1 will conclude (3) with a brief reformulation
of the necessity of taking up aesthetic categories precisely so as to be able
to break with colonizing frameworks — a reformulation that I will try to
concretize through a short contrastive reading of canonical texts by Bernal
Diaz and Cortes.

Adorno's rejection of the traditional "aesthetic" approach to colonial texts

is based on the following reasoning: although the preoccupation with the
"literary" status of a Latin American corpus known more for its formally
"nonliterary" genres (sermons, chronicles, etc.) may have been an unavoid-
able first step in establishing its separate identity vis-a-vis the Peninsula,
the end result has been the chronic tendency to view the colonial corpus as
a moment of sterility awaiting some future act of aesthetic fertilization.
(Such a viewpoint is currently typified, as Adorno notes, in the published
comments of the "boom" novelist Mario Vargas Llosa.)
The achievement of the "new paradigm" is that it has refused to be
bound by this particular literary eschatology. Instead, it turns the tables on
"aesthetics," arguing that the typically "hybrid" genres and plural "subject
positions" of the colony merely prove the inadequacy and sterility of the
aesthetic categories, and not vice versa. It is Adorno's belief that "we have
gone beyond the concepts of author and work, period, genre and literary
movement, as provided by the analytical categories of traditional literary
criticism" (18). (At this point, one might ask whether in fact this table
turning can be limited to the colonial corpus, that is, whether, in principle,
it might not be held to cancel any and all application of traditional aes-
thetic categories.) In place of such categories, the "new paradigm" posits
that of "discourse," whose virtue is that it suspends the literary/nonliterary
binarism, thus permitting literary scholars and critics to train their atten-
tion on an immense body of heretofore neglected, heterodoxical material.
In essence — although Adorno does not express it quite so openly—the
 AESTHETICS AND COLONIAL DISCOURSE 105

category of literature per se is replaced by the much broader and itself more
"hybrid" category not only of discourse but of culture.
No one, I think, would deny that such a lifting of disciplinary restrictions
has had many of the positive and even intellectually liberating results that
Adorno claims for it. There is, however, more at stake here than simply the
crossing of purely arbitrary boundaries. For does not the outright rejection
of aesthetic criticism in the case of colonial Latin American texts simulta-
neously ratify, albeit perhaps unsuspectedly, the traditional colonizing per-
spective, in effect granting to "Eurocentrism" the exclusive right to make
aesthetic judgments?
The problem here stems from a misconception regarding the category
of the aesthetic itself. Adorno effectively equates this category with what is
in essence a species of literary formalism, founded, as she rightly argues,
on the exclusion of social, material, and indeed all "extrinsic" content. In a
word, Adorno tacitly equates the aesthetic with its modernist construc-
tion— a construction with which most of us were effectively indoctrinated
during the period of New Critical and structuralist hegemony and which
the current quasi hegemony of poststructuralism has, I think, done little
fundamentally to dislodge. Typical of the "critical" thinking associated with
such a modernist aesthetic is the still almost automatic procedure of de-
ciding the "literariness" of a given text according to whether or not it demon-
strates the formal properties of a given "genre." "Literariness" — that is,
the property, in the case of a written text, of being "aesthetic" — is reduced
to being a function of formal structure, "genre" itself being understood as
purely a formal category.
What such a reduction leaves out is of course the opposing viewpoint
within aesthetics, according to which the formal categories operate strictly
within — and derive their utility from — the primary process of artistic rep-
resentation. This is the viewpoint of realism, of mimesis. Once a highly re-
spectable, if not precisely dominant trend within aesthetics (thanks to the
only relatively recently lapsed authority of Aristotle), its conscious propo-
nents today are relatively few after the successive anathemas pronounced
against it by modernism/formalism and now, with equal vehemence, by
poststructuralism. By and large, the pursuit of a realist aesthetics is presently
taken up only by Marxism — or at least by that "orthodox" variant that
did not follow Althusserianism into the poststructuralist camp.
In one sense, perhaps, Adorno and the colonial scholars associated with
the "new paradigm" (for example, Walter Mignolo) need no excuse for
disregarding the realist/historical materialist critique of Latin American
 1O6 AESTHETICS AND COLONIAL "DISCOURSE

colonial texts qua aesthetics. For the simple fact is that this critique has yet
to be systematically attempted. At best one can point to the promising but
sporadic efforts of critics beginning with Mariategui and including work
by contemporaries on the order of Agustin Cuevas and Jaime Concha. But
Adorno seems not even to entertain the possibility of such a realist aesthetic
when it is a matter of colonial studies. Between the formalist and "Eurocen-
tric" strictures of a modernist aesthetic and the sheer discursive indetermi-
nacy of the colonial "social text," tertiurn non datur, Poststructuralism (es-
pecially Foucault) is evidently the immediate source for this false antinomy,
but counterposing the artistic qualities of texts to their "social" implica-
tions — again, something that Adorno's "new paradigm" does not cease to
ratify simply by valorizing the latter rather than the former pole — is also
quite consistent with the kind of positivist literary sociology that, to my
way of thinking, has been as harmful a legacy within Latin American criti-
cism as has modernist aesthetic formalism.

II

In addition to a rejection of "aesthetics," the "new paradigm" represents,

according to Adorno, a break with "the illusion that there exist successive
modes of cultural production" (17). Such an "illusion" is characteristic
of what Adorno refers to as a "linear" model of history founded on teleo-
logical concepts of "progress" and "degeneration." This model is to be re-
jected because it "eliminates dialogical and contestatory points of view"
(ibid.).
One may surmise that Adorno's main target here is the Manichaean
brand of positivist historicism preached by nineteenth-century Latin Ameri-
can liberalism. And who would deny the egregious distortions and silenc-
ings bequeathed by this particular metanarrative of progress? But Adorno's
choice of terms suggests a more sweeping dismissal of all forms of histori-
cism that attribute a general line of development to human events. The
very apprehension of the "other" evidently requires a complete suspension
of diachronic schema. The "other" speaks only in the time of the "now."
Here again, as in the break with "aesthetics," we note the peculiarly silent
passing over of the Marxist critique of "linear" historicism, summed up in
the memorable lines of Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:
"Men [sic, original, "die Menschen"] make their own history, but they do
not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances
chosen by themselves, but under given circumstances directly encountered
 AESTHETICS AND COLONIAL DISCOURSE 1O/

and inherited from the past." Such a conception of history, together with
the thesis that history since the end of tribalism has been "the history of
class struggles," clearly retains the idea of "successive moments" of "cul-
tural" as well as of material production. And yet it can scarcely be accused
of eclipsing the "dialogical" and "contestatory." Why, then, does the "new
paradigm," as proclaimed by Adorno, effectively if perhaps unintentionally
exclude it from consideration?
The answer can only be touched upon here. The real problem, I would
propose, is not one of historicism in general but rather of a perplexity over
how to interpret the uniquely and profoundly tragic historical outcome of
the epoch of conquest and colonization. To put it somewhat differently: it
is not the presence of "multiple" subjectivities that distinguishes the colony
so much as the apparent absence of a revolutionary subject. The fact is —
and it is an entirely positive one — that we no longer consent to view this
tragedy, especially in its impact on native and other non-European Latin
Americans, as redeemed but rather as prolonged and even, if possible, as
exacerbated by the passage from colonialism to neocolonial "independence."
With Mariategui, I think we now increasingly understand that any such re-
demption can only be the product of a revolutionary break, not just with
colonialism but with capitalism. We have become, at the very least, termi-
nally skeptical of liberal and developmentalist notions of "progress."
But for most, if not all, of Latin America, this break has yet to be effected,
and great obstacles still stand in its way. How much easier, in the face of a
history seemingly as intractable as it is unconsolable, to abjure the di-
achronic itself and to seek redress for the wrongs done to non-Europeans
and other "others" within the safely synchronic and infinitely rewritable
field of "textuality."2
And the great irony here, of course, is that, even discounting the unspo-
ken defeatism marked by its refusal to historicize, the "new paradigm," in
its demand for such a unilateral dehistoricization, again covertly ratifies
what it most indicts: by simply rewriting the colonial "other" out of the
linear/Enlightenment metanarrative of "progress," the inevitable sugges-
tion is that "progress" is a strictly European privilege. Instead of being over-
come, the colonial relation is simply stood on its head.

Ill

To better illustrate the foregoing let us now briefly consider the merits of
the "new paradigm" 's antiaesthetic and antihistoricist approach with re-
 1O8 AESTHETICS AND COLONIAL "DISCOURSE"

spect to a widely known colonial text: Bernal Diaz del Castillo's Historia
verdadem de la conquista de la Nueva Espana.
The first question seemingly raised by the Historia verdadera is that of
textual typology: is it a mere document, hence only of interest to histori-
ans, or does the Historia verdadera in fact possess certain literary proper-
ties that might command the interest of critics and literary scholars? The
"new paradigm," of course, answers by declining the very binarism fram-
ing the question. Whatever its historiographical value as a document might
be, the Historia verdadera is, like all histories, a narrative — and, like all nar-
ratives, it can, therefore, regardless of its fictive or nonfictive character, be
shown to organize itself around certain discursive structures, for example,
Hayden Whites historical "tropes" or Fredric Jameson's "master-narratives."
To the extent that such reasoning has resulted in granting literary critics
a license to read the Historia verdadera, one can only concur with Adorno
in her positive assessment of the "new paradigm." But other, thornier ques-
tions now arise. Suppose, for example, that we want to contrast the narra-
tive properties of the Historia verdadera to those, say, of the letters of Cortes
or to those of Ercilla's La Araucana. Working within the "new paradigm"
might enable us to observe a number of crucial differentiae, for example,
the far greater tendency for Bernal Diaz's "discourse" to grant a social,
moral, and even ontological complexity to the non-European other. Con-
trast, for instance, Bernal Diaz's account of Cortes's commandment to Moc-
tezuma that he decree an end to human sacrifice to Cortes's own version of
the event: Bernal Diaz's Moctezuma responds angrily with an eloquent de-
fense of Aztec religious practice,3 whereas Cortes's Moctezuma wordlessly
accedes.4 Or note the relative sensitivity to the social character of indige-
nous military practices evinced in the Historia verdadera as distinct from
Ercilla's idealized, neo-Virgilian Araucan warriors.
But to what do we attribute these differences? And what might be their
bearing on questions of aesthetic judgment? Here, it seems to me, the "new
paradigm" enforces a peculiar kind of silence. From the standpoint of the
"new paradigm," Cortes, Ercilla, and Bernal Diaz all become the practically
interchangeable discursive agents of the European conquest and subjuga-
tion of the non-European "other." The differences observed between these
European narratives might, perhaps, be explained by appealing to a kind
of intermediate dimension inserted into the Same/Other dichotomy. Adorno
herself, in her reading of Alva Ixtlilxochitl has acknowledged the concep-
tual need for a "third or intermediate type of alterity."5 But isn't there al-
ready implicit in such an acknowledgment what is in fact the analytical
 AESTHETICS AND COLONIAL DISCOURSE 109

bankruptcy of the category itself? If a "third" alterity, why not a "fourth"

and a "fifth"? Are there "others" but also other "others"? This is the logic
of reductio ad absurdum.
Two conclusions seem to me necessary here. One is that only class dif-
ferences— that is, only a material (viz., nondiscursive), historical order of dif-
ference— can account for the narrative variances noted above. Even more
specifically: it is precisely Bernal Diaz's quasi-plebeian outlook, his often
explicitly critical stance toward the nobiliarchical, crusade-ideology of a
fundamentally mercantile conquest, that makes possible the creation in the
Historia verdadera of what are, when viewed in relation to Cortes's Moc-
tezuma or Ercilla's Caupolican, living, genuinely typical characters.6 It is,
of course, important not to exaggerate or romanticize this difference. The
Historia verdadera never for a moment doubts the ultimate legitimacy of
the European conquest. But the fact remains that a significant departure —
indeed, something authentically progressive — is realized in the Historia
verdadera. Such a progressive departure is, to employ a phrase of Engels's,
"double-sided, double-tongued, self-contradictory and antagonistic."7 But
it is a departure that the "new paradigm" 's categories of "discourse" and
the "other" appear entirely unequipped to explain.
The second conclusion is that Bernal Diaz's plebeian realism, far from
being a measure of his text's refusal of the aesthetic, is on the contrary the
precise criterion of its artistic attainment. While possessing none of La
Araucana's formal marks of epical composition, the Historia verdadera still
reaches, albeit sporadically and spontaneously, to the level of genuine epos.
Bernal Diaz's Moctezuma and Cuauhtemoc, unreliable as they may be from
the standpoint of their superficial factuality, arguably represent the great-
est artistic feats of the European literature of the conquest. The purely for-
mal "aesthetics" of modernism — which conceives the aesthetic itself as
being opposed to the real rather than as one of its specific modes of reflec-
tion— inevitably blinds us to this attainment. But then so too does the
postmodernist antiaesthetic of the "new paradigm."

1990
 CHAPTER NINE

Phenomenology and Colony

Edmundo O'Gorman's
The Invention of America

One of the "rediscoveries" occasioned by the events and controversies sur-

rounding the 1992 Columbian quincentennial has been the singular work
of Mexican historian Edmundo O'Gorman The Invention of America. In
the days leading up to October of that year, even the New York Times found
space to spotlight the work and its by then aged but still venerated author,
detailing, among other things, O'Gorman's legendary feud with rival Mex-
ican historian and intellectual eminence, Miguel Leon-Portilla.1
O'Gorman clearly merits the renewed attention. But in rereading and re-
assessing The Invention of America, we are faced with the question, among
others, of the philosophy of history out of which O'Gorman develops the cen-
tral thesis of his work—that America was not "discovered" but "invented" —
and of its affinity for the new, critical, and revisionist interpretations of the
"discovery" that have now come to the fore. One version of the O'Gorman
legend has it that this philosophy derives from Hegel. Yet even the most
cursory reading of The Invention of America (at least of the revised 1958
English version that I have consulted) reveals this to be a fundamental mis-
perception.2 For someone relatively new to O'Gorman's work and knowing
little in detail of his intellectual formation (as, for example, his involvement
in the philosophical current associated with the Spanish philosopher Jose
Gaos), there may be some difficulty identifying with any certainty what the

no
 PHENOMENOLOGY AND COLONY 111

most immediate sources for his philosophical orientation might be. But Hegel
is manifestly not one of them, despite the occasional Hegelianism — for ex-
ample, "dialectic"—found in The Invention of America. Indeed, in his critical
treatment of von Humboldt's Cosmos, O'Gorman explicitly dismisses its Hegel-
ian interpretation of the "discovery" as the World Spirit in action (29-32).
Perhaps the source of this confusion lies in the unmistakably phenome-
nological stamp of O'Gorman's historical method. But here, in fact, the
culprit is not Hegel but the central figure of modern phenomenology, Ed-
mund Husserl. Moreover, O'Gorman's blending of phenomenology with
references to "ontology" as well as with what can be clearly recognized (de-
spite O'Gorman's avoidance of the term itself) as a hermeneutical emphasis
on history as preeminently concerned with "meanings," reveals that it is
not Husserl alone who provides The Invention of America with its philo-
sophical foundation but rather the revision of Husserlian phenomenology
undertaken by Husserl's student, Martin Heidegger.
I will proceed momentarily to demonstrate the Husserlian and espe-
cially the Heideggerian affinities of The Invention of America, but I wish to
start by stating the two principal questions that are in turn, I think, raised
by this particular philosophical genealogy. First, is it possible to salvage
anything from O'Gorman's principal work if, as I believe is necessary, we
categorically reject its historico-philosophical standpoint? And second, set-
ting aside the more obvious but superficial fact of a merely literary influ-
ence, what objective historical and political circumstances might help to
explain O'Gorman's affinity for this standpoint itself?
First, however, a brief and hopefully merciful philosophical reprise. Phe-
nomenological method, for Husserl, begins, simply, by restricting all philo-
sophical investigations to the realm of the individual consciousness, the
Cartesian cogito. Consciousness of a particular object becomes a matter of
interest only with respect to consciousness itself. Whether or not the ob-
ject exists (and even, perhaps, exceeds the ability of any individual, finite
consciousness to know it fully) becomes a matter of indifference to the
phenomenologist. In Husserl's notorious expression, one simply puts "brack-
ets" around the object insofar as it raises the question of its own reality in-
dependent of consciousness. One considers the object only as it presents
itself within an individual's conscious experience. Husserl also referred to
this method of bracketing the "real" world as the epoche or, in Robert C.
Solomon's convenient characterization, "the phenomenological reduction
by which we 'suspend judgment' about the existence of the natural world
and the causes of our experiences."3
 112 PHENOMENOLOGY AND COLONY

Once the epoche is invoked, however, it becomes clear that objects can-
not simply present themselves to a passive consciousness but must rather
be actively posited by the conscious subject. This act of positing the ob-
jects of consciousness Husserl described as a process of "meaning" them
and the objects meant as "intentional objects." Thus, to quote Georg Lukacs,
"The acts in which individual objects are meant constitute [for Husserl]
'reality.'"4
Although (as we shall see) a Heideggerian conceptual lexicon is super-
imposed on this more orthodox phenomenological language throughout
most of The Invention of America, I think we can nevertheless detect in the
very concept of "invention" itself the geological presence of the Husserlian
epoche. So, for example, when O'Gorman writes in the introduction to The
Invention of America that "the clue to the problem of the historical appear-
ance of America lay in considering the event as the result of an inspired in-
vention of Western thought and not as the result of a purely physical dis-
covery" (4), we have what is in effect a "historian"'s reaffirmation of the
phenomenological reduction. The key to understanding lies not in the ob-
jective encounter of "America" — its "purely physical discovery" — but in
its "appearance" in history. Objects, however, only "appear" to conscious-
ness, hence we are better justified in explaining this appearance itself as
being the result of an act of "meaning" the object on the part of a conscious
subject, as an "invention." O'Gorman's simple equation of "invention" with
"meaning" (in its verbal sense) is patent throughout The Invention of Amer-
ica, as, for example, when he rejects the assumption that "the lump of cos-
mic matter which we now know as the American continent has always
been that, when actually it only became that when such a meaning was
given to it, and will cease to be that when, by virtue of some change in the
current world concept, that meaning will no longer be assigned to it" (42).
Heidegger takes from Husserl the principle of reducing the subject/object
relationship to one of pure, asocial, abstract contemplation and appearance,
but he rejects HusserPs Cartesian practice of starting exclusively from the
cogito. That is, he retains the phenomenological method but refuses, or at
least seems to refuse, the epoche. The ground of phenomena ceases to be
the individual consciousness and becomes Dasein, the transindividual state
of "being there," or, as it is sometimes translated, "existence."5 To again
make use of Solomon's glosses: "What philosophy must provide is not mere
analysis [i.e., Husserlian, phenomenological method] but a rediscovery of
how Being presents itself to us as a phenomenon, of what Being means"
(155). Whence the emphasis, in Heidegger's terminology, on "ontology."
 PHENOMENOLOGY AND COLONY 113

Heidegger thus appears to free Husserlian phenomenology of its ideal-

ism and solipsism. But what seems to be Heidegger's materialist tendency
here is misleading. Dasein, as it turns out, does not denote existence in any
objective, material sense but, as Lukacs pointed out, "nothing more than
human existence, indeed only, in the final analysis, its manifestation in con-
sciousness."6 Dasein does not confront the subject as something that exists
independently of it but rather as that which merely prompts the question
of its own "meaning." The true departure from Husserl consists, then, in
expanding the typically conscious activity of "meaning" beyond the con-
fines of the individual cogito to include all of "Being." We, as mere solip-
sistic units, do not create "meanings." "Meaning" — or, as Heidegger says,
"understanding" — is already out there, infused in the world and in his-
tory. Starting from Dilthey's distinction between natural and "spiritual"
sciences (the so-called Geisteswissenschaften) in which the scientist's only
tool is interpretation, Heidegger simply inflates the hermeneutic field to
include everything there is. In sum, then, Heidegger adds an ontological
dimension to the phenomenological method, but an ontology that quickly
reduces itself to a search for "understanding," that is, to a hermeneutics.
O'Gorman's enlistment in this thinking is clear from the opening pages
of The Invention of America, where he declares the "need to focus historical
events in the light of an ontological perspective, i.e., as a process produc-
ing historical entities instead of a process, as is usually assumed, which
takes for granted the being of such entities as something logically prior to
it" (4). Indeed, it is only Heidegger's arcane definition of "ontology" that
enables one to make any sense at all of what is otherwise O'Gorman's pat-
ently absurd implication that the rejection of the "being" of entities as log-
ically prior to their "production" (i.e., "invention," "understanding") by his-
torians is somehow consistent with an "ontological perspective." But where
Heidegger is always attempting to obscure his fundamental antagonism to
materialism (historical and otherwise) through his notorious flights into a
mystifying — or is it merely a stupefying? — maze of neologisms, O'Gor-
man is, for the most part, refreshingly direct and candid. So, for example,
O'Gorman flatly rejects the "substantialist" view that being resides in things
as their essence: "The being of things is not something that they contain
within themselves, but something that is assigned or granted to them" (41).
Or: "Things are in themselves nothing in particular"; rather, "their being
depends on the meaning we give them" (80-81). The one red herring in
The Invention of America is O'Gorman's persistent use of the terms "ontol-
ogy" and "ontological viewpoint." Read, for these terms, "hermeneutics"
 114 PHENOMENOLOGY AND COLONY

and "hermeneutical viewpoint" and the basic argument stands forth quite
clearly. In point of fact, O'Gorman's forthright reduction of "being" to
"meaning," with the so-called cultural horizon now acting as the supplier
of the phenomenological brackets, executes a more pristinely Husserlian turn
within the generally Heideggerian movement of endless equivocation. Thus,
the "invented" America still resembles Husserl's "intentional object" more
than it does some ineffable bodying-forth of Dasein.
But, turning now to the first of the two questions posed earlier, what
about O'Gorman's argument itself? Supposing we are inclined to reject its
flagrantly antimaterialist philosophy of history, what, if anything, of value
remains? One way to answer this question is to point to what has, in my
impression, been the typical practice of applying O'Gorman's "invention"
theory in the course of subsequent historical, cultural, and critical analysis
of both the conquest and the colonial period. On the whole, it seems to
me, such application takes up the notion of "invention" as a way of em-
phasizing the fact that, in addition to subduing, mapping, exploiting, and
settling "America," the European colonists were also faced with the partly
unconscious need of naming and interpreting it, of fitting it into the "mas-
ter narratives" of a Eurocentric worldview. (One clear example of this can
be cited in the February 1991 issue of NACLA Report on the Americas de-
voted to the then upcoming quincentennial. Entitled "Inventing America,"
it contains articles by, among others, Eduardo Galeano and Anibal Qui-
jano, each highly critical of the "discovery" and insistent on retelling it
from the standpont of its victims. There is no mention of O'Gorman.) As
a corollary to this, it is also pointed out that this meant confronting and
seeking to expunge other, non-Eurocentric "inventions," notably those of
"America" 's prior inhabitants. O'Gorman remains notoriously silent about
these other "inventions." But his rigorously researched debunking of the
"discovery" myth, in which he demonstrates that the hypothesis of a "new
world" was something Columbus and the other European navigators and
cosmographers resisted until (and even beyond) the very end, certainly serves
to illustrate the extent to which Columbus and company "wouldn't have
seen it if they hadn't believed it" — or something to that effect.
That is, O'Gorman's concept of "invention" has itself been interpreted
as more or less equivalent to the concept of ideology. To "invent" America
is to produce its "ideology." But—and this is the crucial point — this is not
at all the meaning O'Gorman gives to the concept of "invention" in his magnum
opus. The theory of ideology, in both its Marxist and even its bourgeois-
sociological formulations, implies the existence of a material foundation
 PHENOMENOLOGY AND COLONY 115

of history and society in relation to which the particular distortions and

falsehoods of "ideology" alone are discernible. If everything is ideology,
then nothing is. The theory of ideology therefore logically implies a theory
of nonideological practice, ergo the existence, at least in potentia, of a sci-
ence. But O'Gorman categorically rejects this sort of reasoning as "substan-
tialist." "Being" is, as we have seen, intransitively reduced to "meaning."
How we understand the world is, for O'Gorman, as for Heidegger and
Husserl, not a function of any discoveries we may make regarding its ac-
tual material nature but of how we choose or are led to understand it. Ei-
ther one "invents" or one "discovers." One cannot, in O'Gorman's schema,
do both. This utterly dogmatic form of hermeneutic idealism O'Gorman
takes to the extreme of arguing that the "cosmic lump of matter" we now
call "America" does not share the "being" it had before Europe "invented"
it. However we may respond to this proposition stated in the abstract, in
practice we all, including O'Gorman, know it to be complete nonsense.
What I am saying, then, is that the theory of an "invention of America"
only makes sense to the extent that it is, or has been, misread and mis-
apprehended.
Why then—to return, finally, to our second question — should O'Gor-
man himself insist on giving a hermeneutical as opposed to an ideological
meaning to the theory of "invention"? Why turn to Heidegger and not
to Marx or even to a non-Marxist theory of ideology such as that of Karl
Mannheim, whose "sociology of knowledge" was not an untrendy thing in
the 1950s? An important part of the answer lies, of course, in O'Gorman's
own clearly expressed sympathy for the ideology of "America" that pro-
duces its "invention." Unlike, I would venture to guess, most of his con-
temporary readers, O'Gorman unearths the seminal fiction beneath the
myth of "discovery" for the purpose not of discarding it but of celebrating
it. The "invention of America" brings about what O'Gorman claims to be
a "more generous concept of the world" (6). Albeit perhaps fortuitously
and not through any preordination, secular or divine, the "invention"
frees Western man from the "cosmic jail" of the old Orbis terrarum. The
misnamed "discovery" may have been a mere "chance event," but because
of it "man opened up for himself the road to the conquest of the uni-
verse" (128). Indeed, O'Gorman strikes an almost postmodern attitude: a
clearly sophisticated "incredulity towards metanarratives" does not prompt
him to seek the truth they no longer convey but merely to embrace
the "metanarratives" (or at least one of them) for the "meanings" they
generate.
 116 PHENOMENOLOGY AND COLONY

This avidly secular but nevertheless profoundly irrationalist celebration

of the "West" suggests, to me at least, the clear imprint of Cold War think-
ing on The Invention of America. Eulogizing the "West," circa 1958, in-
evitably means demonizing the "East." And even though O'Gorman makes
no overt reference to the "threat of communism," I suspect it is lurking
not far beneath the surface here. It is in the 1950s, with the shelving of the
"Good Neighbor Policy" and the CIA-engineered overthow of the Arbenz
government in Guatemala, that, as we know, Latin America again resumes
its symbolic setting as a North American "backyard" in which the evil forces
of "communist aggression" are once again afoot. Will the still largely "un-
civilized" and unsuspecting folk of the South succumb to this deviation
from "Western" progress and civilization, failing to see that the North Amer-
ican nation that — as some say—oppresses and exploits them is in fact the
only hope and beacon for the future? Perhaps not, if they can only be made
to see that, as O'Gorman reasons, they are really just inferior versions of
an "idea" of America as "frontier" — an idea that, says O'Gorman, explains
the "essence of the history of English-speaking America" and its "phenom-
enal success" (143). Thus, Latin America evidently awaits its own, modified
version of Frederick Jackson Turner—unless, in fact, O'Gorman himself
has already filled this need.
But even if this is reading too much into The Invention of America, I
think it must be clear that by putting the phenomenologist's brackets around
the merely "physical event" of the "discovery" of America, O'Gorman
also brackets out of existence the basic material realities of the colonialist
and imperialist conquests and despoliations that follow it. This is all, in
O'Gorman, tacitly excused in the name of an "idea."
If we now see in this idea itself not the redemption of humankind but a
more neutral, or even a sinister, construct, that alone does not indemnify
O'Gorman's philosophy of history itself against this sort of blindness. Not
"meanings" but concrete, social human beings make history, albeit not, as
the saying goes, "just as they please." Perhaps, in that sense, we do "invent"
it, but not before history—and I do not mean its "idea" — invents us.

1991
 PARTY

Culture and Nation

This page intentionally left blank
 CHAPTER TEN

Split Nationalities

In keeping with a growing trend in critical theory, D. Emily Hicks's Border

Writing: The Multidimensional Text takes as its implicit point of departure
the following problem: how are we now to think about, produce, and/or
consume culture without succumbing either to the tainted universalism
embodied in Enlightenment notions of "civilization" or to the equally sus-
pect particularisms lurking in notions of "national culture"?1 Or, to put it
more succinctly: how to think about culture without nation? For what is
perhaps the dominant current of cultural studies, this problem is "solved"
through a tacit mapping of the cultural domain to correspond to that ab-
stract universal ("postmodern," "postcontemporary," "postindustrial," and
so on) within which it is only "counter-" or "subculture(s)" that command
critical interest. The paradox here is that the many "countercultures" do
not appear to add up to a counterculture, and neither are we quite willing
to be pinned down as to w/wtthat culture is that the multiple forms of op-
position are counter to. (Masculine culture, white Anglo culture, hetero-
sexual culture, business culture, no doubt, but are these really cultures any
longer, and, even if they are, do they reduce to a single dominant culture
and not merely to its absence as a universal?)
But as soon as the cultural studies map is redrawn to include the extra-
cultural boundaries between imperial center and imperialized periphery

119
 12O SPLIT NATIONALITIES

(or between "first" and "third" worlds, the "second" having now been effec-
tively divided between these two), this "solution" quickly becomes obso-
lete. For here we are faced with the seemingly unavoidable fact that, once
drawn up against the dominant (non)culture of imperialism, postcolonial
"national" culture coincides with sub- and counterculture. Even if it is con-
ceded that the national culture of, say, Peru or Sri Lanka reenacts its own
subimperial forms of marginalization (as witness the treatment of Quechua-
speaking and Tamil ethnic groups), the category itself suffers no real dam-
age. It is, after all, the imperialists who drew the postcolonial maps, often
with the expressly political aim of dividing national-cultural entities. Or it
may be claimed — as Mariategui did on behalf of Peru's indigenes — that
the oppressed and marginalized "sub-"national culture represents what is
really the embodiment of an authentically national culture still shackled
by postcolonial forms of cultural alienation.
So in answer to the question posed earlier, the response of a third-world
or postcolonial "cultural studies" has been, overall, to deny that culture and
nation can, finally, be disentangled. Indeed, the very structure of an impe-
rialist division of labor, its imposition of a (paradoxically) universallaw of
unequal development, would seem to dictate this response. For the identi-
cal socioeconomic trends (increasing concentration of capital coupled with
universal commodification) that have worked to undermine and finally ex-
plode the unity of the national-cultural in settings such as the United States
and Western Europe (Japan may be another matter) would seem to require,
or at least to thrive upon, the maintenance of a colonial/postcolonial re-
serve of superexploitable and yet-to-be-commodified labor in which the
older sociocultural bonds — above all that of the national-cultural — re-
main in place. In this situation, it is said, the "nation" can become a place
of resistance to imperialist encroachment—whence the still frequently re-
iterated political reasoning that the generally reactionary character of a domi-
nant cultural-nationalism becomes "progressive" as soon as it is taken up
by a dominated or "dependent" national grouping.
This persistent haunting of a would-be transnationalized cultural stud-
ies by specters of the national-cultural — a kind of eternal return, within
the postmodern, of the postcolonial — can be registered in the recent efforts
by critics such as Fredric Jameson and Edward Said to temper the post-
modern urge to globalize late-capitalist culture with reminders that na-
tional liberation movements, hence cultural nationalism, have not simply
closed up shop because Paris- or California-based intellectuals have lost
interest in them.2 Thus, the fact that authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
 SPLIT NATIONALITIES 121

Wole Soyinka, Naguib Mahfouz, or Anita Desai can continue to produce

compelling narrative fictions rooted, at one level at least, in an authenti-
cally national-cultural experience, is not simply to be explained as a conse-
quence of a postcolonial pristinity still unsullied by an "incredulity toward
metanarratives." Such a tragic view of things is not only patronizing; it ob-
scures the important sense in which the postcolonial writer's ability to draw
on the cultural experience of a national "public sphere" represents a con-
scious resistance to postmodernism's affirmative alienations. Could it not
be that the Elias Khourys and Euzhan Palcys are, in addition to being as
hip as anyone to the "precession of simulacra," people with something gen-
uinely new to teach us?
In this respect, of course, the Jamesons and Saids (and one should men-
tion here as well, inter alia, Neil Lazarus, Barbara Harlow, and John Bever-
ley and Marc Zimmerman) merely take up questions of cultural-politics
that have long occupied postcolonial artists and critics themselves.3 In Latin
America (the postcolonial region about which I personally am least igno-
rant), the debate over the national-cultural and its role in resisting imperi-
alism has its modern beginnings in the essays of Jose Marti, who, together
with his more conservative generational cohorts, Ruben Dario and Jose
Enrique Rodo, was quick to take up the cultural issues posed by the de-
cline of the older, European colonial presence in Latin America and the
concomitant rise of North American imperialism. There follows a long
succession of cultural critics who, in the wake of Latin America's major
twentieth-century revolutions, take up this question anew, including intel-
lectuals as politically divergent as Jose Vasconcelos, Jose Carlos Mariategui,
Gilberto Freyre, Fernando Ortiz, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Octavio Paz, and
Ernesto Cardenal.
This is not the occasion for summarizing, much less recapitulating, the
many theories of anti- and postcolonial culture that have gained currency
in Latin America since Marti's "Nuestra America." In my own work on
modernist and avant-garde culture in Latin America, however, I have found
it useful to identify two, effectively alternative paradigms of postcolonial
oppositional culture: the "transcultural" and the "anthropophagous."4 The
first, stemming from the anthropology of Fernando Ortiz, and redeployed
by Angel Rama as a category of narrative composition and analysis, pro-
poses that the Latin American narrative text (and by extension the pro-
ducer of a local, autochthonous culture) can evade the double bind in which
one either settles for a direct imitation of metropolitan imports or seeks to
expunge all "foreign" cultural influences. Instead, the narrative text must
 122 SPLIT NATIONALITIES

treat the local or regional culture itself as a species of language or code,

within which to, as it were, speak or rearticulate or, in this sense, "transcul-
turate" the exotic cultural dominant. Rama cited as successful enactments
of this procedure the "neoregionalist" narratives of Jose Maria Arguedas,
Joao Guimaraes Rosa, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
The one severe problem plaguing this model, according to my analysis,
is that it privileges cultural production without factoring in consumption
as an equally critical phase of cultural activity. As a possible solution to
this, the anthropophagous paradigm, first explicitly outlined in the "Man-
ifesto antropofago" of the Brazilian vanguardist Oswald de Andrade, advo-
cates a practice of (in my own wording) "consumptive production," whereby
the metropolitan cultural import, rather than being simply receded and
then abruptly reinserted into the same exclusive network of cultural distri-
bution, undergoes an even more radical subversion by being directly ap-
propriated as simply one motif of a dynamic, postcolonial mass culture
that can consume without losing its national-cultural identity. But for this,
of course, a postcolonial (and distinctly post-Adornian) "culture industry"
is required — a need met, in Brazil, by that country's massive film and tele-
vision enterprise.
But however they measure up against each other, both of these para-
digms can claim a certain level of success in Latin America. The fiction
"boom" of the 1960s and 1970s, together with the establishment (in Brazil
mainly but also in Mexico, Cuba, Argentina, and Venezuela) of local film,
television, and music industries, proves, if nothing else, how far Latin Amer-
ica has come from Marti's nightmare vision of a complete and abject cul-
tural dependency. Even North American literary and popular culture feels
the transcultural, cannibalizing pull from its southern "backyard" — as wit-
ness cultural phenomena ranging from the "magical realist" The Milagro
Beanfield War to the Afro-Brazilian-Andean-disco syncretism of lambada.
The fact remains, however, that this indisputable cultural triumph —
postcolonial Latin America's conquest not only of a decisive portion of its
own, but also of a certain sector of a metropolitan, cultural terrain — has
not been, as its earlier political visionaries imagined it would, matched by
a corresponding social and political emancipation from imperial bonds.
Although undoubtedly propelled by concrete social and political gains—
none of the aforementioned cultural advances would have been thinkable
without the breakthroughs of the Mexican and Cuban revolutions — these
gains themselves, with the possible exception of Cuba's now endangered
and vestigial socialism, have led merely to new forms of imperial/local elite
 SPLIT NATIONALITIES 123

condominium. And this, in turn, raises the question of whether cultural

nationalism itself, even when "overdetermined" by anti-imperialism, may
not in the end render service as the ideology of a postcolonial capitalism
more interested, finally, in increasing its market share than in liberating
the masses without whose labor, sacrifice, and political allegiance no na-
tional liberation is possible.
The reality of this gap between the emancipatory promise of postcolo-
nial cultural nationalism and its actual historical record, even though it is
not often consciously acknowledged, has, I think, had a pervasive effect on
Latin American cultural politics in the past two decades or so. 1 believe this
can be registered in the growing pressure to, so to speak, de-essentialize
cultural nationalism by rethinking the postcolonial itself as a sort of"un-
fixity" whose historic task is not simply to free itself from colonial depen-
dency but to subvert the very notion of an underlying, shared or universal
standard of "culture" — a standard that itself validates the claim to "inde-
pendence." My use of terms here suggests the key influence of poststruc-
turalist doctrines in furthering this trend, and indeed, the connection is
an important one (as we shall see in a moment). But, as I have suggested
elsewhere,5 the impulse to rethink cultural nationalism along nonessen-
tialist lines has its more local origins in the cultural theory of Latin Ameri-
cans such as the Cuban poet and critic Roberto Fernandez Retamar, whose
writings of the late 1960s and early 1970s were already calling for a re-
jection of a "universal" literary culture and holding up Latin America's
"hybrid" cultures as models for a new, postimperial order of limitless re-
gional differences.6
A theologically inspired "Philosophy of Liberation," based mainly in
Argentina and whose best-known advocate has been Enrique Dussel, had
meanwhile been developing along similar lines for at least twenty years.7
Now that metropolitan-based intellectuals — going back at least as far as
Sartre but comprising more recently such poststructuralist thinkers as Tzve-
tan Todorov and Michel de Certeau — have taken up this theme, the sus-
picion is readily generated of yet another first-world attempt to construct
a Utopian alter image of itself out of the imperialized other. There is, to be
sure, a good deal of truth to this suspicion, but one must not overlook the
extent to which the crises of national liberation and of its ancillary forms
of cultural nationalism in both Latin America and much of the rest of
the postcolonial world have opened up a kind of ideological space for
the confluence of poststructuralist doctrine and the cultural opposition to
imperialism.
 124 SPLIT NATIONALITIES

It is in this context, then, that the contribution and significance of Bor-

der Writing can, I think, best be appreciated. In keeping with the trend in
cultural-political theory I have described above, Hicks's interest in Latin
American literature and culture stems not from a desire to gain its admit-
tance into the European/North American-dominated canon but rather from
a desire to mobilize the former for the seemingly more radical, postnation-
alist drive to smash the canon altogether. Cultural nationalism recognized
the existence of a rigid cultural hierarchy but sought to reverse, or at least
to suspend, the value judgment that hierarchy implied. "Border writing," ac-
cording to Hicks, seeks rather to undermine "the distinction between orig-
inal and alien culture" (6). Moreover, Hicks proposes that this imperative
is not to be understood as a mere application of poststructuralist strictures
regarding "identity thinking" but arises in fact from cultural and artistic
transformations that in Latin American are encountered in actual practice:
"To recuperate now a long tradition of experimentation with the uncriti-
cal use of European poststructuralism is unnecessary" (13).
The originality of Border Writing is that, rather than simply affirming
the—as I have elsewhere termed it—"subversive particularity" of Latin
American culture in the abstract, it seeks to demonstrate how this abstract
possibility is realized in practice through specifically semiotic and psychic
mechanisms operating in and through a discrete set of literary texts. These
mechanisms are classified in a variety of ways (e.g., "multidimensional per-
ception," "nonsynchronous memory," a holographic duality of "interfer-
ence patterns"), but they all revolve around the central figure of the "bor-
der"— "border writing," "border text," "border subject," "border culture."
In using this figure, Hicks is, in effect, attempting to come up with a kind
of spatial marker, both literal and figurative, for the postnationalist cul-
tural space whose existence she both posits and celebrates.
Of course both the transcultural and cannibalizing texts cross cultural
borders as well — borders between codes and even modes of consump-
tion—but always with the final aim of redrawing the national cultural bor-
der around the text or consuming/producing subject in a final return to
categories of national-cultural identity. Hicks's theory of "border writing"
aims not at a mere complication of this essentially mediational poetics (a
further transculturation of the now increasingly traditional forms of trans-
culture) but rather at undermining the mediation itself—at continually
drawing the border within and across both the local and the global text/
culture. Or, as Hicks herself phrases it, "[Border writing] allow[s] for a de-
scription of the mediations of a logic of nonidentity" (94). Where previ-
 SPLIT NATIONALITIES 125

ously a text by, say, Arguedas has been interpreted as merely an improved
device for forging a self-identical postcolonial subject out of a hybrid his-
torical, social, and cultural experience, in its reinterpretation as "border
writing," it functions in exactly the opposing sense as a means for decon-
structing the colonial/postcolonial, center/periphery binarisms as such. In
crossing borders, the "border text" nevertheless thinks, speaks, writes from
the border itself. Polarities are not simply reversed. They are internalized
and then endlessly reproduced.
The bulk of Border Writing is devoted to tracing the effects of this process
in texts by Garcia Marquez, Cortazar, and Valenzuela. Here, as I see it, the
results do not quite measure up to the basic ingenuity of the theoretical
hypothesis. Hicks's reading of Cortazar, in particular of Rayuela and Libra
de Manuel, as border writing — buttressed by analogies to Stockhausen's
"interactive" method of composition — are perhaps the most successful.
Cortazar's narratives certainly resist any effort to endow them with trans-
cultural or cannibalistic properties, a fact that, in recent years, has seemed
to encourage a subtle tendency to read Cortazar as somehow less "authen-
tic" than, say, a Garcia Marquez or even a Borges.8 Hicks's insistence on
Cortazar as a writer always sensitive to the double edge of "identity" poli-
tics in whatever guise performs the useful task of thwarting this move.
The attempt to read Garcia Marquez's Cien anos de soledad as "border
writing" itself borders on the inauthentic, however. Granted that this text
enacts a sort of "nonsynchronous memory" in which the colonial and the
postcolonial, the archaic and the hypermodern, collide without any op-
portunity for their "rational" mediation, the reader's vicarious experience
of this border crossing is itself reterritorialized in the generational saga of
the Buendias. The unity of postcolonial national experience, even if it must
relinquish any pretense to a heroic or tragic sense of its own significance
(Garcia Marquez remains, for me at least, a subtle but inveterate satirist),
is nevertheless preserved in a genealogical structure.
Like Cortazar's, Valenzuela's fictions seem on the whole to fit the "bor-
der" paradigm better than they do that of a radicalized but identity-seeking
cultural nationalism. However, Hicks's assertion (in chapter 2) that in texts
such as "Cambio de armas" Valenzuela not only foils the nationalist/mas-
culinist imaginary but forces the reader to consider a new form of agency
freed from European notions of the subject as self-conscious (41) strikes
me as, at the very least, undecidable. If, as Hicks claims, "it is necessary
that Laura's act [i.e., the heroine's possible assassination of her male cap-
tor/torturer/lover] emerge from a conjuncture of history and agency, not
 126 SPLIT NATIONALITIES

from her deliberation as a self-conscious subject" (44), it is hard to see how

Valenzuela's narrative itself instructs the reader in this necessity. The fact
that Laura's "act" is not preceded—at least on the surface of the narrative —
by some brilliant flash of hypermnesia leading to a return to full conscious-
ness of history (both her own and that of the "nation" during the "dirty
war" of the 1970s and early 1980s) might after all imply that it is simply a
freak occurrence, irrational and unrepeatable, and hence an "agency" only
in a fortuitous sense. Where, moreover, does "history" enter into it? The
reader must evidently supply it, but what if the (non-Argentine) reader
herself has not crossed that particular border? And must agency, in order
to reencounter history and politics on some transsubjective, activist terrain,
necessarily evade the question of consciousness? Hicks's tendency to re-
duce the latter concept to its existentialist meaning in Sartre's Nausea—a
meaning she then, quite correctly, rejects for its abstract individualism —
leads her, unnecessarily it seems to me, to seek its replacement by a hypo-
thetical "border subjectivity," which, even if it really exists, requires a consid-
erable act of imagination to be detected in texts such as "Cambio de armas."
The question of how to know with any certainty whether or not a "bor-
der effect" is truly obtained in narratives such as Valenzuela's (although
perhaps not of any importance to an orthodox poststructuralism that em-
braces undecidability as both an inevitable and an optimal state) points, I
think, to the intrinsic problem with any theory that the text is endowed with
multiple perspectives. This is that there is nothing in the logic of such a
theory to explain why the interpreting subject for whom the effect itself is
devised might not, in practice, undo the effect by resolving the multiplicity
of perspectives in her or his unifying gaze. Even if armed with a clear under-
standing of the holographic image as an illusion of three-dimensionality
produced by the mixing of interference patterns, my contemplation of such
an image does not, by that fact alone, escape the illusionist effect of a three-
dimensional representation. Of course the claim might be lodged, a la Bau-
drillard, that all objects of perception have now been reduced to the virtual
status of holograms. But Hicks seems, wisely, to avoid this sort of reason-
ing. The basic idea here — and it is one with solidly modernist credentials—
is that by multiplying the levels of representation, or if one prefers the
Barthesian schema, by pluralizing the various reference codes, one achieves
a non- or transrepresentational access to the "real." "The 'real' can be known
through reflexive activity in relation to it. Art provides the possibility of
gaining access to such reflexive knowledge" (91). Supposing the real to be,
on its most profound level, such a multiple, nonuniform entity, this process
 SPLIT NATIONALITIES 127

might perhaps really do the thing it claims. But then if the extratextual or
uncoded object already exists in a state of spontaneous deconstructedness,
why should it be necessary to mirror this condition through a conscious
and purposive fragmentation of perspective?
This intrinsic difficulty becomes even clearer if we pose it in terms of
the Deleuzo-Guattarian politics (as formulated in the Anti-Oedipus) with
which the idea of border writing is most closely affiliated. Ronald Bogue
has nicely synthesized this politics: "The only means of overcoming the
paranoiac impulse is to intensify the schizophrenic tendency of capitalism
to the point that the system shatters, and this can only be achieved through
the creation of group-subjects that form transverse connections between
deterritorialized flows that are no longer subject to the constraints of com-
modity exchange."9 In this sense, the production and reproduction of bor-
der subjects in and through the border text might justify itself as simply a
facet of this overall drive to "intensify the schizophrenic tendency of capi-
talism" (ibid.). But even if one were to accept the essential premise here
that capitalism is vulnerable to the simple intensification of one of its own
spontaneous tendencies, it is hard to see how, in transposing this uncon-
trolled, anarchic impulse into the controlled and evidently purposive schiz-
ophrenia of the "multidimensional text," its very emancipatory potential
would not be counteracted. Any effort to guide or set in motion the process
of intensifying the schizophrenic tendency would seem, by virtue of its own
"paranoiac" intentionality, to contradict this tendency.
But these sorts of problems are, of course, no longer specific to Hicks's
particular hypothesis regarding what is, after all, the possibility that Latin
American literature and culture might be incubating a sort of border poet-
ics. They stem, in my view, from the basic futility of trying to outflank the
oppressive logic of cultural nationalism by postulating the capacity of purely
abstract-discursive and (in the case of Border Writing) aesthetic mecha-
nisms to produce a postnationalist "border subject." This is a Utopian pro-
ject, in the best, and worst, senses of the word. It reproduces the classical
ideological pattern of severing the transformation of consciousness from
the constraints imposed by the transformation of social being. Thus, for
example, in her discussion of the idiomatically "border" reality of the ma-
quiladoras (foreign-owned assembly plants located in Mexico just across
the U.S. border and employing an overwhelmingly female workforce at
starvation wages), Hicks is moved to ask, "What possible definition of the
subject would be mirrored by the object produced in such an environ-
ment?" (8). But, we must ask, do "objects" (here the economic, social, and
 128 SPLIT NATIONALITIES

political reality of the maquiladoras) in fact "mirror" an independent and

preexisting border subject, as the wording here suggests? Is it not the sub-
ject here that mirrors the object? Elsewhere, in summing up the textual pol-
itics of Valenzuela's Cola de lagartija, Hicks writes:
Symbols, or metaphors, the end product in the production of meaning,
must be created by Argentines themselves. They must occupy and self-
manage the location at which meaning is produced, the border region
between the political unconscious and the political conscious. They
must gain control over this production process such that even if the
"real" remains elusive, as individuals they will have access to new images,
and as subjects, they will effect changes at the level of signifiers, speech,
and language. (265)

To suggest, of course, that progressive social change is possible without, on

one level, wresting control over the "production of meaning" is to fall into a
justly discredited form of economic determinism. And perhaps, in fairness,
this is what Hicks really wants to convey here. But can such a wresting of
control be deemed possible in the first place in view of the unconscious,
presubjective plane on which meanings are, in Hicks's Lacanian framework,
thought to be produced? Moreover, to suppose that by merely having "ac-
cess to new images" and effecting changes "at the level of signifiers," and so
on, events such as Argentina's "dirty war" might be avoided—is this not fi-
nally to reduce the "dirty war" itself to a sort of symbol, to question its very
existence as something "real"?
If the direct production of border subjects, whether through the spon-
taneous "flows" of deterritorialization or through aesthetic interventions,
is finally a Utopian delusion, what then, we must ask, is the alternative to
cultural-nationalist decay? Here, I think, Samir Amin, in his work Eurocen-
trism, has at least produced the framework for an answer.10 Amin places
the development of cultural nationalism (or, as he more simply terms it,
"culturalism") in the context of a Eurocentric "universalism" hatched in the
European "Renaissance" and systematically formulated in the nineteenth cen-
tury. Two historical factors determine its decline. One is the objective demys-
tification of Eurocentric universalism brought about by its own twentieth-
century pathologies: imperialism, with its world wars and its condemnation
of the masses living on the imperial periphery to perpetual exclusion from
the benefits of "civilization." The other is the rise of a social universalism, en-
abled by universal commodification itself, and first articulated by Marxism.
According to Amin, however, this Marxist or socialist universalism (com-
prising a cultural universalism as well) did not immediately free itself from
 SPLIT NATIONALITIES 129

a residual Eurocentrism contained in the conception that, even with respect

to socialism, "Europe was the model for everything" (126). It is partly as a
result of this that, in our own period, "existing" capitalisms and socialisms
effectively converge in a social formation dominated by "economism," or
the theory that society is governed by economic "laws" independent of con-
scious social agencies. This combined reality, then—the decline of the older,
capitalist, Eurocentric universalism, coupled with the difficult, contradic-
tory emergence of a new, genuinely social universalism embodied in the vi-
sion of a classless society—results in what Amin terms the current "impasse"
in which "capitalist ideology remains dominant on the world scale" but is
matched by "inverted Eurocentrisms" on the periphery. "Without a truly
universalist perspective founded on the critique of economism and enriched
by the contributions of all peoples," writes Amin, "the sterile confronta-
tion between the Eurocentrisms of some and the inverted Eurocentrisms
of others will continue in an atmosphere of destructive fanaticism" (146).
The clear implication here is that it is only along the slow and tortuous
route of revolutionary-political movements, guided by an authentically uni-
versalist and emancipatory worldview, that the impasse can be broken down.
Transcending cultural nationalism on the level of both theory and culture
can only be the result, in any lasting sense, of transcending cultural na-
tionalism as a political and social practice. From this perspective, the pro-
ject of a border writing (or border subject, border culture, and so on) must
be seen as an ambiguous one, reflecting the configuration of the impasse
itself— unable to continue existing on either side of the border but still
unwilling to give up the border itself for fear that this will place it back in
the domain of Eurocentrism's false universe.
But must we then avoid even the anticipatory practices and rhetoric of
a postnationalist, social universalism until the impasse is practically a thing
of the past? I think not, and here is the point on which I dissent most point-
edly from Hicks's border writing hypothesis, even while participating in its
underlying sympathies. The reality that produces border subjects also tells
us a certain amount about what a future and, at least, a transnational cul-
ture might entail. That the emergent face of this culture still hides behind
the mask of capitalism's universal consumerism is beyond question. But to
the extent that activities other than consumption (or the desire for it) be-
come the centrally shared experiences of heretofore distinct "nationalities"
(e.g., the wide degree to which black and Hispanic musical, linguistic, and
purely social idioms are adopted by middle- and working-class white youth
in the United States), one surely glimpses its features. Of what purpose is
 130 SPLIT NATIONALITIES

the border effect here, unless it is to preserve the opportunity for reinsert-
ing cultural nationalism just when it appears to be decisively yielding its
sway? (The same question can, it seems to me, be posed of certain forms of
"multiculturalism," in which, as Amin puts it, "all aspirations for univer-
salism are rejected in favor of a 'right to difference'... invoked as a means
of evading the real problem" [146].)
Moreover, I suggest that it is possible to extend the general interpretive
thesis of a border writing beyond the vanguardist and ambiguous class pol-
itics of texts by Garcia Marquez, Cortazar, and Valenzuela to comprise some-
what older literary traditions of a more social-universalistic character. I
have in mind here especially the tradition of the "proletarian novel" in Latin
America, a tradition including such national-cultural anomalies as B. Tra-
ven (a "border crosser" if there ever was one) as well as the more national-
culturally grounded texts of socialist realists such as Icaza and the Jorge
Amado of the 1940s and early 1950s. In Amado's trilogy Os subterraneos da
liberdade (a work long neglected thanks to the Cold War/"boom"-inspired
aversion for its supposed "Zhdanovite" qualities), we find, for example,
innumerable border crossings, albeit here on the level of the referent per se
rather than that of its various "codes."11 The fascism of Getulio Vargas's Es-
tado Novo emerges—in an interesting variation on the standard Latin Amer-
ican "dictator" novel — as a preeminently international phenomenon in
which politics on the level, say, of rivalry between U.S. and Nazi imperial-
ism takes concrete shape in an intricate plot comprising characters from
virtually every level of Brazilian class society. In the end, of course, Amado's
own Third International brand of nationalism takes hold in the trilogy's
cult-like celebration of Prestes as a Brazilian national savior, but along the
way many of the representational limits imposed by Latin American cul-
tural nationalism are convincingly overcome. That this tradition is not,
moreover, entirely a thing of the past can be verified in the more contem-
porary narratives of the late Manuel Scorza. In this Peruvian author's epic
cycle of social-indigenist novels (collectively entitled La guerra silenciosa),
Amado's feat is basically repeated but here in a narrative style incorporat-
ing many of the more innovative discoveries of the intervening "boom." In
a work such as Redoble par Rancas, Scorza's mercilessly sardonic replay of
the battle of Junin (interspersed with scenes of the modern destruction, by
Peruvian armed forces, of the indigenous community named in the title)
makes the more aestheticist and historically ambiguous reappraisal of Boli-
var in Garcia Marquez's El general en su laberinto look tepid by comparison.
 SPLIT NATIONALITIES 131

Such works, it seems to me, at least bear witness to what has evidently
been the slow, but ongoing, emergence of a poetics of a postnational, social
universalism in Latin America, although this may never have been a con-
scious aim per se. Hicks — even if, for ideological and theoretical motives
of her own, she prefers to locate this poetics elsewhere — nevertheless in-
sists on such a postnational aegis as her own conscious point of departure.
And that, I think, is the particular virtue of Border Writing.

1991
 CHAPTER ELEVEN

Indigenism, Cultural Nationalism, and

the Problem of Universality

Does literary study as traditionally constituted reflect a Western or Euro-

centric bias, and do "emergent literatures," particularly those from the non-
Western and postcolonial world, effectively challenge this bias? Most of us
who work in the area of postcolonial literary and cultural studies would
not hesitate very long, I think, in answering yes to both these questions. To
have been educated before the advent of multiculturalized curricula is typ-
ically evidence enough for believing so—which is not to say that multi-
culturalism as presently institutionalized is guaranteed to counteract Eu-
rocentrism on its deepest levels.
But having once agreed that postcolonial, emergent literary practice calls
for the revision of certain fundamentals of literary theory—as, for exam-
ple, in the area of genre studies — there arise other, less tractable sorts of
questions: Is the Eurocentrism underlying literary theory in fact such that
it can be revised? Can it simply be a question of Theory taking into account
new practice if, as it might be claimed, such practices situate themselves in
the blind spots of Theory? What if Theory has built itself precisely upon
the exclusion of just such practices? And if this is so, does it not follow that
the emergent literary practices of the postcolonial world, and perhaps those
of all nonhegemonic cultures, require a theory or theories of their own? Is

132
 INDIGENISM, CULTURAL NATIONALISM, AND UNIVERSALITY 133

not, therefore, the premise of a single, universal Theory—as that of a single,

universal or "world" Literature — a false and a dangerous one?
Here, one guesses, there is much less likely to be any obvious consensus.
Nevertheless, I think it would be accurate to say that the specter of this lat-
ter train of thinking haunts the contemporary practice of postcolonial stud-
ies, even if its reductive implications are not always clearly thought through
to the end. Certainly, it does haunt the practice of contemporary Latin
American literary studies, the area with which I am most familiar and on
which I shall focus in more detail in a moment. As producers, consumers,
and critics of postcolonial literature, we proceed with considerable caution,
if not fear, of universality. For the suspicion is, or seems to be, that it is in
the recourse to the category of the universal that Western colonialism and
imperialism find their most potent ideological weapon.
What accounts for this antiuniversalism? On an intellectual plane, the
answer must partly lie in the still virtually paradigmatic imprint of a post-
structuralism and, lately, of a theoretizing postmodernism that have posited
the irreducibility of difference and the decrepitude of all thinking that seeks
to legitimize itself through universalizing appeals to "metanarratives" or
"foundations." Within this paradigm, the postcolonial or third world read-
ily lines up on the side of all those subjects marginalized, silenced, and
"othered" by "totalizing" discourses and practices. (Present-day multicul-
turalism, although it tends to drop the deconstructive ban on identity in
favor of a pluralized "rainbow," has even further reinforced the equation of
the universal and the oppressive.) Probably the single most influential ar-
ticulation of a poststructural antiuniversalism in the area of postcolonial
studies remains Gayatri Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?," in which the
author has famously declared that "the colonized subaltern subject is irre-
trievably heterogeneous."1 Even well-meaning poststructuralists such as
Foucault and Deleuze, despite their emphatic valorization of heterogene-
ity, can, she maintains, do nothing but continuously reinstate the homo-
geneous and Eurocentric subject of "power" and "desire." Simply to speak
as though "difference" meant the same thing regardless of one's degree or
kind of difference becomes tantamount, here, to reproducing ideologically
capitalism's international division of labor.
Admittedly, not all postcolonial critics take so radical or dire a view.
Nor do all partake so fully of poststructuralist doctrine, as witness the case
of an Edward Said. Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, poststructural-
ism is not the prerequisite route to the present antiuniversalist mind-set.2
The Cuban critic Roberto Fernandez Retamar, whose writings of the early
 134 INDIGENISM, CULTURAL NATIONALISM, AND UNIVERSALITY

1970s emphatically rejected the possibility of any universal Theory of Lit-

erature and called for the creation of a plurality of regional theories, is a
case in point, as is the work of the Argentine philosopher and liberation
theologian, Enrique Dussel, whose Philosophy of Liberation is doubtless the
most explicit argument for an irreducibly Latin American alterity yet to be
produced.
But to point to the strong affinities of postcolonial studies for certain
philosophical antiuniversalisms, whether strictly poststructuralist or no, is
still to beg the question of the affinity itself. Why this attraction and not
another? To answer, I wish to turn to what I think is the single most useful
contribution to the discussion of these issues, Samir Amin's 1989 work en-
titled simply Eurocentrism.3 The most relevant points of Amin's position
are these: (1) that Eurocentrism is not a true universalism but "a cultural-
ist phenomenon in the sense that it assumes the existence of irreducibly
distinct cultural invariants that shape the historical paths of different peo-
ples" (vii); (2) that, parallel to the institutional and ideological entrench-
ment of Eurocentrism during the nineteenth century (not coincidentally
the time at which Europe gives birth to modern literary studies), there also
develops, as a result of the objective unity of capitalism as a world system,
a genuine social universalism expressed in Marxism; (3) that Marxism, how-
ever, fails to free itself completely of certain residual features of Eurocen-
trism, a fact best illustrated in the theory that the non-European capitalist
periphery would have to approximate conditions in capitalist Europe before
undertaking a transition to a postcapitalist order; (4) that, despite the in-
cipient breaks with this Eurocentrist, or as Amin also terms it, economistic
Marxism marked by the Russian and Chinese revolutions, the universalist
project of Marxism suffers, because of its economistic distortions, a severe,
if temporary, setback, leading to a so-called impasse in which there is (5) a
revival of Eurocentrist apologies for the "free market" and Western liberal
capitalism as genuine universals and (6) a parallel resurgence of cultural
nationalisms on the periphery, often taking the form of religious funda-
mentalisms, or what Amin refers to generally as "inverted Eurocentrisms"
(146). Thus the dominant, Eurocentrist culturalism of the center is matched
by the contestatory culturalisms of the periphery.
It is, I submit, this "impasse," reflecting the difficult historical conditions
of emergence of the universal social and cultural project first given critical
and scientific expression by Marx, that underlies the general intellectual
distrust of universals. Insofar as postcolonial studies evinces this same dis-
trust, it no doubt reacts to the dominant, Eurocentrist culturalism. But, by
 INDIGENISM, CULTURAL NATIONALISM, AND UNIVERSALITY 135

the same token, it also reveals its objective incapacity to go beyond the
bounds of cultural nationalism as a political practice. This, I think, is true
even of so scrupulously "decentered" a text as Spivak's "Can the Subaltern
Speak?," in which the possibility of any common ground between first-
and third-world subjects is virtually, albeit somewhat ruefully, denied. It is
significant that the one conceivable opportunity for attaining the level of
the universal can come only in a moment of delirium: Derrida's "rendering
delirious that interior voice that is the voice of the other in us."4
How is the antiuniversalist logic of the "impasse" reflected in the area
of contemporary Latin Americanism? I have already mentioned the cases
of Fernandez Retamar and Dussel, but rather than focus attention on these
more abstract, philosophical discourses I want to discuss briefly certain
trends in the cultural phenomenon of indigenism. Following the Peruvian
critic Jose Carlos Mariategui, I understand by indigenism a literature rooted
in the social movement against the oppression of Latin America's indige-
nous societies, to be distinguished from both an earlier Indianism that did
not go beyond a romanticized, and often politically conservative, allegoriza-
tion of the indigene and from an indigenous writing per se.5 Mariategui,
writing in the 1920s, conceded that indigenism, because still engaged in a
process of interpreting indigenous society for a nonindigenous subject,
could not avoid a certain "stylization" of the former. But this did not, he
claimed, negate its generally progressive character so long as indigenism
grasped the "problem of the Indian" as one that could only be solved in
the wholesale transformation of the political and economic structure of
Peruvian society.
While remaining a significant literary trend in Latin America, contem-
porary indigenism has turned more and more to the reading and interpre-
tation of newly discovered or deciphered texts by indigenous authors. One
thinks, here, of the important work on pre-Columbian and conquest pe-
riod texts produced by scholars such as Miguel Leon Portilla as well as
contemporary testimonial narratives, including the best known of them, I,
Rigoberta Menchu.
This is, unquestionably, an important and progressive development. With
it, however, there arise certain interpretive problems that shed an interest-
ing light on the political thinking that indigenism often brings to these
texts. Consider, by way of example, a text that has generated a great amount of
interest and interpretive labor in recent years, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala's
seventeenth-century "testimonial," The New Chronicle and Good Govern-
ment. Written in both Spanish and an alphabetized Quechua; calling for a
 136 INDIGENISM, CULTURAL NATIONALISM, AND UNIVERSALITY

modified form of Spanish and Catholic hegemony, in which, however, a

native Andean elite would be in a position to counteract the abuses of
Spanish colonial officials; addressed to the king of Spain but also employ-
ing native Andean discursive and even pictorial traditions—how is such a
text to be read and classified? Is it a testimony to an ongoing process of
cultural assimilation, or does it bespeak an act of cultural resistance?
In her essay "Arts of the Contact Zone" Mary Louise Pratt has invoked
the concept of transculturation to attempt to solve this problem. Transcul-
turation, in Pratt's words,
describes processes whereby members of subordinated or marginal groups
select and invent from materials transmitted by a dominant or
metropolitan culture While subordinate peoples do not usually control
what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying
extents what gets absorbed into their own and what it gets used for.*

Coining an analogous term, Pratt describes the New Chronicle as an "au-

toethnographic text" in which there is "a selective collaboration with and
appropriation of idioms of the metropolis or the conqueror. These are
merged or infiltrated to varying degrees with indigenous idioms to create
self-representations intended to intervene in metropolitan modes of un-
derstanding" (35).
Pratt's solution here is certainly the correct one insofar as the problem
is to establish the text's cultural identity. It is, in fact, neither Spanish nor
Quechua, neither colonial nor indigenous, but a complex mediation of the
two, proper to what Pratt calls the "contact zone" — "social spaces where
cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other" (34). But note that her
reading nevertheless presupposes culture per se as the dominant category
in terms of which the text is to be interpreted. Culture, though stripped of
its essentialist ideology, remains as something anterior to meaning. Thus,
even in being freed of the assimilationist stigma of cultural inferiority, the
indigenous subject is still revalorized in a strictly cultural, ethnographic
sense. In the case of Guaman Poma, it seems almost as if a posture of cul-
tural resistance is declared in compensation for what is, measured by con-
temporary expectations, an at best equivocal and perhaps even somewhat
conservative, colonialist politics.
To the extent that it is possible to generalize here, one might perhaps posit
the existence of a new (postmodern?) trend within indigenism (one no doubt
unsuspected by Mariategui), in which the indigenous figures of a Guaman
Poma or a Rigoberta Menchii function as emblems of cultural resistance —
but also as indexes of a resistance, on the part of their interpreters, to
 INDIGENISM, CULTURAL NATIONALISM, AND UNIVERSALITY 137

envision an anticolonialism or an anti-imperialism that goes beyond the

limits of the cultural. The old, Eurocentrist idol of the "noble" — or, alter-
nately, "evil" — "savage" is smashed, but in its place there is inserted a no
less culturalist representation: the indigene as circumscribed by the affir-
mation of his or her own ethnicity and only within this ethnographic
frame as the emblem of universal social and political meanings.
But an opposing, or at least alternative, trend within contemporary in-
digenism can be pointed to as well. Here I have in mind the indigenist
novels of the late Peruvian writer Manuel Scorza. In the narrative cycle en-
titled La guerra silendosa Scorza employs a range of documentary and tes-
timonial materials collected during a period of indigenous-communal up-
risings in the Peruvian central Andes to fashion an epic account of the
transition from a semifeudal system of land tenure ("gamonalismo") to more
"modern" forms of imperialist and capitalist exploitation. The first novel
of the series, Redoble par Rancas, for example, interweaves the stories of
two conflicts: between the village-commune of Yanacocha, led by the rebel
Hector Chacon, and the larger, subprefectural town of Yanahuanca, presided
over by the local magistrate and major landowner, Judge Montenegro; and
the parallel struggle of the village of Rancas to resist the enclosure of its
sheep pastures by a large, North American mining corporation. Both strug-
gles end in failure for the indigenous forces — Chacon is captured and im-
prisoned before he can organize the general uprising that will assassinate
Montenegro and restore Yanacocha's communal lands, while the rebellious
Ranquenos are massacred by Peruvian armed forces after their actions grow
increasingly militant. But they also are victorious in the sense that they
represent the defeat of the villagers' false consciousness, whether religious
or legalistic, regarding the nature and objectives of their struggle.
What is significant for our purposes here, however, is that Scorza is able
to lend his tale a high degree of cultural and ethnographic detail and to
create a series of protagonists whose indigenous or nonindigenous identity
is well established, without thereby framing the narrative itself as a strug-
gle between "cultures." Despite what the individual characters may think
or act upon, Scorza's method of narration never flinches from the reality
that the struggle is, at base, a struggle between classes. La guerra silendosa
thus brings to full narrative articulation Mariategui's earlier, prophetic in-
sistence that the "problem of the Indian" be grasped as the principal form
taken by the class contradiction in Peru. In this respect, I think, Scorza is
able to overcome the major weakness in Jose Maria Arguedas's otherwise
pathbreaking work in indigenist fiction: the persistent tendency to trade
 138 INDIGEN1SM, CULTURAL NATIONALISM, AND UNIVERSALITY

the epic and political perspectives that partially foreground Arguedas's nar-
ratives for generally static cultural and ethnographic tableaux. True, in Ar-
guedas, culture is a highly problematic reality whose terms must constantly
be redefined. Arguedas, as Angel Rama pointed out, may be the quintes-
sential transculturator — a purveyor of "autoethnographies" if there ever
was one. But whereas in a novel such as Arguedas's Yawar Fiesta action is
always giving way to ethnographic description, in Redoble por Rancas cul-
tural attributes and practices only assume significance in the context of the
action itself—an action that stems not from culture but from social and
economic conflict.
Perhaps it will be objected here that contrasting the transculturalist in-
terpretation of a text such as Guaman Poma's to Scorza's more universalist,
social-indigenist fictions involves a sort of category mistake. Are we not
confusing hermeneutics and aesthetics? But surely Scorza's fictions are as
much the interpretations of an indigenous reality—and even of indigenous
texts, if we accept Scorza's own account of the documentary basis for his
subsequent literary elaborations — as are contemporary readings of Gua-
man Poma or other indigenous testimonials.7 Scorza elaborates his mate-
rials into fictions of profound literary typicality. (The character of Hector
Chacon, "el Nictalope," ranks, I think, among the most compelling in con-
temporary world literature.) He might have done otherwise, and perhaps,
indeed, the decision not to leave his materials in their raw, "testimonial"
form incurs a certain loss of cultural authenticity. Might it not be here,
precisely, that Eurocentrism makes its subtle appearance, offering the alibi
of artistic universality? To this, I think, the reply must be that the decision
merely to "record" the indigenous voice in its "original" form, eschewing
the temptation to universalize for a fidelity to the particulars of "culture"
(or "transculture"), while laudable in itself, offers no fewer opportunities
for Eurocentrist—or cultural-nationalist — infiltration. Not everything or
everyone can, after all, be recorded as part of the testimonial. To settle on
one set of particulars is to exclude others—to universalize as "culture" one
given set of particulars over another. And does this not thereby create the
risk of a metonymic substitution of part for whole — of Guaman Poma, say,
for the entire range of colonial Peru's indigenous voices, mostly unheard?
But my purpose here is not to force some irrevocable sort of choice be-
tween Scorza's literary indigenism and the indigenist testimonial. Rather it
is to suggest that among contemporary Latin Americanists there exists a
strong predisposition to privilege the latter trend as the more authentic
 INDIGENISM, CULTURAL NATIONALISM, AND UNIVERSALITY 139

and hence the more subversive of Eurocentrist intellectual and cultural hege-
mony. This, I believe, is a fallacy, stemming from the culturalist tendency
to assert a direct equivalence between a marginal ethnicity and an emanci-
patory, anti-imperialist politics — and, correlatively, to equate the univer-
sal with imperialist domination. Ironically, its effect, in the end, is to disal-
low the postcolonial subject's own genuine and impelling claims to social
and political universality. Its political and historical logic is that of Amin's
"impasse" — of the antiuniversalism elicited by the presently arrested, but
no less necessary, transition to the universal human emancipation of social
classlessness.

1992
 CHAPTER TWELVE

Nation and Narration in Latin America

Critical Reflections

Toward the end of her subtle and finely written essay on Jose Marmol's
Amalia Doris Sommer considers its relationship to Jose Hernandez's Martin
Fierro as, in effect, that of one rival national epic to another.1 Whereas both
texts "coincide in projecting a national unity after devastating years of di-
vision, to choose one as the country's epic is like taking a particular parti-
san stand; it is to renew the debates about what kind of unity Argentina
should achieve" (112). In the former work, this unity is projected simulta-
neously across lines of gender (masculine/feminine) and regional spaces
(Buenos Aires/provinces). In the latter, the lines crossed are "class bound-
aries between rural men" (ibid.). For Amalia "mestizo and black workers"
constitute the excluded "other"; for Martin Fierro it is "women and citified
(feminized) men associated with foreigners" (ibid.). Neither, however, can
be judged as having the stronger claim to political or ethical superiority,
much less to truth: "If these 'epics' face one another like mirror images
gesturing from opposite directions toward a patriotic threshold, the reader
who calls one image reality and the other a reflection is, in fact, declaring
what side of the mirror he or she is on" (ibid.).
This particular literary assessment—taking the paradoxical form, here, of
a deferral of judgment—strikes me as questionable on a number of grounds,
especially in its strictly allegorical rendering of Hernandez's narrative. But

140
 NATION AND NARRATION IN LATIN AMERICA 14!

before discussing this, I want to take note of certain more general aspects
of the thinking that leads up to the transevaluative claim itself— thinking
that, though elaborated with singular verve and sophistication by Sommer
herself, is representative of a fairly broad tendency within Latin American
literary and cultural studies.
Two things concern me here. The first is the fundamentally negative
and somewhat ironical stance toward nationalism (in an ethico-political
sense) underlying Sommer's textual commentary. Choosing between the
"foundational fictions" of Marmol and Hernandez may be a matter of "po-
litical sympathies," but there is nothing here to imply that one should sym-
pathize with either. The nation—Argentina in this case—no longer inhab-
its the discourse of literary history and criticism as an intrinsic good or telos.
If it is intrinsically anything, it is closer to being an evil. One might ques-
tion whether Sommer's status as a nonnational is not the cause of this na-
tional negativity. But much the same attitude characterizes many contem-
porary Argentine critics as well, among them Josefma Ludmer and David
Vinas, upon whose work Sommer herself draws.
In the poignant, quasi-autobiographical preface to Foundational Fictions,
Sommer reflects on the meaning of this — shall we call it — "postnational"
consciousness with the observation that
differences in evaluating nationalism may have less to do with which
position is right or wrong than with the positionality one occupies: as an
aspirant to national identity, for example, or as a disenchanted national.
Critiques are made, it seems, from centers of uncontested nations, and
disaffection presupposes a romantic prehistory, (x)

Though complicated by a personal experience of immigration and quasi

marginality, Sommer's "positionality" is clearly that of "disenchanted na-
tional." I should hasten to add here that this disenchantment describes my
own "positionality" as well, but the "disaffection" with nationalism seems,
at least in my experience, to be too ubiquitous to be ascribed entirely to
one's personal location in the global system of social — and national — in-
equality. The belief that aspirations to national identity remain a vital and
positive force in the "third world," even as they have waned for the post-
modern metropole, has recently been subjected to withering critique by
Aijaz Ahmad, who sees in cultural nationalism the dangers of an "inverse
racism" and "indigenist obscurantism."2 And Roberto Schwarz has observed
how, for the dominant trend within current intellectual vanguardism in
Brazil, even the radical cultural nationalism of the Goulart years has effec-
tively lost its hegemonic pull: "Its illusory nature becomes evident, and it
 142 NATION AND NARRATION IN LATIN AMERICA

seems a provincial phenomenon associated with archaic forms of oppres-

sion."3 Thus I wonder whether the question of "right or wrong" — at least
with respect to nationalism as an emancipatory theory and practice — does
not, in the end, have more to do with it after all. In fact, I will risk a gener-
alization here and propose that the disaffection with nationalism of which
Sommer speaks, and that frames her readings of texts such as Amalia and
Martin Fierro, results, on an objective, historical plane, from (1) an under-
lying aversion to imperialist nationalism, stemming, among many progres-
sive North American intellectuals, from the period of the Vietnam War; and
(2) the general historical crisis of the national liberation movements of the
so-called Bandung era (circa 1955-75)—what Samir Amin has termed a
"failure of political and social consciousness" on the part of the radical
and cultural nationalisms of the peripheral social formations.4 Subjectively,
this latter crisis has perhaps been longer in taking effect, but Ahmad has
pinpointed the rapid descent of the Iranian revolution into clerical fas-
cism as perhaps the final blow to romantic, "third-world" cultural nation-
alism, particularly in the metropolis (In Theory, 34). And if the initial suc-
cesses of sandinismo for a while resuscitated such sentiments within the
sphere of Latin Americanism, by the time of the electoral defeat of the
FSLN in 1990 (after its own self-travestying descent into the role of Inter-
national Monetary Fund austerity enforcer) they had surely begun to breathe
their last.
I see this "postnational" consciousness, on the surface at least, as a posi-
tive trend and am certainly far from wishing to advocate some return to the
nationalist framework that had dominated modern literary theory from its
origins in romanticism. But the "disaffection" with nationalism, though it
clears the field of a whole array of pernicious habits of thought, is not nec-
essarily equivalent to a genuine transcendence of nationalism on its deeper
ideological levels. Nationalism, in fact, unless confronted and repudiated in
all its ideological ramifications, can find any number of indirect ways to re-
assert itself within the thinking that claims to have abjured it.
This leads me to observe the second peculiarity at work in Sornmer's
notion of "foundational fictions" as well as in the more general critical
practice of rethinking "nation" as "narration."5 There are, as I see it, two
theoretical paths leading from this insight. The first concerns the particu-
lar tendency for literature in "dependent" and neocolonial settings to ac-
quire a heightened political efficacy and centrality it typically lacks in the
metropolis. Such is the ironic result of the "underdevelopment" of the neo-
colonial state apparatus as well as of the relative absence of a structurally
 NATION AND NARRATION IN LATIN AMERICA 143

stable and variegated "civil society," factors that thrust literature — a cultural
process requiring little in the way of economic and technical infrastruc-
ture — directly into the political space reserved, in the metropolis, for cul-
tural organs such as newspapers, the electronic media, and the academy it-
self. By far the best-known articulation of this theory in recent years belongs
to Fredric Jameson, whose widely influential essay "Third World Literature
in the Era of Multinational Capitalism" reasoned that the public/private
split, so characteristic of modern imperialist society, must take on a radi-
cally different configuration on the periphery, where the "story of the pri-
vate individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of
the public third-world culture and society."6 "Narration" thus supplies to
"nation" a kind of "public sphere" within the national — or would-be na-
tional— subject itself. This is what Sommer refers to in Foundational Fic-
tions as the "inextricability of politics from fiction in the history of nation-
building" (5-6).
But consider this last phrase for a moment. It is, in fact, ambiguous,
and one may surmise that Sommer consciously intends the ambiguity: does
it mean that fiction is inextricable from politics — which is the sense con-
veyed by Jameson's theory of third-world literature as "national allegory" —
or does it mean the reverse, that politics is inextricable from fiction? The
second meaning, while it may initially appear to be a simple commutation
of the first (a = b, therefore b = a), leads us in an entirely different direc-
tion. It suggests, not just that the nation requires narrative articulation in
order for its ideological reproduction to take place, but that the nation is
itself a narrative construct, that the nation is, in the end, nothing but nar-
ration. The first theory, that is, addresses the problem of the nation as a
historically and socially objective entity that requires some form of subjec-
tive mediation. Narration is proposed as one, or even perhaps the, princi-
pal mediating link between nation and national subject. The second, how-
ever, repositions this problem as one internal to the subject, as a problem
of the subject for itself, and its constant search for some stable, "fixed"
form of identity.
Reading Foundational Fictions it is often difficult to determine which of
these two — and, I propose, logically incompatible — theories is being ad-
vanced. Depending on how one views things, that is either the book's par-
ticular stroke of brilliance or its most crippling defect. Since it tends to
frame its own discourse as that of a feminist revision of Latin American lit-
erary history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is usually the
first, shall we say, sociohistorical sense of "foundational fictions" that seems
 144 NATION AND NARRATION IN LATIN AMERICA

to be operative. But it is on the second, and in essence, Lacanian sense of

this term — in which the "foundational fiction" becomes a version of the
"symbolic" — that the reasoning seems eventually to come to rest. So, for
example, we have Sommer's assertion that "everyone not only 'has' a na-
tionality and gender in the same imagined way, but these imaginings con-
stitute us as modern subjects" (40). A more stark example of this ambigu-
ity can be found in John Beverley and Marc Zimmerman's Literature and
Politics in Central American Revolutions, in which the authors declare on
the very first page their adherence to the Laclau-Mouffe theory of society
as "not some essence that is prior to representation but rather the product
of struggles over meaning and representation."7 Subsequently, Beverley and
Zimmerman go on to make a highly cogent case for literature, especially
revolutionary poetry in Central America, as a "model for politics" in the
"sociohistorical" sense explicated above (see xiii and 8-9). But the funda-
mental inconsistency here — how can literature serve as a "model," that is,
as a representation, of anything if it in fact already constructs the object it
is supposed to be modeling? — seems not to occur to them.
We can further draw the distinction between these two opposing for-
mulations of the "nation-as-narration" theory here by observing that in
the first of them nationalism itself retains the characteristics of an ideology.
That is to say, it takes the form of a consciousness—though "false" and
"inverted" — o/an objective reality rooted in history and class relations.
When the subject thinks to itself, "I am Argentine," or, after reading Martin
Fierro, says to itself, "This is the true Argentina," the signifier "Argentina"
may, indeed, lack a stable signified, but something—a state, a market, a
territory, an ensemble of class relations — is reflected in this thought. A
subject, when it identifies itself in this way, thinks as it must think in order
for a historically given "social formation" to constitute and reproduce it-
self. If, as may in fact happen, this consciousness takes the form of a story,
of a "narration" — one, perhaps, it has learned from reading a "foundational
fiction" — then this, indeed, can be said to imply the existence of the "na-
tion" in narrative form, but the true object of consciousness in this case,
the nation as socially and historically given or determined, must neverthe-
less be distinguished from it. As ideology, nationalism may, via narration,
imagine a "nation" but only insofar as it already takes the form of a con-
sciousness, however distorted, of a given social and historical object.
By contrast, in the second formulation nationalism obeys the structural/
linguistic logic that stipulates identity as a product of difference, or, to in-
troduce the psychoanalytic dimension, a logic that stipulates the subject for
 NATION AND NARRATION IN LATIN AMERICA 145

itself as the product of that subject's own proclivity to imagine an "other"

that it excludes. Narration here becomes the process in which the subject,
on a strictly pre- or unconscious plane, produces the "misprision" whereby
its identity can be fixed within the constraints of a symbolic order. To think
or imagine myself as "Argentine," I must simultaneously invoke the non-
"Argentine," and if the "Argentine" is necessarily a good, this other, non-
Argentine" must be an evil. Nationalism is thus conceived according to
the model of a pathology, evidently psychological in its origins but yet too
broad a phenomenon to be termed abnormal. One might call it, in this
sense, a cultural pathology.
Nationalism, then, as ideology, or as cultural pathology? To argue that
it is the first is not to deny that nationalism as ideology may take patholog-
ical forms. A look across the "new world order" today certainly supports the
view that nationalism, after the "end of history," has taken on the features
of a collective psychosis. But we must, as we attempt to diagnose the dis-
ease, be clear about its source, for on this will depend the method of treat-
ment. If, in adherence to Freudian/Lacanian models, this source is thought
to lie in the unconscious process of subject formation, then any effort to
overcome nationalism will become therapeutic in nature — will take the
form, that is, of an intervention in which it is the subject qua itself that
must be transformed. Thinking along the lines of "foundational fictions,"
such a cultural "therapy" would perhaps be equivalent to the critical or in-
terpretive process itself, whereby the underlying "fiction" (the "founda-
tional" here being analogous to the unconscious) is brought to conscious-
ness and then rewritten so that new "subject positions" come into play.
For Amalia, then, or for Martin Fierro, we exchange the revolutionary po-
etry of Roque Dalton, or, perhaps even better, the testimonial narrative of
Rigoberta Menchu.
Here, of course, arises the problem of how—if the solution is to undream
the nationalist romance and then have some other dream in its place —
consciously to effect this substitution. Evidently this requires more than a
simple process of reading Dalton or Menchu even if we could, by some fe-
licitous maneuver, arrange for their mass dissemination. The evident para-
dox here suggests to me that the problem itself has been falsely posed from
the outset. Thinking nationalism as, primarily, a cultural pathology is, a
priori, to place it beyond the scope of a conscious, politically oriented form
of practice. At a certain point, anyone who brackets the nation(al) as a so-
cially and historically determined ensemble of objective relations, even if
for the initially methodological purpose of isolating the nation(al) in its
 146 NATION AND NARRATION IN LATIN AMERICA

subjective mediation, finds, to use Sommer's Through the Looking Glass

metaphor, that the brackets have turned into a double-sided mirror. What
this speaks to is the constant need to keep the subject in sight of its objec-
tive, social determinants. For this we need the theory of ideology in its clas-
sically Marxist conception, and without Althusserian (which is to say, La-
canian) admixtures.
But why, then, this tendency to pathologize, and at the same time to
culturalize, the nation(al)? To answer this fully we would have to explain
the even broader tendency within radically oriented criticism and theory
as a whole — its Latin Americanist current included — to route virtually
all political questions, since at least the late 1960s, through a category of
the subject derived, in essence, from Freudianism. We will have to defer
that task here. But, looking back to the historical crisis of cultural nation-
alism referred to earlier, I think we can at least speculate that in a world in
which the universalist and emancipatory claims of nationalism have largely
been discredited, but in which nationalist passions and conflicts neverthe-
less appear to be ascendant in virtually all quarters, one might well become
predisposed to a theory that explains the objective, secular appearance of
the irrational as simply an outgrowth of the genetic irrationalism of the
subject as "desiring machine." As I have recently suggested elsewhere, cur-
rent political reality is such that the thought of being able to redirect the
frightening energies of nationalism simply by retelling the national narra-
tives themselves becomes a comforting one.8 In his superb essay "Nation-
alism by Elimination," Roberto Schwarz has noted as well how, simply by
declaring nationalism and the nation(al) to be anachronisms outmoded
by the new global culture of postmodernism, it becomes possible to con-
vince oneself that the predicaments of cultural imperialism and neocolonial
"imitation" have simply ceased to matter. But the problem, writes Schwarz,
is that
the inevitability of cultural imitation is bound up with a specific set of
historical imperatives over which abstract philosophical critiques can
exercise no power. Even here nationalism is the weak part of the argument,
and its supersession at the level of philosophy has no purchase on the realities
to which it owes its strength. (Misplaced Ideas, 7; my emphasis)
But to return now to the more narrowly literary problem from which
we initially set forth: must we, as Sommer asserts, treat Martin Fierro as
simply another "foundational fiction," perhaps unlike the earlier liberal-
elitist Amalia with respect to its specific "rules of recognition" and "dis-
criminatory identities" but no less the product of a pathological—that is,
 NATION AND NARRATION IN LATIN AMERICA 147

pre- or unconscious — fixation on "nation-building"?9 The plausibility of

this assertion — and T would concede that it is initially quite plausible —
rests, it seems to me, on a prior decision to read both texts as allegorical,
and so it is on the question of allegory that I wish to focus for a moment.
Sommer provides her own working definition of allegory as "a narrative
structure in which one line is a trace of the other, in which each helps to
write the other" (42). In the Latin American "foundational fictions," the
"lines" are, of course, "love and country," Eros and Polis, so that allegory
takes on the additional characteristics of a love story that is really about
politics, or, in Sommer's terms, a "romance." Taking up both Benjamin's
theory of allegory in the Trauerspiele and de Man's in "The Rhetoric of
Temporality," however, Sommer adopts what might seem a curiously favor-
able view of allegory as the foil to the romantic aesthetic (and epistemology)
of the symbol, that category of pure presence and immediacy into which
history (for Benjamin) and "writing" as the constant deferral of meaning
(for de Man) are both made to disappear: "In Benjamin's essay (as in de
Man's), allegory is the trajectory of a philosophically felicitous failure, the
recurrent waking from an endless dream of absolute presence" (45).
Sommer is quick to concede that the "foundational fictions" she reads
are allegorical in the philosophically less "rigorous" sense that they fail "ei-
ther [to] keep levels of meaning discrete or show how that was impossi-
ble." They are "those fictions that try to pass for truth and to become the
ground for political association" (ibid.). The important point for us here,
however, is that in either case the unique possibility for literature to con-
vey truth rests with allegory. Either the allegory is philosophically "rigor-
ous," in which case we "wake" from the romantic dream of the symbol, or
it is "sloppy," and we simply opt to go on dreaming. Allegory, that is, denotes
here, in a literary context, the epistemology stemming from a pathological
view of the subject and of consciousness. Just as, from the standpoint of
pathology, no possibility of truth exists in the relationship of subject to
object, due to the "misprision" or transcendental falsehood lying at the
root of subjectivity itself, so in allegory objective truth cannot be captured,
even approximately, in representation or narrative. The truth reflected in
the "surface" narrative or "line" is not a truth outside but, as it were, be-
neath it, on a deeper narrative level. Like the dream in its Freudian inter-
pretation, allegory has already been "meant" unconsciously by the subject
in the latent content of its own desire. The subject is always already the
truth of its own (allegorical) dream. Sommer adds a Lacanian and post-
structuralist twist to allegory here by stipulating the inescapable gap or lack
 148 NATION AND NARRATION IN LATIN AMERICA

of fit between the two levels, but this does nothing to alter the fact that nar-
rative, by being reduced to its allegorical dimension, must cease to be read
as true (or false) with respect to an object external to the narrative process
itself.
To read a text such as Amalia as allegory in this sense has at least the ad-
vantage of verisimilitude because the allegorical features of Marmol's novel
are practically the only ones that make it seem at all interesting for reading
or interpretation. Remove the anti-Rosas morality play and there is really
not much left beyond the lifeless characters and soap opera formulas of
the "romance." But Martin Fierro, notwithstanding the traditional practice
in Argentina of spinning nationalist allegories around the figure of its hero,
is a work that presents the allegorizing reader or critic with more definite
obstacles. For the sake of brevity here let us take as an example canto 6 of
part 1 of the poem.10 In it Martin Fierro tells of his desertion from the
frontier garrison to which he had been taken after his earlier press-gang-
ing. He returns to his old farmstead only to find it abandoned and in ru-
ins. A neighbor informs him that the land and cattle have been taken over
by the big landowners "pa pagar arrendamientos" (to pay the back rent)
(147, line 1,036) and that his two young sons have had to hire themselves
out as laborers. His wife, it appears, has gone away with another man:
jY la pobre mi mujer
Dios sabe cuanto sufrio!
Me dicen que se void
con no se que gavilan:
sin duda a buscar el pan
que no podia darle yo.
No es raro que a uno le falte
lo que a algun otro le sobre:
si no le quedo un cobre,
sino de hijos un enjambre,
,>que mas iba a hacer la pobre
para no morirse de hambre?
[Tal vez no te vuelva a ver,
prenda de mi corazon!
Dios te de su proteccion,
ya que no me la dio a mi.

[And my poor woman / God knows how much she suffered! / They tell me
that she flew off with who knows what bird of prey: / probably to find the
bread / that I couldn't give her.
 NATION AND NARRATION IN LATIN AMERICA 149

It's only to be expected that what one lacks / the other has more than
enough of: / if she hadn't a penny to her name / but only a swarm of kids /
what else was the poor woman to do / to keep from dying of hunger?
Perhaps I won't ever see you again / my heart's precious jewel! / God grant
you his protection / since he never granted it to me.] (148, lines 1,051-66;
my translation)

The protagonist goes on to proclaim his bitterly won consciousness of the

world ("ya conozco el mundo" [now I know what the world is]) and vows
to take up the life of a social outlaw ("sere gaucho matrero" [I'll be a rebel
gaucho]), and there then follows his duel with the "gaucho negro," perse-
cution by the authorities, the sudden conversion of Cruz from police deputy
to Fierro's fellow outcast, and the decision of the two to leave "civilization"
behind and live among the same Indians Fierro had earlier fought as a
solider, since "hasta los indios no alcanza / la faculta del gobierno" (the
long arm of the law doesn't reach as far as the Indians) (186; canto 13, part
1, lines 2,189-90). Fierro's spouse disappears from the text, nor do we meet
with her again in the narrative. Gender relations are not, as Sommer duly
notes, a prominent theme in Martin Fierro — although the openly misogy-
nous Cruz partly attributes his rebellion to bitterness over a romantic mis-
adventure. But the quoted lines are sufficient, it seems to me, to compli-
cate any attempt to project an allegorical meaning, much less the contours
of a "romance," onto Martin Fierro. If, indeed, "love and country," Eros
and Polis, do disclose an underlying articulation here, its logic is antitheti-
cal to that of allegory. For here we see the erotic not as a surrogate for the
political but as a determination of the political itself, as a practice that can-
not— as this extreme situation reveals — escape the reality of unequal so-
cial power. Here we see Eros becoming Polis, making apparent, in the pro-
cess, the latter's condition of alienation and negativity. The fact that the
protagonist expresses this effective attenuation of the erotic as a conse-
quence of brute economic necessity—"ique mas iba a hacer la pobre?" —
does not in any way minimize the political factor here, nor does it prevent
Martin Fierro from being, after its own negative fashion, a kind of unro-
mantic "love story." There is certainly a greater insight into the complex
nature of dependent, agro-capitalist marital relations in these few stanzas
than anything found in Amalia. Here, in fact, the male protagonist's desire
for his female consort does not project a dream of national unity onto the
marital bond but — in a complete inversion — shows the marital bond itself
to be a casualty of the nation in its existing political and social configuration.
 150 NATION AND NARRATION IN LATIN AMERICA

It may be useful at this point to recall Lukacs's discussion of allegory,

via his own "against-the-grain" reading of the Trauerspiele, in "The Ideol-
ogy of Modernism." "Allegory," he writes, "is a problematic genre because
it rejects that assumption of an immanent meaning to human existence
which — however unconscious, however combined with religious concepts
of transcendence — is the basis of traditional art."11 Against this "imma-
nent meaning," allegory—under which heading Lukacs reads (or reads Ben-
jamin as reading) not only the German baroque drama but modernism it-
self— concedes the possibility of meaning only in transcendence, implying
the "transferable and arbitrary" nature of phenomena themselves (43). For
Lukacs, that is, the relevant opposition is not, as for Benjamin and de Man,
that of allegory and symbol but of allegory and the realist poetics of the
"type," of "abstract particularity" and "concrete typicality."
This is not the occasion to mount a formal and systematic defense of
Martin Fierro as a realist work of art. But episodes such as that in canto 6
are, I think, indicative of the genuine, though primitive, typicality of its
protagonist in the Lukacsian sense. Hernandez arguably achieves true epi-
cality, though this quality of the narrative can be easily missed amidst all
the campy paraphernalia of the gauchesque. In any case, the protagonist of
Martin Fierro, understood in the context of his narrative development
within the poem itself, seems to me quite the antithesis of an allegorical
hero. Sommer is, of course, quite right to note the canonization of Martin
Fierro, beginning with Lugones, as just such a (national) allegory. But the
point is that one cannot sustain such an allegorical interpretation without
violating, and falsifying, the work's intrinsic unity as a narrative. Its char-
acters and episodes may be stark, almost iconic; but a careful reading of
these narrative elements in their interlocking totality reveals them to be
anything but "transferable" or "abstract particulars" (43). The severe econ-
omy of the narrative in no way impairs its "assumption of an immanent
meaning to human existence." One must guard against the error of con-
fusing the epic starkness and condensed format of Hernandez's narrative
with the drab abstraction of allegory.
To reject the allegorical interpretation of Martin Fierro is not to deny its
profoundly nationalistic character. But its nationalism can, I think, only
be grasped as integral with the epic, nonallegorical character of the narra-
tive itself, if we conceive it along the lines of ideology—that is, as a socio-
historically derived limit to consciousness obtaining in the conscious relation
of subject to historical-material object. More concretely, I would suggest
that the nationalism of Martin Fierro—taking, as Sommer observes, the
 NATION AND NARRATION IN LATIN AMERICA 151

form of a marked xenophobia and anticosmopolitanism — enters into the

narrator's consciousness at precisely that point at which its popular and
plebeian politics fails to make the transition to a class politics. One might go
even further and speculate that the emergent labor movement in Argentina
is very crudely anticipated in Hernandez's story but unconsciously and, in
this sense, falsely. Hernandez discloses all the lineaments of proletarianiza-
tion in Martin Fierro but evidently lacks its concept. But let us be clear
here that despite such a relapse into the populist xenophobia that later na-
tionalist ideologues found so readily exploitable, Hernandez is far and
away an advance over Marmol, not to mention Sarmiento. The critique of
liberal-elitist power expressed in Martin Fierro is devastating and, within
its ideological limits, unfailingly precise. As Fierro expresses it, "el gaucho
en esta tierra / solo sirve pa votar" (in this land the gaucho / is only good
for casting a vote) (159, canto 8, part 1, lines 1,371-72). And Cruz, as he
describes, toward the end of part 1, the emergent national bourgeoisie's
"proyetos de colonias y carriles / y a tirar plata a miles / en los gringos en-
ganchaos" (schemes for settlements and railroads / and for making a bun-
dle / in cahoots with the gringos) (183, canto 12, lines 2,113-16), is even
more astute in his swipe at liberal reformers:
De los males que sufrimos
hablan mucho los puebleros;
pero hacen como los teros
para esconder sus niditos:
en un lao ponen los gritos
y en otro tienen los giievos.
Y se hacen los que no aciertan
a dar con la coyontura:
mientras al gaucho lo apura
con rigor la autorida,
ellos a la enfermeda
le estan errando la cura.

[About the wrongs we suffer / the city folk are always talking; / but they act
like those partridges / that to hide their nests / do their squawking over here /
while they keep their eggs over there.
And they pretend that they / don't get what's really going on: / while the
gaucho gets hassled / by the law without letup / they're trying to treat the
disease / with the wrong medicine.] (184, canto 12, lines 2,131-42; my
translation)

Again, such sentiments are linked to a gauchesque strain of "romantic anti-

capitalism" that turns, in part 2 of the poem, into an accommodation to
 152 NATION AND NARRATION IN LATIN AMERICA

these very same "proyetos de colonias y carriles." The portrait of rural,

proletarian life that emerges within these constraints, however, is an im-
mense step forward from the writings of someone like Sarmiento, who, it
may be recalled, insisted in Facundo that "el gaucho no trabaja" (the gaucho
doesn't work).12 There is little else quite like Martin Fierro in all of nine-
teenth-century Latin American literature, and it anticipates much of the
best social realism of the succeeding period.
But my final point is this: thinking nationalism along the lines of cul-
tural pathology, rather than ideology, forces us to overlook this dimension
of the narrative, blinding us to the objective makeup of the work itself, to
its intrinsic narrative possibilities. It is, in the last analysis, to take the na-
tion(al) out of history altogether and to locate it within an unconscious
territory of subject formation that Freud — as even Althusser was candid
enough to remind us — openly proclaimed as "eternal."13

1993
 PART VI

Postmodernity
This page intentionally left blank
 CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Latin America and Postmodernism

A Brief Theoretical Inquiry

Can one speak, today, of a Latin American postmodernism? Such a ques-

tion is immediately complicated by two others. The first concerns the spe-
cific cultural objectivity of postmodernism per se. For despite the rapid
proliferation of the term in recent intellectual and cultural discourse, and
what has come to seem its uncontroversial application to particular areas
of culture and the arts (such as architecture), there remain suspicions that
the postmodern "turn" is rather a case of willful overinterpretation of su-
perficial trends within fashion than any objective shift in artistic and liter-
ary method and structure on the order of the modernist "revolution" it-
self. The second question concerns Latin American modernism. That it is
proper to speak of such an entity, few will deny, but what does it comprise,
and in what ways has Latin American modernism (which is not to say mod-
ernismo) diverged from modernist orthodoxy? The various critical projects
that have sought to resolve the issue may have advanced the discussion,
but one cannot rightly speak of a general consensus here.1 In view of this,
the very question of a Latin American postmodernism may seem absurdly
premature and out of place — if not simply the sign of a naively colonizing
literary historicism that assumes that culture, like high technology, flows
in one direction only.

155
 156 LATIN AMERICA AND POSTMODERNISM

While acknowledging the growing sense of doubt and cynicism that is

often the effect of pondering such matters, one must grant that the prob-
lem itself is not simply artificial — that it does, in fact, point to superstruc-
tural changes that are real, even if their political truth and material basis are
often totally obscured in the course of "postmodern" theorizing. To begin
with the question of postmodernism as such: whether or not one accepts
the theory of a Lyotard, a Jameson, or a Habermas as finally superior, one
may rely on one's own experience as a cultural and intellectual consumer
to verify that the fundamental pledge of the modernist avant-garde to "rev-
olutionize" the mechanisms of bourgeois culture, to "make it new," and so
on, has utterly exhausted its credit. Modernism has defaulted. In the end,
it has become just another high-priced commodity, a fixture of the official
culture. I would suggest that as readers and consumers of culture we all
know this to be true, however much we may still find it useful to deny this
disillusionment as critics and theorists. If nothing else, then, postmodernism
may be characterized as the general mood that has settled over the market
for cultural goods — a mood of extreme cynicism and exhaustion, albeit
perhaps tinged with Utopian stirrings.
Rendered in more abstract and philosophical terms, this sense of "in-
credulity" (thinking here of Lyotard's description of the postmodern "con-
dition" as "incredulity towards metanarratives") bespeaks, I think, the col-
lapse of an intellectual and artistic culture built on the idea of an aesthetic
agency.2 According to modernism, works of art and literature exert, through
their very aesthetic being, a radical force against the objective social and his-
torical order. This order they no longer seek to represent, or even to criticize
through representational strategies, but rather to negate. In its more conser-
vative versions, this becomes an "art for art's sake" aestheticism, in which
agency is deployed within the realm of a particular formal or technical me-
dium: language, image, or sound. At what is apparently the other extreme —
that of the early-twentieth-century vanguards — the work of art directs it-
self against the bourgeois art institution itself, which it seeks to abolish
with the objective of "reintegrating art and life."3 But if one adds to these
formulas the implicit belief that it is consciousness, or one's prior mode of
perceiving the real, that must first be altered if worldly transformations are
to become possible, then it is easy to see how even the most monastic of
aestheticisms (for example, Mallarme's) can seem to hold forth a revolu-
tionary promise. For what is the poetry of Mallarme, one inevitably hears,
but the cunning descent into the workings of language and meaning—into
the very fount of conscious being? By delving into the preconscious elements
 LATIN AMERICA AND POSTMODERNISM 157

of subject formation, albeit in subtle and highly mediated fashion, the mod-
ernist work of art positions itself for radical intervention in the extraaes-
thetic realm.
Or so it was once seriously believed. Without ceasing to profess an in-
tellectual faith in aesthetic agency as expressed in a myriad of vocabularies,
however, the dominant artistic and intellectual culture nevertheless does
so under an increasing burden of bad faith. Indeed, it does so with the en-
croaching sense that this is nothing but an article of faith associated with
an official and reified rite of culture worship. The complex historical devel-
opments that, already in the nineteenth century, produce an aesthetic ide-
ology of the "work" as agent of revolutionary change, have not, perhaps,
quit the stage quite yet. But the manifest disappointments left in the wake
of modernism — the unavoidable sense that, in Habermas's words, "an
emancipatory effect does not follow"4 — suggest that revolutionary agency,
itself borrowed from the political in the aftermath of its disappointments,
may have to seek new lodging and that aesthetic practice will find itself in-
creasingly casting about for new "metanarratives" within which to deploy
itself.
Concerning any new aesthetic likely to emerge out of the crisis of aes-
thetic agency, I think we know and can say relatively little that is definitive.
"Postmodernism" names, in my view, a rather clouded and ambiguous set
of cultural tendencies in which the still residually hegemonic modernist
paradigm remains the most visible. For some, of course, this state of "in-
determinacy" and de facto "pluralism" is celebrated as the proper antidote
to modernism. Against this, I propose, one must attempt a dialectical survey
of what appear to be randomized outcomes based on the general under-
standing of crisis as the contradictory unity of both danger and opportu-
nity, as both the potential opening onto new, genuinely progressive devel-
opments and the simultaneous likelihood that the collapse of the modernist
Utopia will only mean the intensification of its decadent and apologetic as-
pects. Among these potentially progressive directions I would include above
all the reencounter with an aesthetics of representation professing socially
realistic ends — or what is, at least, an implicit lifting of the high-modernist
ban that had long been placed on this kind of "nineteenth-century" art and
literature. One may describe this more broadly as the shift from an aesthetics
of predominantly formal orientation, concerned above all with innovative
manipulations of the signifier, toward an aesthetics of content that seeks, ini-
tially only with the formal means at hand, to reflect artistically new or mar-
ginalized spheres of social and historical reality. Much of contemporary
 158 LATIN AMERICA AND POSTMODERNISM

extracanonical (for example, "ethnic" and women's) art and literature

seems to aim, if only semiconsciously, in this direction, notwithstanding
the natural circumstance that this orientation toward new contents finds
itself initially tangled up in naturalism and impressionism. The opposing
tendency to simply pour out late-capitalist apologetics in the name of an aes-
thetics of simulation or neoexistentialist communion—something Fredric
Jameson has characterized as "pastiche" — is presently the more visible and,
for obvious reasons, the more favored by monopoly-capitalist culture in-
dustries.5 At its worst — for example, Denis Johnson's 1986 novel The Stars
at Noon—this postmodernism shows a clear affinity for fascism.6 More typi-
cally, however, these two contradictory impulses are repeated within the
postmodernist work itself as incessantly forking paths along which the
work is again and again obliged to move.
The present state of apparent ambiguity and diffusion—of the constantly
repeated encounter in a multiplicity of contexts with postmodernism's fork-
ing path — reflects and mediates the present character of economic and
political class struggles both in the metropolitan West and generally through-
out the global capitalist system. Society too, speaking very generally, is pre-
sented with a forking path, one route leading in the general direction of
social classlessness (that is, an authentic, socially egalitarian communism)
and the other to the ever more profound social decay and irrationality that
the maintenance of monopoly and state capitalism entails. However, the
long-term and definitive decline of the old revolutionary movement, both
as a political and a cultural force, and the slowness of any new, potentially
globalizing movement to assume its place and rectify its errors, have had
the powerful effect of clouding, dispersing, and even displacing the princi-
pal contradiction (that of capital and labor on a world scale) such that it
exerts the omnipresent but amorphous pressure of something like Jameson's
"political unconscious." The culture of modernism could—and did — flour-
ish under these conditions, but only for as long as the category of aesthetic
agency—of artwork as revolutionary act — could maintain its ideological
grip over a decisive sector of the cultural intelligentsia, only for as long as
the Utopian energies generated by the appearance of this category could
keep up a head of steam. After the failure of aesthetic agency and the "rev-
olution" promised by the modernist avant-garde, however, no new postaes-
thetic agency appears ready to gather up the entropic flows. Or not yet, at
any rate.
How, then, would this (one hopes) dialectical and materialist outline of
the general "postmodern condition" apply particularly to cultural reality
 LATIN AMERICA AND POSTMODERNISM 159

in Latin America? Rather than attempt to answer this question directly on

a plane of theoretical reasoning, I want to approach it by means of a criti-
cal commentary on the prominently displayed theoretical and interpretive
positions taken by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria in his work The Voice of
the Masters.7
In the preamble to this work, Gonzalez Echevarria lays out the general
theoretical proposition concerning Latin American postmodernism that
he will repeat and enrich at successive points throughout the work's vari-
ous essays. This is that, beginning with Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos (1953),
if not earlier in the writings of Borges, Latin American literature begins to
undermine the Nature trope that founds, up until that time, all ideologies
of cultural and national identity in Latin America. This process Gonzalez
Echevarria likens to deconstruction, which, according to The Voice of the
Masters, "endeavours to demonstrate the constant presence of mystifica-
tion and delusion" (4). Gonzalez Echevarria admits that there exists a pos-
sible "blindspot" in the reasoning here, inasmuch as it "invents a super-
critical consciousness that winds up the mechanism and leaves it ticking"
(ibid.). But this only shows that, in the end, the critical and the literary op-
erations are one and the same — coded versions of each other. In fact, he
writes, "the main trope in postmodern Latin American literature is the same
supercritical consciousness mentioned with regard to deconstructive criti-
cism. The most advanced work in that direction, initiated probably by
Borges, is Sarduy's narratives" (ibid.).
In essence, then, The Voice of the Masters claims for what it denotes as a
Latin American postmodernism both a capacity and a will to deconstruct
or "dismantle" (Gonzalez Echevarria's modest euphemism for the former)
the ideology of bourgeois cultural nationalism in Latin America. Gonzalez
Echevarria's readings of Rodo's Ariel and Gallegos's Dona Barbara as them-
selves the sites of a certain "mythology of writing" in which the same "dis-
mantling" takes place on an apparently unconscious level, suggest in turn
that the contribution of the postmodernists Borges, Carpentier, and Sar-
duy—as well as the Garcia Marquez of El otono del patriarca and the Roa
Bastos of Yo, el Supremo—is that of rendering conscious and instrumental
an anti-ideological, antifoundational agency that The Voice of the Masters
refers to as the "Super Negator."
It is important to observe here, before proceeding to assess The Voice of
the Masters's specific theoretical proposal in terms of our foregoing analy-
sis, that its point of departure corresponds to an entirely valid perception.
This is that the principle of aesthetic agency in Latin American modernism
 160 LATIN AMERICA AND POSTMODERNISM

is always sublated within the more pressing, overdetermining drive to over-

come the effects of colonization and dependency and to "found" an au-
thoritative discourse of cultural-national identity. The idea here, although
The Voice of the Masters does not put it in these terms, is that the aesthetic
agency of the work—for example, its potential for "negation" — is dis-
placed by the need to forge out of a heterogeneous history and culture an
autonomous Latin American subject. Negation must defer to an affirmative
mediation.
Having at the outset succeeded in identifying the differentia specifica of
modernist culture in Latin America, however, The Voice of the Masters sets
off in the wrong direction. For it will not be difficult to recognize in the
theory of a "Super Negator," disclosed within the progressive coming-to-
consciousness of literary self-reference, what essentially remain the terms
of a classically metropolitan modernism. Gonzalez Echevarria denotes as
"postmodern" what would (if it were indeed the case) amount only to the
(re)enthronement of the category of aesthetic agency, formulated her in the
guise of a "dismantling" negation. Like a good Yale deconstructionist, Gon-
zalez Echevarria rewrites the postmodern crisis of agency as itself the prod-
uct of some ultimate and self-referential meta-agency. What produces the
breakdown of the modernist work is merely the sublime act whereby agency
"draws itself into question," but only so as to be hypostatically reaffirmed.
Gonzalez Echevarria argues in directly political terms that this reflects
the need for an anarcho-liberal stance of opposition to "authoritarianism,"
whether "right or left." Power is reduced to "rhetoric," and the task of con-
testing and taking power to the purely derivative activity of "dismantling."
The Voice of the Masters expresses a grudging admiration for the assassins
of Anastasio Somoza insofar as their act bespoke a symbolic excess and
"went beyond political pragmatism" (5). But the recent history of concrete
and "pragmatic" class struggles against imperialism in Latin America is
implicitly dismissed. One is given to understand that such endeavors still
fall within the scope of an "ideology" governed by the tropes of Nature
and Authority. In the end, the sterility of this thinking requires, I think, no
comment.
Against this, I would argue that the crisis in a foundational or cultural-
nationalist modernism, which Gonzalez Echevarria is probably right to in-
fer from the writings of Borges et al., reflects the general and underlying
crisis of nationalism and populism in Latin America. This crisis results in
a contradictory tendency, characterized on the one hand by a metafounda-
 LATIN AMERICA AND POSTMODERNISM l6l

tionalism of purely ironic and formal effect — a tendency that The Voice of
the Masters inflates into a deconstructionist/postmodernist canon. The same
crisis, however, produces an opposing tendency to search for new sub- or
transnational, postpopulist subjective contents that have been heretofore
excluded from modernist representationalities. The former tendency is clear-
est in Borges as well as in texts like El otono del patriarca, the latter proba-
bly in contemporary testimonial narratives. But here too, the "forking path"
is greatly dispersed throughout the texts themselves in familiar postmod-
ern fashion. The dialectic of form and content enters, so to speak, upon a
period of chronic negativity and displacement, itself determined by the sim-
ilarly unresolved and generally uncertain trajectory of the class struggle in
Latin America.
The contrast between a dialectical-materialist approach to the question
of a Latin American postmodernism and The Voice of the Masters's "decon-
structionist," Yale school modernism is particularly exposed in Gonzalez
Echevarria's own reading of the testimonial, specifically Miguel Barnet's
Biografia de un cimarron. Although Gonzalez Echevarria is not blind to the
cultural and political forces that underlie a work such as the Cimarron, he
concludes by finding in Barnet's text what is, despite its will to mimesis,
merely the formal drama of textuality. The testimonial's struggle to "bypass
literature" is ultimately "inconclusive" (114). "It is an illusion that those
dreams [of union with the oppressed "other"] are realized, an illusion that
the text's own dialectics dissolves" (120). "Montejos's memory is a text too"
(122). Finally, Gonzalez Echevarria declares that the testimonial "has shown
that... radical change in literature is not compatible with visible changes
in other domains, that, when pressed by sociopolitical phenomena, litera-
ture tends to seek refuge in its own foundations, rather than simply give
way to self-denying innovations" (ibid.).
It would be hard to imagine a more unbending reaffirmation of a basi-
cally conservative modernism, a more stubborn refusal to observe what
modernism once prided as its own specific domain — namely, the contra-
dictory emergence of the new out of the old. The Voice of the Masters ob-
serves in the testimonial what is, to be sure, one of its contradictory aspects:
its recourse to a naive, fundamentally naturalist mimeticism. But it falsely
contrasts this aspect to a sort of Eternal Return of Literature and utterly
fails to see the opposing and perhaps primary tendency here in the testi-
monial's incorporation of new social and historical contents. To conclude,
on the basis of this engulfing blind spot, that "radical change in literature
 162 LATIN AMERICA AND POSTMODERNISM

is not compatible with visible changes in other domains" requires an almost

Ptolemaic high-modernist recalcitrance. Against this, one may, 1 propose,
read in testimonials like the Cimarron a direction within postmodernity
that, although seriously hampered by its formal inadequacies, points to the
development of a new social and epic realism, cleared of the rubble of the
bourgeois master narratives of nationalism, populism, and masculinism.
This is not to say, of course, that the new testimonial literature cannot
be subject to articulation within a neopopulist ideological framework. The
process of capturing new, as it were, postmodern social contents within a
discursive net cast by "progressive" nationalism may be detected as already
under way in, for example, Fernandez Retamar's Caliban and in some of
his other writings.8 Here, the most tangible aspect of the testimonial sub-
ject— his or her "alterity," particularly vis-a-vis a "Euro-North American"
mode of privileged subjecthood — becomes a new locus of national or re-
gional autonomy and identity. And, clearly, a certain degree of this pop-
ulist hegemonizing of alterity provides the subtext for the Cimarron.
But it would be a mistake to reduce the progressive postmodernity of
the testimonial to simply a maneuver deployed by a discourse of national-
ist elites — however enlightened and reform-minded. Where the Cimarron
may be liable to suffer this fate, testimonials like Rigoberta Menchu's or
Roque Dalton's Miguel Mdrmol (to my mind, the most brilliant achievement
of this literary trend) would appear well equipped to resist it. The danger,
after all, does not lie simply in the reversion of alterity back into a meta-
physical idiom of sameness and totality—something exemplified in En-
rique Dussel's Philosophy of Liberation, for example. What must be resisted,
rather, is the dilution of the contemporary testimonial's specifically class-
critical content with respect to the established politics of national libera-
tion. The testimonial can, if one likes, be grasped as a tactic embedded
within a larger strategy aimed at establishing a new and revolutionary class
(as opposed to simply a "popular" or "national") politics in Latin Amer-
ica. The objective is not simply "alterity" but an alternative to the orthodox
politics of alliance with "progressive" bourgeois elements, alliances founded
on one or another version of nationalism. But, like any tactic, this particu-
lar one of directly encountering and disclosing the life-worlds of hereto-
fore silenced and marginalized social subjects (those who do not speak but
are merely spoken for under populist schemes of national liberation) can
be made to serve different ends. The testimonial "tactic" can even, so to
speak, become falsely elevated into an end in itself. The evident propensity
 LATIN AMERICA AND POSTMODERNISM 163

of some "left" poststructuralist criticism to impute to Latin American tes-

timonial writing a non-Western, antirationalist, and even deconstructive
character fully partakes of this latter distortion.9
Against this — and here I conclude — one can discern in testimonial "post-
modernism" a specific phase within an equally specific dialectical process —
a species of node or "fork" at, or from, which a passage from mere tactic
into strategy becomes discernible. But along which path?

1988
 CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Postmodernism and Imperialism

Theory and Politics in Latin America

My remarks here concern the following topics of critical discussion and

debate: (1) the ideological character of postmodernism both as a philo-
sophical standpoint and as a set of political objectives and strategies, (2)
the development within a broadly postmodernist theoretical framework of
a trend advocating a critique of certain postmodern tenets from the stand-
point of anti-imperialism, and (3) the influence of this trend on both the
theory and the practice of oppositional culture in Latin America. So as to
eliminate the need for second-guessing my own perspective in what fol-
lows, let me state clearly at the outset that I will adhere to what I under-
stand to be both a Marxist and a Leninist position as concerns epistemology
and the social and historical primacy of class contradiction. Philosophi-
cally, then, I will be advancing and defending historical and dialectical ma-
terialist arguments. Regarding questions of culture and aesthetics, as well
as those of revolutionary strategy under existing conditions—areas in which
Marxist and Leninist theory have either remained relatively speculative or
have found it necessary to rethink older positions — my own thinking may
or may not merit the attribution of "orthodoxy," depending on how that
term is currently understood.

164
 POSTMODERNISM AND IMPERIALISM 165

One typically appeals to the term "postmodern" in order to characterize a

broad and ever widening range of aesthetic and cultural practices and arti-
facts. But the concept itself, however diffuse and contested, has also come
to designate a very definite current of philosophy as well as a theoretical
approach to politics. Postmodern philosophy—or simply postmodern "the-
ory," if we are to accept Jameson's somewhat disingenuous observation that
it "marks the end of philosophy"1 — arguably includes the now standard
work of poststructuralist thinkers such as Derrida and Foucault as well as
the more recent work of ex-post-Althusserian theorists such as Ernesto La-
clau and Chantal Mouffe, academic philosophical converts such as Richard
Rorty, and the perennial vanguardist Stanley Aronowitz. The latter elabo-
rate and rearticulate an increasingly withered poststructuralism, redeploy-
ing the grandly dogmatic and quasi-mystical "critique of the metaphysics
of presence" as a critical refusal of the "foundationalism" and "essential-
ism" of the philosophy of the Enlightenment. These two assignations —
which now come to replace the baleful Derridean charge of "metaphysics" —
refer, respectively, to the Enlightenment practice of seeking to ground all
claims regarding either truth or value in terms of a self-evidencing stan-
dard of Reason and to the ontological fixation on being as essence rather
than as relationality or "difference."
Postmodern philosophy for the most part adopts its "antiessentialism"
directly from Derrida and company, adding little if anything to accepted (or
attenuated) poststructuralist doctrine. Where postmodernism contributes
more significantly to the honing down and retooling of poststructuralism
is, I propose, in its indictment of foundationalism — in place of the vaguer
abstractions of "presence" or "identity" — as the adversarial doctrine. It is
not all "Western" modes of thought and being that must now be discarded
but more precisely their Enlightenment or modern modalities, founded on
the concept of reason. Indeed, even the charge of "foundationalism" per-
haps functions as a minor subterfuge here. What postmodern philosophy
intends is, to cite Aronowitz's forthright observation, a "rejection of rea-
son as a foundation for human affairs."2 Postmodernism might thus be
considered a form — albeit an unconventional one — of irrationalism.
To be sure, important caveats can be raised here. Postmodernist theoreti-
cians often carefully stipulate that a rejection of reason as foundation does
not imply or require a rejection of all narrowly "reasonable" procedures.
 166 POSTMODERNISM AND IMPERIALISM

Perhaps it is possible to act "reasonably" without the need to prove that

that is what one is doing. Postmodernity, at any rate, is not to be equated
with an antimodernity. Aronowitz, for example, has written that "postmod-
ern movements" (for example, ecology and "Solidarity"-type labor groups)
"borrow freely the terms and programs of modernity but place them in
new discursive contexts" (61). Chantal Mouffe insists that "radical democ-
racy"— according to her, the political and social project of postmoder-
nity—aims to "defend the political project [of Enlightenment] while aban-
doning the notion that it must be based on a specific form of rationality."3
Ernesto Laclau makes an even nicer distinction by suggesting that "it is
precisely the ontological status of the central categories of the discourses of
modernity and not their content, that is at stake— Postmodernity does
not imply a change in the values of Enlightenment modernity but rather a
particular weakening of their absolutist character."4 And a similarly conser-
vative gesture within the grander irrationalist impulse can, of course, be
followed in Lyotard's characterization of "paralogy" as those practices le-
gitimating themselves exclusively within their own "small narrative" con-
texts rather than within the macroframes of modernist metanarratives of
Reason, Progress, History, and so on.5
Two counterobjections are necessary here, however. The first is that any
thoughtful consideration of claims to locate the attributes of reason within
supposedly local or nontotalizable contexts immediately begs the question
of what, then, acts to set the limits to any particular instance of "paralogy"
and the like. How does the mere adding of the predicate "local" or "spe-
cific" or "weakened" serve to dispense with the logic of an external ground
or foundation? Cannot, for example, the ecology movement be shown to
be grounded in a social and political context outside of and broader than it
is, whatever the movement may think of itself? If reason is present (or ab-
sent) in the fragment, does not this presence/absence necessarily connect
with the whole on some level? If, as one might say, postmodernism wants
to proclaim a rationality of means entirely divorced from a rationality of
ends, does it not thereby sacrifice the very "means/ends" logic it wants to
invoke, the very logical framework in which one speaks of "contexts"? I
suggest it would be more precise to describe the measured, antifounda-
tionalist "rationalism" of postmodernism as simply an evasive maneuver
designed to immunize from critique the real objective here: that is, to pre-
serve "Enlightenment" as merely an outward and superficial guise for
irrationalist content, to reduce "Enlightenment," as an actual set of prin-
 POSTMODERNISM AND IMPERIALISM l6/

ciples consciously designed to govern thought and action, to being merely

that specific mythology needed to inform the project of a "new radical
imaginary."6
Clearly, there is a complete failure —or refusal — of dialectical reason-
ing incurred in postmodernism's attempted retention of an Enlightenment
"micro"-rationality. And this brings up the second rejoinder: postmodern
philosophy's practiced avoidance on this same score of the Marxist, dialec-
tical materialist critique of Enlightenment. Postmodern theory, seemingly
without exception, consigns something it calls "Marxism" to the foul En-
lightenment brew of "foundationalism." Marxism is, in effect, collapsed
back into Hegelianism, the materialist dialectic into the idealist dialectic —
or, as Aronowitz somewhat puzzlingly puts it, the "form of Marxism is re-
tained while its categories are not" (52). But in no instance that I know of
has a postmodern theorist systematically confronted the contention first
developed by Marx and Engels that "this realm of reason was nothing more
than the idealized realm of the bourgeoisie."71 think perhaps it needs to be
remembered that the Marxist project was not and is not the simple re-
placement of one "universal reason" with another but the practical and
material transformation of reason to be attained in classless society; and
that this attainment would not mean the culmination of reason on earth a
la Hegel but a raising of reason to a higher level through its very de-"ideal-
ization." Reason, then, comes to be grasped as a relative, time-bound prin-
ciple that nevertheless attains a historical universality through the social
universality of the proletariat (gendered and multiethnic) as they/we who —
to cite a famous lyric — "shall be the human race."
But again, postmodern irrationalism seems systematically to evade con-
frontation with this critique of Enlightenment. It typically manages this
through a variety of fundamentally dogmatic maneuvers, epitomized in
the work of Laclau and Mouffe who, as Ellen Meiksins Wood has shown,
consistently and falsely reduce Marxism to a "closed system" of pure eco-
nomic determinism.8
Why this evasion? Surely there is more than a casual connection here
with the fact that the typical postmodern theorist probably never got any
closer to Marxism or Leninism than Althusser's left-wing structuralism and
Lacanianism. One can readily understand how the one-time advocate of a
self-enclosed "theoretical practice" might elicit postmodern suspicions of
closure and "scientism." Indeed, Althusser's "Marxism" can fairly be accused
of having preprogrammed, in its flight from the class struggles of its time
 168 POSTMODERNISM AND IMPERIALISM

and into narrowly epistemological speculation, the subsequent turnabout

in which even the residually rationalist categories still formally upheld by
Althusser are themselves rejected for their inconsistency.9
But this is secondary. What I would suggest is that postmodernism's
hostility toward a "foundationalist" parody of Marxism, combined with
the elision of Marxism's genuinely dialectical and materialist content, flows
not from a simple misunderstanding but, objectively, from the consistent
need of an ideologically embattled capitalism to seek displacement and pre-
emption of Marxism through the formulation of radical-sounding "third
paths" (that is, "neither capitalism nor socialism"). That postmodern phi-
losophy normally refrains from open anticommunism, preferring to pay lip
service to "socialism" even while making the necessary obeisances to the
demonologies of "Stalin," may make it appear as some sort of a "left" op-
tion. But is there really anything "left"? The most crucial problem for Marx-
ism today—how to extend and put into practice a critique from the left of
retreating "socialism" at the moment of the old communist movement's
complete transformation into its opposite — remains safely beyond post-
modernist conceptual horizons.
Postmodernist philosophy's oblique but hostile relation to Marxism
largely duplicates that of Nietzsche. And the classical analysis here belongs
to Lukacs's critique of Nietzschean irrationalism in The Destruction of Rea-
son, a work largely ignored by contemporary theory since being anathe-
matized by Althusserianism in the 1960s. Lukacs identifies in Nietzsche's
radically antisystemic and countercultural thinking a consistent drive to
attack and discredit the socialist ideals of his time. But against these Niet-
zsche proposes nothing with any better claim to social rationality. Any re-
maining link between reason and the emancipatory is refused. It is, ac-
cording to Lukacs, this very antagonism toward socialism — a movement
of whose most advanced theoretical expression Nietzsche remained funda-
mentally ignorant — that supplies Nietzschean philosophy with its point
of departure and its principal unifying "ground" as such. "It is material
from 'enemy territory', problems and questions imposed by the class en-
emy which ultimately determine the content of his philosophy."10 Unlike
his more typical fellow reactionaries, however, Nietzsche conceded the deca-
dence of bourgeois culture and hence the consequent need to formulate an
intellectual creed that could give the appearance of overcoming it. In this he
anticipates the later, more explicit "antibourgeois" anticommunisms of the
coming imperialist epoch — most obviously fascism. This defense of a deca-
dent bourgeois order, based on the partial acknowledgment of its defects
 POSTMODERNISM AND IMPERIALISM 169

and its urgent need for cultural renewal, and pointing to a "third path" "be-
yond" the domain of reason," Lukacs terms an "indirect apologetic."
Postmodern philosophy receives Nietzsche through the filters of Deleuze,
Foucault, and Derrida, blending him with similarly mediated versions of
Heidegger and William James into a new irrationalist hybrid. But the terms
of Lukacs's Nietzsche critique on the whole remain no less appropriate.
Whereas, on the one hand, postmodernist philosophy's aversion to ortho-
dox fascism is so far not to be seriously questioned, its basic content con-
tinues, I would argue, to be "dictated by the adversary." And this adversary—
revolutionary communism as both a theory and a practice — assumes an
even sharper identity today than in Nietzsche's epoch. Let it be said that
Lukacs, writing during and just after World War 11, posits an adversarial
Marxism-Leninism falsely purged of the critical tensions and errors that
we know afflicted it both then and more recently. If, from our own present
standpoint, The Destruction of Reason has a serious flaw, it is surely this
failure to anticipate or express openly the struggles and uncertainties within
communist orthodoxy itself. (Lukacs's subsequent allegiance to Khrushchevite
positions — by then, perhaps, inevitable — marks, in my view, his decisive
move to the right on these issues.) But the fact that postmodern philoso-
phy arises in a conjuncture marked by capitalist restoration throughout
the "socialist" bloc and the consequent extreme crisis and disarray within
the theoretical discourse of Marxism, though it may explain the relative
freedom from genuinely contestatory Marxist critique enjoyed by post-
modern theorists, in no way alters the essence of this ideological develop-
ment as a reprise of pseudodialectical, Nietzschean "indirect apologetics."
This becomes fully apparent when one turns to postmodernism's more
explicit formulations as a politics. I am thinking here mainly of Laclau
and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, a work that, though it re-
mains strongly controversial, has acquired since its publication a virtually
manifesto-like standing among many intellectuals predisposed to post-
structuralist theory. 12 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy proposes, to free the
Gramscian politics linked to the concept of "hegemony" (the so-called war
of position, as opposed to "war of maneuver") from its residual, Marxian
"foundationalism" in recognition of what is held to be the primary effi-
cacy of discourse itself and its "articulating" agents in forming hegemonic
subjects. And it turns out of course that "socialist strategy" means dump-
ing socialism altogether for a "radical democracy" that more adequately
conforms to the "indeterminacy" of a "society" whose concept is modeled
directly on the poststructuralist critique of the sign.
 I/O POSTMODERNISM AND IMPERIALISM

The key arguments of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy—as, in addition,

the serious objections they have elicited — have become sufficiently well
known to avoid lengthy repetition here. What Mouffe and Laclau promise
to deliver is, in the end, a revolutionary or at least emancipatory political
strategy shorn of "foundationalist" ballast. In effect, however, they merely
succeed in shifting the locus of political and social agency from "essential-
ist" categories of class and party to a discursive agency of "articulation."13
And when it comes time to specify concretely the actual articulating sub-
jects themselves, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy resorts to a battery of ar-
gumentative circularities and subterfuges that simply relegate the articula-
tory agency to "other discourses."14
In The Retreat from Class, Ellen Meiksins Wood has shown how, under
the weight of its own illogic, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy inevitably
collapses as an argument with any pretense to denoting political or social
realities — a collapse that, because of its considerable synthetic ambitions
and conceptual clarity, perhaps marks the conclusive failure of poststruc-
turalism to produce a viable political theory. But the failure of argument
has interfered little with the capacity of this theoretical tract to supply po-
tentially anticapitalist intellectuals with a powerful dose of "indirect apolo-
getics." The fact that the "third path" calls itself "radical democracy," drap-
ing itself in the "ethics" if not the epistemology of Enlightenment, the fact
that it outwardly resists the "fixity" of any one privileged subject, makes it,
in a sense, the more perfect "radical" argument for a capitalist politics of
pure irrationalist spontaneity. And we know who wins on the battlefield of
the spontaneous.15 While the oppressed are fed the myths of their own "hege-
mony"— and why not, for "on the threshold of postmodernity," humanity
is "for the first time the creator and constructor of its own history"? —
those already in a position to "articulate" the myths for us only strengthen
their hold on power.16

II

In my remarks so far I have emphasized how contemporary postmodern

philosophy's blanket hostility toward the universalisms of Enlightenment
thought may in fact serve to preempt Marxism's carefully directed critique
of that concrete universal that is present-day capitalist ideology and power.
Does not the merely theoretical refusal of the (ideal) ground serve in fact
to strengthen the real foundations of real oppression by rendering all puta-
 POSTMODERNISM AND IMPERIALISM 1/1

tive knowledge of the latter illicit? When Peter Dews rebukes Foucault for
his attempt to equate the "plural" with the emancipatory, the remark ap-
plies to more recent postmodern theory with equal force: "The deep naivety
of this conception lies in the assumption that once the aspiration to uni-
versality ... is abandoned what will be left is a harmonious plurality of un-
mediated perspectives."17 In light of this perverse blindness to concrete uni-
versals, postmodernism's seemingly general skepticism toward Marxism as
one possible instance of "foundationalism" would be better grasped as a
specific and determining antagonism. Is there a living—that is, practiced—
philosophy overman Marxism that any longer purports to ground ratio-
nal praxis in universal (but in this case also practical-material) categories?
I am saying, then, that postmodern philosophy and political theory be-
come objectively, albeit perhaps obliquely, a variation of anticommunism.
It might, however, be objected at this point that postmodernism en-
compasses not only this demonstrably right-wing tendency but also a cer-
tain "left" that, like Marxism, aims at an actual transcendence of oppres-
sive totalities but that diverges from Marxism in its precise identification
of the oppressor and of the social agent charged with its opposition and
overthrow. Under this more "practical" aegis, the axis of postmodern an-
tagonism shifts from the universal versus the particular to the more politi-
cally charged tension between the "center" and the "margin." Such a shift
has, for example, been adumbrated by Cornel West as representing a par-
ticularly American inflection of the postmodern. "For Americans," says
West,
are politically always already in a condition of postmodern fragmentation
and heterogeneity in a way that Europeans have not been; and the revolt
against the center by those constituted as marginals is an oppositional
difference in a way that poststructuralist notions of difference are not.
These American attacks on universality in the name of difference, these
"postmodern" issues of otherness (Afro-Americans, Native Americans,
women, gays) are in fact an implicit critique of certain French postmodern
discourses about otherness that really serve to hide and conceal the power
of the voices and movements of Others. ls

Among instances of a "left" postmodernism we might then include a range

of contemporary feminisms and the intellectual opposition to homopho-
bia as well as the cultural nationalisms of ethnic minority groups. The cat-
egory of the "marginal" scarcely exhausts itself here, however. Arrayed
against the "center" — even as also "concealed" by its discourses and "dis-
 1/2 POSTMODERNISM AND IMPERIALISM

ciplines" — are, in this conception, the millions who inhabit the neocolo-
nial societies of the "third world." Hence there might be a definite logic in
describing the contemporary anticolonial and anti-imperialist movements of
the periphery as in their own way also "postmodern."
It is this "marginal" and "anti-imperialist" claim to postmodernity that
I now wish to assess in some depth. In particular I propose to challenge
the idea that such a "left" movement within postmodernism really suc-
ceeds in freeing itself from the right-wing apologetic strain within the post-
modern philosophy of the "center."
The basic outlines of this "left" position are as follows: both poststruc-
turalism and postmodernism, as discourses emergent in the "center," have
failed to give adequate theoretical consideration to the international divi-
sion of labor and to what is in fact the uneven and oppressive relation of
metropolitan knowledge and its institutions to the "life-world" of the pe-
riphery. Both metropolitan knowledge as well as metropolitan systems of
ethics constitute themselves upon a prior exclusion of peripheral or mar-
ginalized realities. They therefore become themselves falsely "universal"
and, as such, ideological rather than genuinely critical. The remedy to such
false consciousness is not to be sought in the mere abstract insistence on
"difference" (or "unfixity," the "heterogeneous," and so on) but in the direct,
practical intervention of those who are different, those flesh-and-blood
"others" whom, as West observes (here following Gayatri Spivak), the very
conceptual appeal to alterity has ironically tended to exclude. As a corol-
lary, it is then implied that a definite epistemological primacy, together
with a kind of ethical exemplariness, adheres to those subjects and prac-
tices marginalized by imperialist institutions of knowledge and culture.
Among "first-world" theorists who have put forward this kind of criti-
cism, perhaps the best known is Fredric Jameson. In his essay "Third World
Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism" Jameson argues that
"third world texts ... necessarily project a political dimension in the form
of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an
allegory of the embattled situation of the public third world culture and
society."19 Third-world texts, then — and by extension those who produce
them and their primary public—retain what the culture of postmodernism
in the "first world" is unable to provide according to another of Jameson's
well-known arguments: a "cognitive map" equipped to project the private
onto the public sphere.20 As such, these peripheral practices of significa-
tion consciously represent a bedrock political reality that, for the con-
 POSTMODERNISM AND IMPERIALISM 173

temporary postmodern metropole, remains on the level of the political

unconscious. (It should be pointed out, of course, that Jameson's schema
is largely indifferent in this respect to the modernism/postmodernism
divide.) What enables this is the fact that the third-world subject, like
Hegel's slave, exhibits a "situational consciousness" (Jameson's preferred
substitute term for materialism) (92). As "master," however, the metropol-
itan consciousness becomes enthralled to the fetishes that symbolize its
dominance.
An analogous but weaker theory of the marginal as epistemologically
privileged is found in the writings of Edward Said. In The World, the Text,
and the Critic, for example, Said chastises contemporary critical theory, es-
pecially poststructuralism, for its lack of "worldliness" — by which he evi-
dently means much the same thing designated by Jameson's "situational
consciousness." What is needed, according to Said, is "a sort of spatial sense,
a sort of measuring faculty for locating or situating theory" that Said de-
notes simply as "critical consciousness."21 The World, the Text, and the Critic
ultimately disappoints, I think, in its own failure to historically or "spatially"
situate such "critical consciousness," but given Said's public commitment
to Palestinian national liberation it would not seem unreasonable to iden-
tify in his call for "worldliness" a prescription for "third-worldliness."
Both Jameson and Said — the former far more openly and forthrightly
than the latter — violate central tenets of postmodernism, of course, inso-
far as they posit the existence of a marginal consciousness imbued with "pres-
ence" and "self-identity." That is, they appear to justify an orthodox post-
modernist counteraccusation of "essentialism." However, should this be
thought to constitute a final incompatibility of postmodernism for an anti-
imperialist, postcolonial standpoint, it suffices to mention here the work
of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Foreseeing this difficulty, Spivak has (in
her critical reading of the work of a radical collective of Indian historians
known as the "subaltern studies group") sought to justify such "essential-
ism" as a strategic necessity despite its supposed epistemological falsity. Rad-
ical third-world historians, writes Spivak, "must remain committed to the
subaltern as the subject of his history. As they choose this strategy, they re-
veal the limits of the critique of humanism as produced in the west."22
Spivak, that is to say, poses the necessity of an exceptionalism: a concep-
tual reliance on the "subject of history," which, as a poststructuralist, she
would condemn as reactionary and "humanist," is allowed on "strategical"
grounds within the terrain of the "subaltern." It begins to sound ironically
 174 POSTMODERNISM AND IMPERIALISM

like the old procolonialist condescension to the "native's" need for myths
that the educated metropolitan city dweller has now dispensed with—but
more on this later.
Even if the "marginal" cannot be proved to enjoy an epistemological
advantage, however, its very reality as a "situation" requiring direct action
against oppression can be appealed to as politically and ethically exem-
plary. Thus, in her very poignant essay entitled "Feminism: The Political
Conscience of Postmodernism?" the critic and video artist Laura Kipnis pro-
poses that feminism, seemingly entrapped between the "textualist" (i.e.,
modernist) aestheticism of French poststructuralist critics on the order of
Cixous, Irigaray, and others and North American liberal reformism (an-
other case of "essentialism"), adopt "a theory of women not as class or caste
but as colony" (161).23 The efforts of a Rorty or a Laclau to salvage "En-
lightenment" by ridding it of foundationalism and leaving only its "prag-
matic" procedures would, in this view, be too little too late. For Kipnis, as
for Craig Owens, postmodernism denotes what is really the definitive de-
cline of the "West" and its colonial systems of power.24 If those marginal-
ized within the center itself (e.g., women) are to rescue themselves from
the sinking ship, they must model their opposition on the practice of non-
Western anticolonial rebels. Referring to the 1986 bombing of Libya, Kip-
nis writes: "When retaliation is taken, as has been announced, for 'Ameri-
can arrogance,' this is the postmodern critique of Enlightenment; it is, in
fact, a decentering, it is the margin, the absence, the periphery rewriting
the rules from its own interest" (163).
An analogous proposal for third-world revolt within the conceptual
terrain of postmodernism has been issued by George Yiidice. Against the
postmodern "ethics" formulated by Foucault as an "aesthetics of exis-
tence"— manifesting itself, for example, in the liberal comforts of plural-
ism— Yiidice suggests finding an ethical standard "among the dominated
and oppressed peoples of the 'peripheral' or underdeveloped countries."25
As a mere "aesthetic," the postmodern "explores the marginal, yet is inca-
pable of any solidarity with it" (224). Yudice terms this marginal ethic an
"ethic of survival" and points to the example set by Rigoberta Menchu in
her role as an organizer for the Christian base-community movement against
genocidal repression in Guatemala.26 "Menchu, in fact, has turned her very
identity into a 'poetics of defense.' Her oppression and that of her people
have opened them to an unfixity delimited by the unboundedness of strug-
gle" (229). In Menchu's ethical example we thus have, so to speak, the sub-
versive promise of "unfixity" a la Mouffe-Laclau made flesh.
 POSTMODERNISM AND IMPERIALISM 1/5

Yudice is not the first to attempt this particular inflection with specific
reference to Latin America. The "liberation theology" that guides Menchii's
practice as a militant might itself lay some claim to representing an indige-
nously Latin American postmodernism — "avant la lettre" insofar as Fou-
cault and his followers are concerned. The philosophical implications of
liberation theology have been worked out by the so-called Philosophy of
Liberation, an intellectual current that developed in Argentina in the early
1970s. As recounted by Horacio Cerutti-Guldberg, Philosophy of Libera-
tion set out explicitly to formulate a uniquely Latin American doctrine of
liberation that would be "neither a liberal individualism nor a Marxist col-
lectivism."27 Rather, it would set itself the goal of "philosophizing out of
the social demands of the most needy, the marginalized and despised sec-
tors of the population" (44). This in turn requires, according to exponent
Enrique Dussel, a new philosophical method—known as "analectics" —
based on the logical priority or "anteriority" of the exterior (i.e., the mar-
ginal, the Other) over totality.28 Analectics are to supplant the "Eurocen-
tric" method of dialectics. As Cerutti-Guldberg observes:
Dialectics (it doesn't matter whether Hegelian or Marxist, since analectical
philosophy identifies them) could never exceed "intrasystematicity." It
would be incapable of capturing the requirements of "alterity" expressed in
the "face" of the "poor" that demands justice. In this sense, it would appear
necessary lo postulate a method that would go beyond (ana-) and not
merely through (dia-) the totality. This is the "analectical" method which
works with the central notion of analogy. In this way, analectical
philosophy would develop the "essential" thinking longed for by Heidegger.
Such thinking would be made possible when it emerges out of the cultural,
anthropological "alterative" Latin American space. This space is postulated
as "preliminary in the order of Being" and "posterior in the order of
knowledge" with respect to the "ontological totality." It is constituted by
the poor of the "third world." (50)

In Dussel's Philosophy of Liberation the logic of going "beyond" the to-

tality ultimately leads to explicit theology and mysticism: "What reason
can never embrace — the mystery of the other as other — only faith can
penetrate" (93). But the analectical method has received other, nontheo-
logical formulations in Latin America, most notably by the Cuban critic
Roberto Fernandez Retamar, whose theoretical writings of the early 1970s
were aimed at refuting the possibility that a "universal" theory of literature
could truthfully reflect the radical alterity of "Nuestra America."29 This is
so not only as a result of the unequal, exploitative relation of imperial me-
tropolis to periphery—a relation that is historically evolved and determined
 176 POSTMODERNISM AND IMPERIALISM

and thus subject to transformation—but because all notions of universal-

ity (for example, Goethe's and Marx and Engels's idea of a Weltliteratur)
are fictions masking the reality of radical diversity and alterity.
One should point out here that Fernandez Retamar's philosophical au-
thority is Jose Marti and certainly not Derrida, Deleuze, or Foucault, whom,
had he been aware of them at the time, Fernandez Retamar would almost
surely have regarded with skeptical hostility. Dussel and the various Latin
American philosophers associated with Philosophy of Liberation have ob-
vious debts to European phenomenology and existentialism, especially to
Heidegger and Levinas. But here, too, a philosophical trend in which we
can now recognize the idea of postmodernity as a radical break with En-
lightenment develops out of what is perceived at least as a direct social and
political demand for theory to adequately reflect the life-world of those
who are, as it were, at once "marginal" and the "subject of history." One
can sympathize with the general impatience of Latin American critics and
theorists who see in the category of the "postmodern" what appears to be
yet another neocolonial attempt to impose alien cultural models. (Such
would probably be Fernandez Retamar's conscious sentiments.) But the
example of the analectical critiques of Dussel and Fernandez Retamar show,
in fact, that the intellectual and cultural gulf is overdrawn and that all roads
to postmodernism do not lead through French poststructuralism.

Ill

Do we then find a Latin American culture of postmodernism linked to these

particular conceptual trends? I would argue — and have argued elsewhere —
that the recent proliferation in Latin America of so-called testimonial nar-
ratives like that of Rigoberta Menchu, as well as the fictional and quasi-
fictional texts that adopt the perspective of the marginalized (see, inter alia,
the works of Elena Poniatowska, Eduardo Galeano, and Manlio Argueta),
give some evidence of postmodernity insofar as they look for ways of "giv-
ing voice" to alterity.30 Significant here is their implicit opposition to the
more traditional (and modernist) approach of "magical realism" in which
the marginal becomes a kind of aesthetic mode of access to the ground of
national or regional unity and identity. One could include here as well the
general wave of interest in Latin American popular and "barrio" culture as
an embodiment of "resistance."
But our direct concern here is with the ideological character of the con-
ceptual trend as such. Does the move to, as it were, found postmodernism's
 POSTMODERNISM AND IMPERIALISM 1/7

antifoundationalism in the rebellious consciousness of those marginalized

by modernity alter orthodox postmodernism's reactionary character? I do
not think so. Basing themselves on what is, to be sure, the decisive histori-
cal and political reality of unequal development and the undeniably impe-
rialist and neocolonialist bias of much metropolitan-based theory, the "left"
postmodernists we have surveyed here all, to one degree or another, pro-
ceed to distort this reality into a new irrationalist and spontaneist myth.
Marginality is postulated as a condition that, purely by virtue of its objec-
tive situation, gives rise to the subversive particularity upon which postmod-
ern politics pins its hopes. But, one must ask, where has this been shown
actually to occur? Where has imperialism, and its attendant "scientific" and
cultural institutions, actually given way and not simply adapted to the "new
social movements" founded on ideals of alterity?
Jameson, whose argument for a third-world cognitive privilege gestures
openly toward an anti-imperialist nationalism as the road to both political
and cultural redemption from postmodern psychic and social pathologies,
speaks to us of Ousmane Sembene and Lu Hsun but leaves out the larger
question of where strategies of all-class national liberation have ultimately
led Africa and China — of whether, in fact, nationalism, even the radical
nationalism of cultural alterity, can be said to have succeeded as a strategy
of anti-imperialism. As Aijaz Ahmad remarked in his well-taken critique
of Jameson's essay, Jameson's retention of a "three worlds" theoretical frame-
work imposes a view of neocolonial society as free of class contradictions.31
Spivak's move to characterize the subaltern as what might be termed
"deconstruction with a human face" only leads us further into a spon-
taneist thicket — although the logic here is more consistent than in Jame-
son and Said because the transition from colonial to independent status is
itself reduced to a "displacement of function between sign systems" (In
Other Worlds, 198).
Kipnis, whose attempt to implicate both textualist and reformist femi-
nisms in a politics of elitism and quietism has real merits, can in the end
offer up as models for an "anticolonial" feminism little more than the vague
threat of anti-Western counterterror from radical third-world nationalists
such as Mu'ammar Gadhafi. One recalls here Lenin's dialectical insight in
What Is to Be Done? regarding the internal link between spontaneism and
terrorism. Yudice's counterposing of a third-world "ethic of survival" to a
postmodern ethic of "self-formation" itself possesses real force as an ethi-
cal judgment, and one can only concur in arguing the superior moral exam-
ple of a Rigoberta Menchu. But where does this lead us politically? Those
 1/8 POSTMODERNISM AND IMPERIALISM

superexploited and oppressed at the periphery thus become pegged with a

sort of subpolitical consciousness, as if they could not or need not see be-
yond the sheer fact of "survival."
Are these lapses into the most threadbare sorts of political myths and
fetishes simply the result of ignorance or bad faith on the part of sympa-
thetic first-world theorists? Perhaps in some cases, but generally not, I think,
though that is really beside the point. Regarding current political reality in
Latin America, at least, such retreats into spontaneism and the overall subes-
timation of the conscious element in the waging of political struggle merely
reflect in a general way the continuing and indeed increasing reliance of
much of the autochthonous anti-imperialist left on a similar mix of ro-
mantic faith in exemplary violence and in the eventual spontaneous upris-
ing of the "people," whether with bullets or with ballots. Although both fo-
quismo and the strategy of a "peaceful road to socialism" based on populist
alliances are recognized on one level to have failed, the conclusions drawn
from this by the mainstream left have on the whole only led to an even
more thoroughgoing abandonment of Marxist and Leninist political strate-
gies in favor of a "democratic" politics of consensus.
Here I would refer the reader to the survey of recent intellectual-political
trends in Latin America undertaken by James Petras and Michael Morley.32
These authors note how, after the fascist counterrevolutions of the 1970s
and the ensuing normalization of counterrevolutionary policy under the
guise of the "return to democracy" in the 1980s, a new type of intellectual
replaces the Latin American "organic" intellectual—the Martis, Mariateguis,
Guevaras — that typified previous periods of revolutionary and radical fer-
ment. This they term the "institutional intellectual," alluding to the latter's
frequent dependence on research funding from liberal and social-democratic
foundations based in the metropolis. Writing in U.S. Hegemony under Siege,
Petras and Morley note the involvement of the new "institutional intellec-
tuals" in various successive "waves" of research agenda, emanating from
the funding agencies themselves. These focused, in turn, on a critique of
the economic model and human rights violations of the military dictator-
ships and on an assessment of the "new social movements" emerging in
the wake of the dictatorships. Concerning this latter focus, Petras and Mor-
ley note how
studies ... of the social movements claimed that [these] were counterposed
to class politics, that the class structure from which they emerged was
"heterogeneous," and that the struggles of the social movements were far
removed from older ideological politics. The political line in regard to
 POSTMODERNISM AND IMPERIALISM 1/9

social movements was in the first instance that they should separate
themselves from the ideological (radical) political parties; later, with the
rise of liberal electoral parties, the political line shifted and the movements
were advised to channel their attention toward the "struggle for
democracy." The "autonomy of social movements" was promoted when the
researchers sought to separate them from the revolutionary left;
"participation" in "broad democratic fronts" became the formula the
researchers promoted when liberal electoral politics came to the fore. (149)

Unfortunately, Petras and Morley provide few specific names here of "in-
stitutional intellectuals" or their host foundations. But it will not be diffi-
cult, for the reader of recent, "postmodern" social and political theory in
Latin America to recognize in this description of "social movement" re-
search the work of theorists such as Arditi, Argumedo, Boron, Brunner, Es-
cobar, Garcia Canclini, Lechner, and Nun.33
This entire political trend within Latin America can, I think, be correctly
grasped only as a consequence of the failure of Marxists, in particular the
established communist parties and allied organizations, to carry out a self-
criticism from the left and of the resulting shift rightward into political
positions that merely compound the errors of the past. As Petras and Mor-
ley put it in Latin America in the Time of Cholera, the "internal crisis of the
political parties of the popular classes has severely weakened the political,
organizational, and ideological capacities of the oppressed majorities to
respond to the prolonged decay of social life: double negativity has not yet
generated a positive outcome" (20). The response of traditional Latin Amer-
ican Marxism to the evident failure of populism (with or without a foco
component) as a variation on the orthodox "two-stage" model (democratic
capitalism first, then socialism) has typically been to jettison the second
stage entirely. One could argue with a certain justice that this collapse was
inevitable given the political mistakes already embedded in the older line.
As Adolfo Sanchez Vasquez has recently pointed out, Latin Americans in-
herited the Marxism of the Second International, the Marxism that regarded
revolution in the Western centers of capitalism as the necessary precondi-
tion for even just national liberation, much less socialism or communism
on the periphery.34
The Marx who, after studying British colonialism in Ireland, concluded
that the liberation of Irish workers from imperialism was key to the politi-
cal advance of an increasingly reformist and conservative British working
class; the Marx who speculated that peasant communes in Russia might
make feasible a direct transition to socialism — this Marx was largely
 180 POSTMODERNISM AND IMPERIALISM

unknown in Latin America. Thus when the communism of the Third In-
ternational adopted the "two-stage" model for neocolonial countries,
Latin American revolutionaries had scarcely any theoretical basis on which
to dissent. (This, according to Sanchez Vasquez, held true even for so orig-
inal a Marxist thinker as Mariategui, who, perhaps because he had to go
outside Marxism for theories sensitive to factors of unequal development,
was attracted by the irrationalism of Bergson and Sorel.) Latin America is
in no way unique in this, needless to say. Everywhere, the dominant trend
is to compound past errors with even greater ones, thus reaching the point
of renouncing the very core of Marxism as such in preference for liberal
anachronisms and worse.
I dwell on this because I think a truly critical assessment of an "anti-
imperialist" postmodernism, as of orthodox postmodernism, requires a prior
recognition of how such thinking has been foregrounded by Marxism and
particularly by the crisis within Marxism—a foregrounding that, as we have
repeatedly observed, postmodernism systematically tends to erase. The very
insistence on a politics of spontaneism and myth, on the tacit abandon-
ment of conscious and scientific revolutionary strategy and organization,
is, I am suggesting, the derivative effect of developments within Marxism
itself, of what amounts to the conscious political decision to give up the
principle of revolution as a scientifically grounded activity, as a praxis with
a rational foundation. The contemporary emphasis on "cultural politics"
that one finds throughout intellectual and radical discourse in Latin Amer-
ica as well as in the metropolis, although useful and positive to the degree
that it opens up new areas for genuinely political analysis and critique, is
symptomatic, in my view, of this theoretical surrender and more often than
not simply ratifies the nonstrategy of spontaneism. One might almost speak
these days of a "culturalism" occupying the ideological space once held by
the economism of the Second International "revisionists." To adopt the
"postmodern" sensibility means, in this sense, to regard the "culturalization"
of the political as somehow simply in accordance with the current nature
of things — to so minimize the role of political determination as to elimi-
nate it altogether. And yet, this sensibility itself is politically determined.
Spontaneism, however it may drape itself in populist slogans and admi-
ration for the people's day-to-day struggle for survival, rests on an intel-
lectual distrust of the masses, a view of the mass as beyond the reach of
reason and hence to be guided by myth. The Latin American masses have a
long history of being stigmatized in this way by both imperial and Creole
elites. This elitism begins to lose its hold on the intelligentsia in the writings
 POSTMODERNISM AND IMPERIALISM l8l

of genuine "radical democrats" such as Marti and is still further overcome

in the discourses of revolutionary, "organic" intellectuals such as Maria-
tegui and Guevara, although even here vestiges of the old viewpoint remain.
(Mariategui, who saw the Quechua-speaking indigenous peasants of Peru
as beings with full historical and political subjecthood, maintained ridicu-
lously archaic and racist views regarding Peru's blacks and Asian immi-
grants.) And, of course, sexism has been and remains a deadly obstacle.
But in the era of "postmodernity," we are being urged, in exchange for a
cult of alterity, to relinquish this conception of the masses as the rational
agents of social and historical change, as the bearers of progress. Given the
increasing prevalence of such aristocratism, however it may devise radical
credentials for itself, it becomes possible to fall short of this truly demo-
cratic vision, to be seduced by the false Nietzschean regard for the masses
as capable only of an unconscious, instinctual political agency.
In this respect, it is important to consider what was, during the 1980s,
the role of the Nicaraguan Revolution, and especially the theory and prac-
tice of sandinismo, in supplying to radical, or "anti-imperialist," postmod-
ernism a species of historical warrant. As Greg Dawes has recently observed
in Aesthetics and Revolution (see, especially, chapter 1, "Sandinismo and Post-
modernism"), "Terms such as pluralism, unfixity, differance, and totality"
were "frequently evoked when historians, political scientists, and literary
theorists ... turned their gaze toward Nicaragua" (25). Dawes asserts the
existence of a definite "correlation between a certain type of postmodern
theoretical language ... and the 'post-Marxist' revisions incarnated in the
politico-aesthetic alterations that have taken place in Nicaragua since 1979."35
Inspired, in part, by sandinista theoreticians themselves, but above all by
the great explosion of cultural energy unleashed by the revolution, not a
few intellectuals claimed to see in the evident freedom of sandinismo from
orthodox, Marxist notions of class, and the former's seemingly successful
attempts to utilize culture itself as a primary means of constructing a pop-
ular-revolutionary subject, a corroboration in practice of certain basic tenets
of postmodern political theory.36
The clearest example of this is, I think, to be found in John Beverley
and Marc Zimmerman's Literature and Politics in Central American Revolu-
tions, as well as in Beverley's subsequent essay "The Politics of Latin Amer-
ican Postmodernism."37 In the former work, the authors, in effect, argue
two fundamental theses. The first is that, due to the effects of dependent,
export-oriented capitalism in the region, and the resulting absence of a
well-developed scientific and technical culture, it is literature, and above
 182 POSTMODERNISM AND IMPERIALISM

all poetry, that takes on the role, in Central America, of producing the
"subject position of a radicalized intelligentsia" (9). Here, it seems to me,
Beverley and Zimmerman make a highly compelling case. Their second
thesis complicates matters, however. Invoking both the Althusserian the-
ory of ideology as an unconscious process of subject formation and the
Laclau-Mouffe theory of society as "not some essence that is prior to
representation but rather the product of struggles over meaning and repre-
sentation" (ix) — that is, society as itself the supreme ideological construct —
Literature and Politics implicitly attributes to Central American revolu-
tionary poetry as "ideological signifier" the power to, as it were, constitute
the revolutionary society itself. True, this is revolutionary society in its
subjective dimensions only; but following the Laclau-Mouffe logic, one is
forced to conclude that society has no other dimension. Beverley and Zim-
merman cite the example of Carlos Fonseca, founder of the Frente Sandin-
ista de Liberation Nacional (FSLN), whose basically literary invention of
Sandino as revolutionary theorist in the so-called Ideario supplied a needed
"ideology of armed national liberation struggle specific to Nicaragua's cul-
tural and political experience" (32). That is, if literature in Central Amer-
ica is a "model for politics" (xiii), sandinismo itself, as formulated by the
basically literary intelligence of Fonseca (over which the poetry of Dario
exercised a decisive influence), represents such a "model" in truly practical
form. Sandinismo, and not "Marxism-Leninism," becomes the "necessary
and sufficient ideological signifier for all social forces in the country capa-
ble of being mobilized against dictatorship and U.S. domination" (32). Ex-
plicit efforts to rouse class consciousness become unnecessary—and even,
perhaps, counterproductive. By coming at the subject on the level of cul-
ture— that is, unconsciously and, as it were, from behind — sandinismo be-
comes a formula for a spontaneous revolutionary will.
What then to make of the FSLN's fall from power after their electoral
loss in February 1990? In Literature and Politics—caught virtually in press
by this unexpected turn of events — Beverley and Zimmerman concede
that the "identification achieved in the period of insurrection and recon-
struction between a radicalized intelligentsia ... and the popular sectors"
had "at least in part, broken down" (111). They hold out the possibility,
however, that a "continued radicalization and democratization at the cul-
tural level might have produced a stronger bond between the revolution
and the popular sectors, and that this, in turn, might have offset some of
the ideological damage caused by the economic crisis and the war" (112).
 POSTMODERNISM AND IMPERIALISM 183

In Beverley's "The Politics of Latin American Postmodernism," this same

hope is expressed in stronger language:
Even in defeat (and precisely because of their commitment to implement
and respect democratic processes in the face of massive foreign aggression
and interference) it seems to me the Sandinistas are exemplary of the emer-
gence of a postmodern but still explicitly socialist political agency in Latin
America: I believe their political project is by no means exhausted. (120)

If we take off our postmodern spectacles, however, and look at what—

on the level of sandinismo as economic and social policy rather than "ideo-
logical signifier" — preceded the electoral debacle of 1990, a rather differ-
ent picture emerges: that of a conscious decision to seek accommodation
with the revolution's enemies, both in Washington and within Nicaragua
itself, leaving the masses of Nicaraguan workers and peasants to suffer the
consequences. As Petras and Morley report in Latin America in the Time of
Cholera (see chapter 6, "The Electoral Defeat of the Sandinistas: Critical
Reflections"), the FSLN response to the combined pressure of the contra
war and the economic embargo was, among other things, (1) to implement
massive, IMF-style austerity measures, resulting in catastrophic economic
hardships for the poor; (2) to send in the police to break the resulting
strikes and protests; (3) to agree to elections while the contra war was still
being actively pursued by Washington; (4) to permit massive foreign fund-
ing of the pro-U.S. opposition parties coalesced in the Union Nicaragiiense
de Oposicion (UNO); and (5) to conduct a glitzy, U.S.-styie electoral cam-
paign, in the hopes that this sort of "ideological signifier" and "struggle
over meaning" might persuade those it had betrayed that the FSLN was
still their best hope for the future. As FSLN comandanteTomas Borge him-
self declared, "We sacrificed the working class in favor of the economy as
part of a strategic plan."38 Unfortunately for Borge, Ortega, and the FSLN
leadership, however, this strategy failed, leaving the revolution to, as Petras
and Morley put it, "fall between two chairs" — unable to sell itself to the
imperialists in Washington and the capitalist elites in Nicaragua itself, after
having first sold out the Nicaraguan masses who had supplied the "politi-
cal agency" — in the form of the armed insurrections that had brought the
FSLN to power in the first place. And as for the "exhaustion" of their "polit-
ical project," about which Beverley expresses a cautionary optimism: Petras
and Morley report that after the election of UNO candidate Violeta Chamorro
in 1990, Ortega and the FSLN directorate have, while threatening "govern-
ment from below," actively facilitated Chamorro's "free market," neolib-
 184 POSTMODERNISM AND IMPERIALISM

eral "reforms" — even, in the person of former FSLN vice president Sergio
Ramirez, traveling to Washington to help Chamorro's representatives offer
up the latest round of sacrifices to the World Bank and other prospective
lenders (Latin America in the Time of Cholera, 139).
The lesson here, with respect to the question of "postmodern ... politi-
cal agency," would seem to be that there is no magical, cultural route — no
matter how poetically inspired — around the stubborn political problem
of class consciousness as such. Re-"articulate" and re-"signify" the social
text as it would, when sandinismo made the calculation that a good dose of
"revolutionary" culture would enable it to renegotiate its identity with the
popular sector while its leading representatives renegotiated the economic
pact with imperialism, this problem came back to haunt it with a vengeance.
While the FSLN trusted to the spontaneous power of its ideological signi-
fiers to generate a mass revolutionary will, the masses responded by spon-
taneously turning it out of power. Of course, in doing so, the latter demon-
strated their own grievous lack of consciousness. But even to suggest, as
Beverley and Zimmerman do, that this was somehow a result of insuffi-
cient "radicalization and democratization at the cultural level," is to trade
in reality itself for a pair of postmodern spectacles.
Ultimately, it may be only revolutionary practice, the activity of strat-
egy and organization, that can successfully trouble the political reveries of
postmodernism. But just the sheer history of such practice, particularly in
Latin America, makes risible any theory that considers politics (in the Lenin-
ist sense) to be either too abstract to matter or—in what finally amounts
to the same thing—to be "self-produced," as Aronowitz has phrased it.
Perhaps the most eloquent refutation of spontaneist faith in "new social
movements" is recorded in Roque Dalton's testimonial classic Miguel Mar-
mol, in which the legendary Salvadoran revolutionary named in the title
recounts a life as a communist militant in Central America. It is impossi-
ble, by citing excerpts, to do justice to the combined practical wisdom and
theoretical profundity of this narrative (by which I mean Marmol's own; I
leave it to subtler intellects than mine to decide whether Dalton's editorial
participation in this narrative may somehow serve to render it a postmod-
ern "historiographic metafiction"). But one passage in particular speaks
poignantly to the question at hand: in the third chapter, Marmol discusses
his return in 1930, shortly before he participates in founding the Salvadoran
Communist Party, to his hometown of Ilopango. His task is to organize a
union of rural workers. At first, as he tells it, the workers reject him, suspi-
cious that he is anti-Catholic. He is led to recall the failure of previous
 POSTMODERNISM AND IMPERIALISM 185

union-organizing efforts carried out by a local teacher and a railroad engi-

neer: "However, we suspected they had always worked outside reality, that
they hadn't based their organizing work on the actual problems of people
and, on the contrary, had created an impenetrable barrier between their
'enlightenment' and the 'backwardness' they ascribed to the people."39
Marmol, however, persists in "finding out what the people thought"
(119) — that is, he refuses to take their initially backward reaction (defense
of church authority) to mean that they lack "enlightenment." Meetings are
called, and as the people begin to talk about working conditions, Marmol
recalls, "it wasn't hard to hear, over and over again, concepts that sounded
to me just like the 'class struggle,' the 'dictatorship of the proletariat,' etc."
(135-36). Marmol's task, then, is not to "enlighten" the "backward" masses,
nor is it simply to acknowledge "what the people thought" as sovereign.
Rather, it is to collect these isolated concepts, to articulate them, and to
lead the masses in drawing the logically necessary conclusions.
Of course, the eventual armed insurrection of 1932, toward which the
practice of Marmol and the Salvadoran Communists was ultimately di-
rected, proved a miscalculation and was drowned in blood. But the fact
that it could be planned at all must be considered, as it is by Marmol, a sig-
nificant step forward. If, as the present situation in Central America sug-
gests, the positive culmination of such practice remains distant, this, it seems
to me, is a reflection not of Marmol's "sectarianism" (as Dalton had, and,
no doubt, the postmoderns would have it) but of his precociousness. Mar-
mol demonstrates here his profoundly dialectical grasp of the contradic-
tory relation of theory to practice, of concept to reality, of culture to class,
of the conscious to the spontaneous, of the "from without" to the "from
within." Postmodernism, meanwhile, even at its most "left," political, and
self-critical, remains cut off from the dialectical truths discovered in the
practice of Marmol and of the millions of others in Latin America and
across the planet who prepared it and will follow it through.

1989, 1993
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 PART VII

"Cultural Studies"
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 CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Cultural Studies Movement

and Latin America
An Overview

Since roughly the mid-1980s, students, critics, and theorists of Latin Amer-
ican culture and literature have found themselves dogged by the question
of Latin America and postmodernism. Is there a Latin American post-
modernism or a Latin postmodernity? If so, is it merely an extension of
the metropolitan version, or is it an alternative to it? Do the various criti-
cal theories often termed "postmodern" enable us to make better sense of
contemporary Latin American reality, or do they merely continue a covertly
imperializing practice of assimilating Latin American or postcolonial cul-
ture itself to critical canons that the latter have had no hand in establish-
ing? Many positions, including my own, have by now been staked out on
these questions.1 I will not take the time to sum them up here, except to
say that haunting the debate as a whole seems to be a persistent nervous-
ness about its legitimacy. I, at least, have often found myself wondering in
private whether we ought even to bother with the question at all, whether
just consenting to raise the "issue" of "Latin America and postmodernism"
is already to fall into a clever sort of neocolonizing trap.
In any case, the issue soon becomes practically unavoidable, whether
ultimately legitimate or not. Still, I have to admit at the outset to the same
sort of uneasiness about the question of Latin America and "cultural stud-
ies." As with postmodernism, the question can take various forms: Is there

189
 19O THE CULTURAL STUDIES MOVEMENT AND LATIN AMERICA

a Latin American "cultural studies"? If not, should there be one? And if

there is, what is its relationship to cultural studies as practiced in metro-
politan settings such as Britain or the United States? Yet no matter what
form it takes, it always seems to be preempted by another set of questions,
namely, what is "cultural studies" anyway, and why should Latin Ameri-
cans, or Latin Americanists, bother with it in the first place?
The questions of postmodernism and cultural studies with respect to
contemporary Latin America are not, of course, precisely analogous. Post-
modernism evokes both a certain, if perhaps hypothetical, cultural reality
and a set of intellectual and critical approaches to it. "Cultural studies"
connotes only the second of these. So the question would seem to be a
simpler one: is the method or theory of "cultural studies" adequate or ap-
propriate to the particular cultural object here?
But is it quite so simple as this? For to answer either yes or no presup-
poses that cultural studies is finally adequate to some other cultural object,
whether metropolitan mass culture or just culture in a general, global sense.
And that is something that I, for reasons I will indicate, am unwilling sim-
ply to concede. So the place to begin, I suggest, is with "cultural studies"
itself and the claims that are often made on its behalf.
What is "cultural studies," then? The term itself, like "postmodernism,"
seems to cause no end of wrangling and confusion.2 For some, especially
those trained in literature departments, it appears to mean simply utilizing
techniques of formal analysis developed by linguistics and poetics — semi-
otics and deconstruction, to name just two — to interpret texts or "dis-
courses" of a cultural but not necessarily literary or linguistic character. For
others, it refers much more strictly to a specific mode of radical cultural
analysis and critique developed by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham in Britain. Associated with
the CCCS or "Birmingham school" are Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall,
among many others.
Insofar as the term itself is a matter of importance here—and I suggest
that we avoid getting too preoccupied with its legitimate and illegitimate
uses — I would propose the following empirical generalization: "cultural
studies," when not simply an explicit reference to the tradition of the Birm-
ingham school, is the Anglo-North American name we now generally give
to the dominant current of left-tending poststructuralist criticism—espe-
cially, for practical purposes, that stemming from the work of Michel Fou-
cault — as it crosses from the humanities into the social sciences. Of course,
to say "crosses" implies the existence of a disciplinary boundary that many
 THE CULTURAL STUDIES MOVEMENT AND LATIN AMERICA 191

practitioners of "cultural studies" treat as nonexistent. Perhaps it would be

more precise to say that the rise of "cultural studies" marks the disappear-
ance of at least one component of the humanities/social sciences division
of labor and "knowledge." But the trajectory of the change remains impor-
tant here. If, as one might put it, both a certain class of humanists and a
certain class of social scientists now look to thinkers such as Foucault for a
common conception of what it is they study, it is the latter group for whom
this stance has required the more serious "breach" of discipline.
But the basic impulse behind cultural studies predates the current
vogue attaching to the rubric. My view here — which I will have to present
only on the most general plane — is that cultural studies grows out of the
long-germinating dissatisfaction on the left wing both of the humanities
and of the social sciences with a current of cultural criticism most often
associated with the tradition of the Frankfurt school. The latter tradition,
as is well known, tended to view contemporary, late-capitalist mass and
popular culture as irredeemably lost, even hostile, to any project of human
emancipation. With the advent of modern monopoly capitalism, even cul-
ture had become, in Adorno and Horkheimer's expression, an "industry,"
feeding what were merely the fetishized images of traditional culture to a
society locked into an attitude of passive consumption. As the one remain-
ing locus of negativity, and hence of possible resistance to the culture in-
dustry, Frankfurt school "Critical Theory" pointed to the modernist or
avant-garde "work of art": by rendering itself opaque to the debased con-
sciousness of the commodity world, and thus in a sense unconsumable,
the work of a Schoenberg or a Beckett could at least hope, if not to repre-
sent the "administered universe," then to make negatively palpable its true
horrors. Or so the reasoning went.
Cultural studies dissents from this adverse stigmatization and urges the
recognition of an oppositional, emancipatory dimension in mass capitalist
culture. Although neither its more degraded aspects nor its commodity
character are denied per se, the primary conceptual status of mass culture
within Frankfurt school theory is challenged. Thus, where theorists like
Adorno viewed culture as a monolithically controlled compartment of the
social whole, cultural studies theorists such as Williams or Hall emphasize its
ubiquitous presence in the multiple areas of social life, including work and
politics. Culture comes to be thought of more as practice than as product.
At the same time, the simultaneous elevation of the aesthetic and denigra-
tion of the cultural — the Frankfurt school's seemingly radical redeploy-
ment of "high" and "low" art hierarchies — is suspended by Birmingham-
 192 THE CULTURAL STUDIES MOVEMENT AND LATIN AMERICA

style cultural studies. Mass culture is proposed as embodying its own scale of
values to which notions of aesthetic autonomy are fundamentally irrelevant.
In form, then, cultural studies suggests a politically and practically ori-
ented dissension from Frankfurt school criticism, a refusal of what is fairly
obviously the deadend of radical aestheticism from the standpoint of pro-
gressive social change. The at times almost apocalyptic mood of pessimism
that pervades much of the Frankfurt school gives way to the casual, up-
beat, and even celebratory tone of cultural studies. A "sixties" accent is
unmistakable.
But the change here, I would maintain, is less radical than it appears.
And in a certain sense, I think, it presents the danger of a move further to
the right. Why so? Above all because, despite the fact that it drops the elit-
ist and aestheticist ban on mass culture, cultural studies nevertheless du-
plicates the conceptual premise of such a ban for thinkers like Adorno: that
of the historical impossibility of advancing, through the revolutionary nega-
tion of the existing order, to a higher stage of social existence as such—the
disavowal, in short, of social classlessness as historical telos. If Adorno, hos-
tile to the "existing socialism" of his day and dismayed by what appeared
to him to be the fascist seduction of the Western proletariat, abandoned
the revolutionary, class critique of culture, cultural studies, despite advo-
cating a "cultural politic," does nothing to restore this class critique and
threatens, in some ways, to bury it even deeper. While, from his residence
in what Lukacs sarcastically described as the Hotel Abyss, Adorno paints a
picture of frank hopelessness, cultural studies broadcasts the false hopes of
emancipation through the spontaneous cultural subversions of dominant
order, leaving class relations intact. If there is an Adornian politics, its mil-
itants must be relatively few. The politics of cultural studies, however, given
its seemingly affirmative radicalism, exerts a potentially much greater mass
appeal.
No doubt it can be objected here that the mere insistence on capitalist
mass culture as a field of contention rather than an iron cage does not per
se rule out a class critique of culture and may even be seen as inviting it.
But it is, in my observation, the parallel practice of cultural studies to posit,
along with the politicization of culture, the culturalization of class. So as to
avoid what is purportedly an outmoded tendency to class reductionism,
cultural studies effectively reduces the question of class itself to that of the
culturally constructed nature of class identities. For social and political
theorists such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe—not central figures in
the cultural studies movement as such, but certainly an important influence
 THE CULTURAL STUDIES MOVEMENT AND LATIN AMERICA 193

on and articulation of the present-day movement's central concerns—this

then becomes grounds for revoking the "ontological privilege" of class al-
together and proclaiming a politics with no other objective but the "artic-
ulation" and rearticulation of new, presumably less oppressive forms of
"hegemonic" identity.3 "Culture," that is, in appearing to take on an eman-
cipatory, political dimension purged by the dismal aestheticism of the Frank-
furt school, in reality becomes a surrogate for a politics of social emancipa-
tion. The Adornian withdrawal from history and its often painful realities
of class conflict and revolutionary disappointment — into what seemed the
still marginally hopeful resistance of autonomous art to a debased culture—
continues, in my view, to foreground the "cultural politics" of the Birm-
ingham school and its emulators. (And with the fall of Eastern bloc "so-
cialism"— that is, of its pseudo-Marxist state-capitalist elites — to the "free
market forces" decreed by the IMF and the Deutsche Bank, the tendency
to political withdrawal becomes, if anything, even stronger.) The fact that
it is popular culture rather than the aesthetic that now constitutes the field
and defines the meaning of the emancipatory simply makes the implicit
surrender to existing class relations more subtle and difficult to confront.
Adorno, at least, knew what he was missing.
The close affinities of cultural studies for poststructuralism must be seen
in this light. Adorno's position was, in essence, that a realist or representa-
tionally based mode of cognition, including a realist aesthetics, had be-
come tainted by the dominant instrumental reason of monopoly capital-
ism and was thus useless for purposes of emancipation. But note that even
so, the obsolescence of representation has nothing to do with any intrinsic
property of meaning or signification but rather with the putative nonrep-
resentability of society itself in its objective totality. If it was only the radi-
cally nonrepresentational structure of modern, abstract art that could es-
cape assimilation into the socially dominant categories, this was still, in
the final analysis, a result of what were theorized to be objective social and
historical transformations. Cultural studies, with the experience of the 1960s
in its rearview mirror, becomes understandably uneasy with this dystopian
posture and implicitly requires an epistemology that, while still excluding
society itself as an object of rational, conceptual representation, is neverthe-
less more attuned to a mood of social activism. This it finds in poststruc-
turalism, given its general depiction of knowledge as a process of significa-
tion rather than representation, together with its theory of meaning itself
as a pure, constitutive, and even playful activity, free of all fixity or objec-
tive constraints. The subsequent, superficially plausible inference — now a
 194 THE CULTURAL STUDIES MOVEMENT AND LATIN AMERICA

matter of dogma on the culturalist left—that forms of subjectivity and

identity, and even "facts" themselves, are therefore "culturally constructed"
becomes, in this epistemological context, a basis for radical affirmation
rather than, under the Adornian sociology, a cause for despair.4 But the
price of this Foucauldian optimism is the tacit reduction of society itself to
a semiotic or "discursive" existence. In this context, the possibility of trans-
forming society in its totality as an objective structure, in which Adorno
declared himself a nonbeliever, is not even posed.
Proponents of cultural studies may perhaps counter here that even despite
this loss of a historical and a social-revolutionary perspective, the empha-
sis on culture as a signifying practice or—to use John Brenkman's phrase —
a "value-interpretation" that can be "articulated" to a range of political pro-
jects is still preferable to the "Old Left" tendency to treat culture as merely
the passive reflection of intrinsic class interests.5 To the extent that Marx-
ists have in fact been guilty of this latter practice, I would at least agree that
between Dick Hebdige and, say, G. V. Plekhanov there is really no meaning-
ful basis for choice. At the same time, however, part of the cultural studies
shtick is to convey the impression that up until now the left has ignored
the radical possibilities inherent in mass or popular culture. (The one seem-
ing exception to the rule here is said to be Gramsci.) If we take "left" to mean
Adorno and company, then of course the notion is understandable. But
this is, in essence, a falsification, resting on the same Cold War modernism
that undergirds Adorno's elitist aestheticism. From Brecht and Eisenstein
to socialist and Popular Front realisms, from the Mexican muralists to the
Beijing Opera, the Old, communist, Left consistently struggled to establish
a mass cultural presence. If the effort sometimes failed, or resulted in bor-
ing crudities, it just as often succeeded. The Old Left was not adverse to a
certain, class-aligned "cultural politics." Among the reasons for its histori-
cal demise, the Old Left's neglect of mass culture as a political arena does
not, I think, weigh very heavily.
But to turn now from Frankfurt-Birmingham to a more North-South
axis: is Latin America, barely recovered from postmodern bombardment,
about to be invaded by cultural studies? If this were the actual scenario,
then I would certainly advocate a posture of militant resistance. But the
implicit suggestion here—perhaps reinforced at the time of the first "post-
modernism" debates by the then upcoming Columbian quincentennial —
that Latin Americans are once again in danger of selling themselves for a
handful of glass beads is both patronizing and naive. In the first place, the
modern Latin American tradition of cultural criticism was never a stranger
 THE CULTURAL STUDIES MOVEMENT AND LATIN AMERICA 195

to Frankfurt school-style critique, even if, in the heat of the anti-imperialist

movements of the 1960s, it was less apt to see it as something viable. (I
think here, for example, of the Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz or of the
Argentine Josefina Ludmer.) Nor has this tradition been less involved in
the structuralist and poststructuralist moments, as witness the huge im-
pact of Althusser and the somewhat lesser but still significant impact of
Foucault on theorists from Ernesto Laclau to Angel Rama. And it certainly
seems to me that one can speak of a Latin American "cultural politics," es-
pecially in the wake of the smashing of foquismo and the left-populism of
the late 1960s and early 1970s. (See, inter alia, Nestor Garcia Canclini, Nelly
Richard, John Beverley, George Yudice, and jean Franco.) With U.S. and
other imperial corporate interests poised to remove what few barriers to
mass cultural imports still exist in Latin America, who knows but that we
will find the culturalist left groping for a way to interpret the ousting of
Che or Sandino by Madonna as somehow still enabling a subtle form of
"resistance"? The point is that once we accept the political and historical
premises of the cultural studies style of critique—and, North or South,
the conditions for acceptance are fundamentally similar — we are all pretty
much in the same boat.
But perhaps we are seeing such an invasion in a less suspected quarter: I
am thinking here of the noticeably higher profile accorded by the North
American metropolis in recent years to images of Latin American popular
culture — especially peasant and religious culture. This has become a phe-
nomenon not only in advertisements for such things as airlines and coffee,
where one would expect it, but also in trendier, cultural consumption pat-
terns in cities like New York and Los Angeles, where a limited market has
developed for Latin American images of saints, religious paraphernalia, and
other quasi-kitsch items. In 1991, for example, I attended a celebration-
cum-art exhibit on the occasion of the Day of the Dead hosted by the Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts, Multicultural Arts Center, complete with a variety
of re<a£>/o-style personal memorials, papier-mache skulls, and a mariachi
band. The crowd, mostly but not exclusively non-Latin, visibly enjoyed it-
self but also seemed uncertain whether to play the role of sympathetic ob-
server or celebrant. Meanwhile, a show at Boston's Institute of Contempo-
rary Art, bilingually titled "El Corazon Sangrante/The Bleeding Heart," was
featuring a collection of mostly modern and contemporary works by Mex-
ican and Chicano artists, including Frida Kahlo, David Avalos, and Nahum
Zenil but also a sampling of Aztec figurines and colonial-period religious
paintings. With the possible exception of the Kahlos, most of the modern
 196 THE CULTURAL STUDIES MOVEMENT AND LATIN AMERICA

work was engaged in an ironic, highly self-conscious but nevertheless cyn-

ical pandering to this same metropolitan taste for the artifacts and icons of
Latin popular culture and religious mysticism.6
One can hardly blame this sort of trend on the Birmingham school, but
the curiously indulgent and uncritical reception accorded to spectacles such
as these by what is, in my experience, a largely educated, progressive, and
pro-multiculturalist audience ultimately springs, I think, from an ideolog-
ical basis shared by cultural studies. True, the marketing of Latin American
popular culture can have a certain positive impact; I am thinking, here, of
the superb collections of Latin dance music put together in the 1980s by
the rock performer and musicologist David Byrne. But at what point does
the sympathetic and progressive cultural consumer-celebrant perhaps un-
wittingly revert to the reactionary who regrets the passing of the semifeu-
dal, paternalist, and mystifying order that frames the exotic images?
In any case, it is striking to me how the dominant narrative of Latin
America among progressive intellectuals in the United States seems to have
shifted from that of a no doubt excessively romanticized political militance
to what might be termed a neoexoticist story of popular culture, politically
sanctioned by a liberal multiculturalism. Whereas the old New Left played
at being Che or Sandino, now it dresses itself up in peasant garb — a la
Frida Kahlo but minus the hammer and sickle on her lapel.

1991
 CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Transcultural/Subpolitical
Pitfalls of "Hybridity"

It is in no way meant as a detraction to say that William Rowe and Vivian

Schelling's Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America is the
kind of book whose appearance might safely have been predicted.1 Surely
it could only have been a matter of time before the new and burgeoning
field of what is currently termed cultural studies, under whose multidisci-
plinary aegis erstwhile humanists now routinely take on mass-cultural forms
such as the soap opera or the rock concert, collided with the steadily increas-
ing, multiculturalist interest in Latin America to reveal an intellectual fis-
sure of sorts — at least in the English-speaking world. This is a fissure that
Memory and Modernity clearly aims to fill.
Training the methodologies of cultural studies on Latin America turns
out, however, to be a problematic task. For, as Rowe and Schelling are scru-
pulous in observing, the unevenness of capitalist development in Latin
America has made it necessary to draw complex distinctions between a pop-
ular culture that is often an outgrowth of precapitalist and sometimes tribal
social relations and a mass culture that, although employing the same ad-
vanced technologies of reproduction and dissemination existing in the me-
tropolis (TV, radio, cinema, print), cannot be assumed to be in the process
of simply supplanting the former. What Rowe and Schelling seek to show
through analysis of such phenomena as the radio transmission of oral folk

197
 198 PITFALLS OF "HYBRIDITY"

ballads to sertanejo migrants in Sao Paulo, or the mass marketing of tradi-

tional indigenous ceramic sculptures in Mexico, is that the mass, mechani-
cal reproduction and commodification of "folk" culture, though they radi-
cally transform folk culture, do not necessarily disable it as a potential site
for reaffirmation of communal, pre- or anticapitalist values. The operative
concept here is what the authors refer to as "resignification" (and what,
following Angel Rama and others, has often come to be described as "trans-
culturation"): the popular, in undergoing massification, may nevertheless
retain its power to reintegrate the cultural commodity into its system of be-
liefs or "meanings." Given the survival of communal, village ways even in the
cities themselves, consumption as such can become an actively "signifying
practice" of an unintended sort. As Rowe and Schelling succinctly phrase
it, "Popular cannot mean purity, nor the culture industry its loss" (113).
That is, to switch vocabularies, cultural studies, in order to render an
adequate critical account of Latin American popular culture, must revise a
certain customary set of assumptions regarding modernity (and postmoder-
nity) as such. For, contrary to the metropolitan experience, Latin Ameri-
can modernity coexists spatiotemporally with the traditional. Moderniza-
tion proceeds irreversibly but still carries the traditional in its wake. Thus,
there persists, in Latin America, the possibility for a traditional experience
of the modern — or, to use Rowe and Schelling's term, for an experience of
modernity that, as popular culture, nevertheless retains a memory of how
it might otherwise have been.
The bulk of Memory and Modernity is devoted to tracing the process of
cultural resignification — of a traditional "negotiation" of modernity—across
a broad range of popular cultural practices in Latin America, focusing par-
ticularly on Mexico, Brazil, and the Andean region. From the early colo-
nial cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe, to the revolt at Canudos, to contem-
porary Andean religious processions, Rowe and Schelling consistently show
how the conceptual binarisms of a conventional metropolitan criticism —
autochthonous/foreign, aesthetic/artisanal, city/country—break down in
the face of a reality in which such boundaries are constantly redrawn. Was,
for example, the Guadalupe cult, as it has often been portrayed, merely an
instrument cynically deployed by a Spanish colonial regime intent on mass
indoctrination and the extirpation of native religion? Or, as is also com-
monly supposed, did it mark a subtle subversion of orthodox Catholic
dogma by an indigenous Mexican society intent on carrying on its "idola-
trous" and magical forms of religious practice in a disguised form? The
 PITFALLS OF HYBRIDITY 199

answer, according to Rowe and Schelling's way of thinking, is neither, for

both accounts presuppose the indigenous culture of Mexico (centered on
religion) as a fixed essence, which must logically either give way to another
such essence or persist in its fixity. Only by grasping culture itself as a "sig-
nifying practice" rather than as an inert set of signs — as the process of en-
codement itself rather than as a finished, coded product — can one approx-
imate the reality of the Guadalupe cult as hybrid, as "transculturation." To
be sure, the condition of hybridity does not suspend what is arguably a
historically irreversible process of distintegration. "Over time," write Rowe
and Schelling,
the native practices dubbed as idolatry broke increasingly adrift from the
comprehensive context of meanings they originally reproduced. Idolatry
remained a repertory of actions, conducts and ruses capable of giving
coherence to the emotional states of the person but at the same time no
longer being a way of interpreting the cosmos. (22)

But such a "breaking adrift" must not be viewed in an exclusively tragic

light, as if tantamount to a cultural death. That would be to indulge in a
romantic myth of popular culture as inextricably bonded to the existence
of a given "people," when, in fact, culture shows the same intrinsic capac-
ity to change "peoples" that "peoples" do in changing cultures.
It is in its avoidance of the romantic myth of popular culture — no less
than in its refusal of the correlative modernist myth of the culture industry
as popular culture's technologically induced demise — that Memory and
Modernity's cross-disciplinary, semiotically guided, cultural studies method-
ology shows its considerable advantages over both a strictly formal aes-
thetic analysis and a conventional sociology of culture. Moreover, it is to
the real credit of Rowe and Schelling, two British academics obviously con-
versant with the metropolitan critical discourses often claiming the gran-
diose title of Theory, that they rely preponderantly on the often lesser-
known but no less theoretically informed work of Latin American cultural
critics. Memory and Modernity deserves reading if for no other reason than
that it introduces to an English-speaking public, in some cases for the first
time, the signal contributions of Angel Rama, Roberto Schwarz, Josefma
Ludmer, Carlos Monsivais, Beatriz Sarlo, Nestor Garcia Canclini, Alberto
Flores Galindo, and a host of others.
However, the cultural studies approach also carries with it certain lia-
bilities, of both a theoretical and a political nature. The principal drawback,
in my view, is a tendency, albeit one that arises out of a legitimate concern
 200 PITFALLS OF HYBRIDITY

to wrest the concept of culture from the "essentialist" formulations of ro-

manticism and modernism, to see culture coating virtually everything and
thus, ironically, to treat it as a kind of categorical a priori, exempt from
theorization as a determinate social and historical reality. For, as it turns
out, cultural studies not only stipulates the semiotic rather than simply se-
mantic property of culture; it also, as a rule, adheres to a familiar epistemo-
logical claim lodged on behalf of semiosis itself, according to which the sign
does not attach to a preexisting referent but rather the reverse: reference as
such is held to be merely an effect induced by a prior and autonomous
process of signification. Thus, although the typical practitioner of cultural
studies may adopt what seems to be a conventional stance toward "culture"
as a stable object of intellectual "study," this stance is theoretically brack-
eted by the belief that all social activity, including that of cultural studies,
is inexorably "cultural" in the sense that it is always engaged in a process of
signification, of generating meaning. Indeed, how could one ever pretend
to step outside the space of culture if, as is commonly alleged, not only are
the objects of conscious behavior (including those of scientific inquiry)
cultural constructs but likewise the subject itself? The theory of the subject
as strictly an "effect" of preconscious processes, whether these be psychic,
linguistic, or simply "discursive," is of course in no way original to cultural
studies but rather comes to it from without—either directly via Freud or,
more typically, in a form mediated by Lacan, Althusser, and Foucault. What
is perhaps the novelty of cultural studies is that it brings a certain closure to
the standard poststructuralist equation, "the subject = the unconscious =
language = discourse (= ideology, in the Althusserian variation)," with the
simple addendum, "= culture."
The intellectual difficulties besetting such a theory of culture can read-
ily be discerned. How, if "culture" in the sense described here pervades all
our social and individual reality— if all that we experience is "always al-
ready" culture — can we ever find a position from which to render a criti-
cal analysis of it? Moreover, how are we to determine with any certainty—
since cultural "difference" is clearly a key tenet of cultural studies — where
one "culture" ends and another begins? In defense of cultural studies, it
may be (and often is) argued that the point of critical work is not, in the
end, to better understand or "interpret" culture but to "change" it. The
recognition that culture has no outside from which it can be objectively
known and evaluated vouchsafes, if anything, the activist role of the critic,
now lacking excuses to enter the cultural fray for any but avowedly politi-
 PITFALLS OP HYBRIDITY 201

cal motives. To want to "study" culture is ipso facto to want to alter — or

bolster — the relations of "power" that, as cultural studies has learned from
Foucault (even if Gramsci usually gets the credit), subtend it. But here too,
it seems to me, what cultural studies gives with one hand it takes away
with the other: for, governed by the premise of culture as the primordial
social reality, the claim (in itself a valid one) that culture is inseparable from
politics logically threatens a reduction of politics to culture. The politics en-
visioned by cultural studies is itself a cultural politics, in which there has
occurred a subtle transfer of emancipatory aims from the process of objec-
tive social transformation to the properly "cultural" task of intervention in
the "subject"-forming play of discourse(s).
Memory and Modernity bids early on at standing clear of these sorts of
theoretical and practical problems. Thus, even as they loosely follow Marx-
ism in "ascribing to popular culture an emancipatory and Utopian charge"
(2), Rowe and Schelling state their intention of avoiding a "programmatic
approach" to culture in which there is a tendency to "locate the observer in
some ideal place from which everything can be judged as contributing (or
not) to an emerging positive future" (2-3). "In reality things are not so
clear," so Rowe and Schelling confine themselves to "seeking to investigate
what actually occurs in the conflict of meanings and practices between so-
cial groups" (3). But the question cannot in fact be avoided: is it in the
realm of "meanings" or in that of "practices" that the active struggle to
achieve the "emerging positive future" must be seen as primarily occur-
ring? And despite its declared agnosticism on this point, Memory and Moder-
nity, it seems to me, implicitly takes up the culturalist position here. How
else to read the following (in its own way, "programmatic") statement?
The investigation of popular culture ... requires taking the cultural sphere
as neither merely derivative from the socio-economic, as a merely
ideological phenomenon, nor as in some metaphysical sense preceding it.
Rather, it is the decisive area where soda] conflicts are experienced and
evaluated. (12; my emphasis)

Given that the better part of Rowe and Schelling's forays into specific pop-
ular cultural practices also generally avoid "programmatic" evaluations in
favor of the more modestly empirical task of "investigating what actually
occurs" (but then, of course, the question arises as to what governs the
selection of objects of "investigation") the accents of their theoretically
culturalist position tend to be somewhat muted. And, in fairness, there is
much of a purely empirical nature that is valuable in Memory and Moder-
 202 PITFALLS OF HYBRIDITY

nity, the theoretical issue aside. But when, for example, in discussing the
Quechua poetry of Arguedas, Rowe and Schelling claim for it the power to
"mobilize the Andean cosmos as an autonomous and alternative cultural
universe, whose exemplary creativity can direct the transformative power
of twentieth century technology towards the making of a new civilization"
(60), the Utopian-idealist logic of culturalism becomes more explicit. Like-
wise, I think, underlying their claim that the popular "resignification" of
the telenovela can, by "mobilizing popular experience and memories," pro-
duce "a margin of control... over their social meanings" (109), there per-
sists the myth of a "salvation through culture." For, even supposing this to
be true, how does the "control over social meanings" advance an emanci-
patory struggle in the absence (acknowledged by Rowe and Schelling) of
control over the "ownership of the media"? Might it not in fact be argued
that such "control over social meanings" serves to compensate for the pow-
erlessness of the masses to control the means of their production?
Or take, as a final example, the authors' discussion of the "boom"-era
fiction of Garcia Marquez, Roa Bastos, and Rulfo. In the case of the latter,
Rowe and Schelling go to the length of suggesting that the admittedly sim-
ulated orality of narratives such as Pedro Paramo and El llano en llamas
nevertheless "interfere[s] with the codes of the written world" and thereby
"exposes and criticizes the division [between the popular/oral and elite/
written worlds] from the side of the dominated" (209). As I have tried to
show in my own work, such attempts at a politically redemptive reading of
Rulfo (which effectively adopt the line of interpretation advanced by Rama
in Transmigration narrativa en America Latino) fallaciously equate the su-
perficial absence of an authorial "lengua culta" in Rulfo with the presence
(even if indirect) of a "lengua popular."2 But even if it is true that Rulfian
narrative succeeds, in some sense, at writing from "within" a culture of
orality, does this automatically place it on the "side of the dominated"?
Cannot such an act of transcultural affirmation serve, quite as effectively,
the dominant interest? Such has been, after all, the "cultural politics" of
Latin American populism, which Rowe and Schelling openly reject as an
overtly political ideology.
On the question of radical politics itself, Memory and Modernity gener-
ally reflects what has, beginning in the 1980s, come to be the current think-
ing of much of the intellectual left in Latin America. This thinking attributes
the counterrevolutionary trends of the 1970s and 1980s (supposedly miti-
gated somewhat by the formal re-"democratization" of former military
 PITFALLS OF HYBRIDITY 2O3

regimes) to the historic failure of the traditional left parties to establish

"hegemony" — that is, to articulate an ideological-Utopian politics with the
cultural realities of "everyday life." A somewhat selectively interpreted
Gramsci supplants Lenin (and Mao) as the principal authority for a re-
formed revolutionary strategy in which spontaneous, "cultural" formations
and practices (e.g., the "new social movements") are stressed over those of
the vanguard party (or, alternately, the/oco) embarked on its quest for the
massification of revolutionary doctrine.3 In this spirit, Rowe and Schelling
echo Mariategui's advocacy of a politics of myth (154). (Although, curiously,
they have virtually nothing to say about the Shining Path insurgency in
Peru — a movement that claims, at any rate, to have put such a politics
into effect.)
Insofar as the traditional left in Latin America simply replicated the lib-
eral elite's dismissal of popular culture as a throwback to a "barbaric" pre-
modernity, this more recent demand for a left cultural politics has every
justification. Certainly, it has highlighted the critical need of the left to
question its own racial and sexual politics. But in placing the emphasis on
culture and "hegemony," such thinking risks sidetracking the criticism of
the Old Left's historic tendency to endorse nationalism and populism as
multiclass political strategies. This, in my view, is the key question con-
fronting any mass-based oppositional movement — and not only in Latin
America. The need for a cultural politics, for "hegemony" in this sense,
cannot — as Gramsci understood perfectly well — be taken as preempting
the need for a clear-sighted class politics.
Rowe and Schelling seem, to a degree, conscious of this danger, at least
as measured by their sharp critique of populism and nationalism in the
case of Peronism, getulisrno, aprismo, and the Partido Revolucionario In-
stitucional (PRI). Like the left-oriented Latin American critics and theo-
rists upon whose work they rely, however, the authors of Memory and Moder-
nity seem to have no clear sense of what the progressive alternative might
be. Vague talk of "democracy" and the necessarily "dispersed" character of
popular cultural loci of opposition become, given the need for a vigorously
historical and class analysis of the present conjuncture, little more than
postmodernist phrasemongering. In this respect, it seems to me striking
that Rowe and Schelling can, on the one hand, criticize the former Sandin-
ista government in Nicaragua for its "mixed economy" policy of conces-
sions to private capital and, on the other, single out FSLN cultural policy
for blanket praise, without at least speculating on a possible connection
 2O4 PITFALLS OF HYBRIDITY

between the two. Were not the poetry workshops and the literacy cam-
paigns, for all their progressive aspects, governed by the same nationalist/
populist ideology that justified, in the name of national sovereignty and
the "patria," economic sacrifice and austerity for those whose "culture"
was being celebrated? It is this sort of political, indeed historical, question
that Memory and Modernity, enclosed in its radically culturalist sociology,
is prevented from posing.

1992
 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Brazilian Critical Theory and the

Question of Cultural Studies

Two things set me thinking about the conjuncture named in the title of
this essay. One was a meeting I had in 1992 with a Brazilian social scientist
on a research leave at a Boston-area university who was eager to compile a
bibliography of "cultural studies" titles to take back with him to Brazil. He
had been given the job of obtaining this information by several colleagues
back home, among them a well-known social and political analyst whom I
inferred to be Octavio lanni. In a very private, almost secretive tone, it was
confided to me that at least some left intellectuals in Brazil were having
doubts about Marxism and were curious whether "cultural studies" might
be a radical alternative. Together with an anthropologist friend at my own
university, I did the best I could to provide the desired list of titles. But 1
was nervous about it, both because the request had cast me in the role of
the "metropolitan" intellectual granting a "third-world" counterpart access
to the latest and most "advanced" intellectual commodity and because I my-
self was and remain skeptical of much of the intellectual work that often
goes under the name of "cultural studies." To compound the irony of my
position, then, I presented my Brazilian colleague with a list of titles, to-
gether with a warning to be very cautious — "tenha muito cuidado" — with
their contents.

205
 2O6 BRAZILIAN CRITICAL THEORY AND CULTURAL STUDIES

The second event was the recent publication, in English translation, of a

collection of essays by the Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz.1 I had known
and admired Schwarz's essays in their Portuguese originals for some time,
especially the long essay entitled "Cultura e Politica, 1964-69." But my re-
reading of Schwarz did more than refresh my memory. It was positively
revelatory and convinced me that Schwarz is, notwithstanding the relative
paucity of his published work, the most important Latin American critic
of his generation. It struck me, moreover, that the theoretical positions
mapped out in essays such as "Culture and Politics" and "Nationalism by
Elimination" are, despite the absence of the buzzwords themselves, impor-
tant contributions to the current debates regarding questions of postmoder-
nity, postcoloniality, and, indeed, "cultural studies" itself. Thinking back to
my quandary over how to respond to my Brazilian friend's interest in cul-
tural studies, I was both chagrined to realize that Schwarz had been left off
my proffered list but also gratified to have discovered, however belatedly,
what should have been my accompanying caveat: not just "muito cuidado"
but a pointed reference to "as ideiasfora do lugar," or, indeed, to Schwarz's
mode of cultural criticism itself not only as a Brazilian alternative but even
perhaps as a possible foil to the cultural studies paradigm as such. It is this
latter possibility in particular that I wish to explore in what follows.
But, "misplaced idea" or not, what is entailed by the said paradigm of
"cultural studies"? The names on my list had included critics once associ-
ated with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (whence the rubric
itself derives) or "Birmingham school," above all Raymond Williams and
Stuart Hall; North America-based critics who have worked on mass and
popular culture more or less in the Birmingham style, including Andrew
Ross, John Fiske, Constance Penley, and Janice Radway; Arjun Appadurai
and others associated with the journal of the Society for Transnational Cul-
tural Studies, Public Culture; the "science-as-culture" critiques formulated
by people such as Donna Haraway and James Clifford; and, in the area of
Latin Americanism, the work, say, of Nestor Garcia Canclini, Jose Joaquin
Brunner, and the metropolitan-based writings of William Rowe and Vi-
vian Schelling, George Yiidice, Jean Franco, Marc Zimmerman, Maria Ce-
leste Olalquiaga, and others.
But, beyond the obvious concern for "culture" as opposed merely, say,
to "literature," what, if anything, joins these various strands together? Here
I would point to two shared theoretical modulations: The first and most
visible is the suspension of the categories of aesthetic judgment that un-
derlie the hierarchy of cultural values — "high," "low," "middle brow," and
 BRAZILIAN CRITICAL THEORY AND CULTURAL STUDIES 2(>7

the like — in the traditional practice of the humanistic criticism. Thus, the
afternoon soap opera or the gossip column become no less valid as objects
of critical analysis than novels or poems. In this regard there appears to
occur a gravitation of humanistic studies toward the critical methodolo-
gies of the social sciences. And yet, "cultural studies" is not just a new name
for the sociology of culture. For this disciplinary shift is at the same time a
movement from the opposite direction as well, suggesting that what is un-
der way is a more general reordering of disciplinary boundaries themselves.
In the work of an anthropologist such as Clifford, for example, it is explic-
itly denied that in studying "culture" the social scientist places himself or
herself outside the space of the cultural. 2 The work of the cultural analyst
and critic drops its "strong" epistemological claim to objectivity and con-
cedes its own, sometimes problematic status as a cultural intervention. Cul-
ture moves from the right-hand side of the subject/object binarism to bracket
the relationship as a whole. Here, then, the conventional social-scientific
orientation toward culture as object of empirical study moves more in the
direction of the humanistic disciplines, in which culture has been theorized
as an essentially hermeneutic realm — one of "discourses," "meanings," "nar-
ratives," and so on— that the work of the critic not only "studies" but in-
terprets and even "resignifies."
It would be an error, however, to suppose that these trends have all em-
anated from the "metropolitan" intellectual circles in which issues of mass
culture have assumed so high a profile in recent years. Take, for example,
the work of Garcia Canclini, a Mexico-based social and cultural theorist.
In an essay also recently published in English translation, Garcia Canclini
proposes that the fundamental conceptual oppositions that have long dom-
inated cultural criticism in Latin America — not only high versus low but
modern versus traditional, center versus periphery, foreign versus autochtho-
nous— have lost their purchase on contemporary reality.3 A "global re-
structuring of society and politics" (31) has undermined the older cultural
paradigm linked to dependency theory. Rather than continuously refer-
ring back to a "patrimony," or a site of fixed cultural essence or identity,
culture now becomes simply a process of "reconversion," of constant "ne-
gotiation" and "hybridization" across the multiple political, economic, and
ethnic divisions of Latin American societies.
Here, in fact, Garcia Canclini openly asserts what is often merely an un-
conscious implication of European and North American cultural studies,
namely, that culture, in freeing itself from the purportedly precultural so-
cial structures that had previously furnished the criteria for its conceptual-
 208 BRAZILIAN CRITICAL THEORY AND CULTURAL STUDIES

ization and critique, becomes, in the words of Rowe and Schelling (whose
Memory and Modernity largely follows on the work of Garcia Canclini),
"the decisive area where social conflicts are experienced and evaluated."4
Not only the center/periphery opposition but, in Garcia Canclini's words,
the very "idea of community" as the "abstraction of a cohesive national
state" (40) have become obsolete. Extrapolating from this we might then
go on to add, as perhaps its third dimension, the general tendency of cul-
tural studies not merely to insist on the globalization of culture—such that,
let us say, sushi bars become as familiar a part of life in Seattle as in Tokyo
but still retain their "Japanese" identity—but on its de- or postnational-
ization. That is, cultural nationalism itself, based on a logic in which "cul-
ture" is (or, in a postcolonial setting, would some day become) a predicate
of "nation," grows outmoded in the face of processes that have rendered
culture so fungible, so fluid and freefloating a "sign system," that the very
spatial fixity of categories such as "nation" can no longer contain it. If any-
thing, this relation is reversed: it is now "culture," as a generative, symbolic
process, that predicates "nation."
It is in connection with this third, postnationalist dimension of cultural
studies—its rethinking of culture as a reality that has transcended the limi-
tations of the nation-state—that Schwarz's work in critical theory becomes
especially pertinent. In his essay "Brazilian Culture: Nationalism by Elimi-
nation" (which first appeared in Brazil in 1986), Schwarz takes up the phe-
nomenon of the seemingly "imitative nature" of Brazilian cultural life, ar-
guing in an ingenious twist that the very perception of foreign imitation as
a problem is ideological, reflecting the Brazilian elite's historical alienation
from the culture of the masses it exploits. The problem of imitation is, ac-
cording to Schwarz, a false one because it "concentrates its fire on the rela-
tionship between elite and model whereas the real crux is the exclusion of
the poor from the universe of contemporary culture" (16). In the course of
this argument, Schwarz notes the widespread opposition of contemporary
intellectual radicalism in Brazil to the cultural nationalism that character-
ized the Goulart years on the grounds that the reality of globalized culture
now makes this goal an anachronism. "The argument," writes Schwarz,

is irrefutable but it must be said that in the new context an emphasis on the
international dimension of culture becomes no more than a legitimation of
the existing mass media. Just as nationalists used to condemn imperialism
and hush up bourgeois oppression, so the antinationalists invoke the
authoritarianism and backwardness of their opponents, with good reason,
while suggesting that the reign of mass communication is either
 BRAZILIAN CRITICAL THEORY AND CULTURAL STUDIES 2O9

emancipatory or aesthetically acceptable [But] the imposition of foreign

ideology and the cultural expropriation of the people are realities which do
not cease to exist just because there is mystification in the nationalists'
theories about them. (5)

One sees immediately here the implicit challenge to the theoretical revi-
sions of Garcia Canclini and perhaps to cultural studies generally. It is one
thing to deny that culture emanates from a national "patrimony," but to pro-
ceed, as does Garcia Canclini, directly from this to the affirmation of the
total globalization and fungibility of culture and of the obsolescence of a
cultural critique centered on "fixed," structural inequalities such as impe-
rialism and the state appears merely to be a replacement of one mystifica-
tion by another.5 To be sure, its defenders may challenge the idea that cul-
tural studies is, as Schwarz claims of the Brazilian antinationalists, "no more
than a legitimation of existing mass media": is this not once again to por-
tray the "reign of mass communications" as a monolithic "culture indus-
try" a la Adorno and Horkheimer, when in fact the very point of cultural
studies was to rethink the cultural sphere itself as a contested and contestable
one, characterized not only by the brainwashing effects of commercial and
state propaganda but just as much by the subversive "reconversions" of the
consumers themselves? Perhaps so. Yet the thrust of Schwarz's critique of
what he terms the "mass media modernists" is that even in such seemingly
oppositional practices as "reconversion" there persists a Utopian faith in
the power of a globalized culture to stand in for the emancipatory social
aims that cultural nationalism once looked to the "nation" to carry out.
Both cultural nationalism and a postnationalist cultural studies rest on a
common ideological ground insofar as both think culture, whether "patri-
monial" and fixed or "transcultural" and decentered, in isolation from its
economic basis in labor and class relations. The leap from cultural nation-
alism to the deterritorialized world of constant border crossings and cul-
tural hybrids remains no less a confinement within an effectively reified
notion of culture as a strictly symbolic, spiritualized realm. If cultural stud-
ies discovers within this realm a power to subvert dominant cultural forms,
this in no way undoes the effects of this reification. As Schwarz says, "It is
a question of choosing between the old and new error, both upheld in the
name of progress" (ibid.).
I have spoken of "reification" here, mindful that Schwarz himself seems
to avoid the term. Nor, for that matter, does the term "alienation" make
any prominent appearance in the essays of Misplaced Ideas. Nevertheless, I
think it must be clear that it is precisely these concepts that constitute the
 21O BRAZILIAN CRITICAL THEORY AND CULTURAL STUDIES

point of departure for Schwarz's mode of cultural critique. Given his intel-
lectual ties to the tradition of the Frankfurt school and Adorno in particu-
lar, this should come as no surprise. The point here, however, is to note
how, by forcefully posing anew the question of culture's alienated charac-
ter in the present social and historical context—what he bluntly terms the
"exclusion of the poor from the universe of contemporary culture" (16) —
Schwarz throws into high relief a dimension of cultural studies that goes
almost entirely unremarked in the course of present-day "debates." For,
however justly cultural studies may claim to have freed the concept of cul-
ture from its bondage to "essentialist" categories such as the "nation," the
price it pays for this undoubted liberation would seem to be the total if of-
ten unconscious acquiescence in its alienation. In his essay "The Affirma-
tive Character of Culture," Marcuse wrote of a

fairly widespread usage of the concept of culture, in which the spiritual

world is lifted out of its social context, making culture a (false) collective
noun and attributing (false) universality to it. This ... concept of culture,
clearly seen in expressions such as "national culture," "Germanic culture,"
or "Roman culture," plays off the spiritual world against the material world
by holding up culture as the realm of authentic values and self-contained
ends in opposition to the world of social utility and means. Through the
use of this concept, culture is distinguished from civilization and
sociologically and valuationally removed from the social process.6

It is this concept of culture that Marcuse dubs "affirmative" and in which,

according to him, the alienation of labor and social life generally in bourgeois
society finds perhaps its most seductive form of ideological compensation.
Now, cultural studies, having emerged in the wake of the anti-"humanist"
revolutions of Althusser and Foucault, will naturally have nothing to do
with the antediluvian notions of "spirit," "authentic values," and the like.
Thus, it may seem perverse to suggest any affinity between "affirmative
culture" and the conceptual object of cultural studies. Still, despite the fact
that it eschews the conventionally "humanist" discourse of culture in pref-
erence, say, for a culture that embodies "resistance" or "hegemony" or for
culture as the site of a struggle over "meanings," the "culture" of cultural
studies strikes me as no less "sociologically and valuationally removed from
the social process" (95).
This is certainly the case with Garcia Canclini, for whom culture has
been narrowed down to little more than the object of the purely descrip-
tive norms of positivist sociology. The fact that Garcia Canclini adds a cer-
 BRAZILIAN CRITICAL THEORY AND CULTURAL STUDIES 211

tain theoretical novelty to this object by stipulating its "deterritorialized"

and effectively semiotic rather than semantic property or by proclaiming
the total reordering of cultural space itself in the wake of "global restruc-
turing" does nothing to alter its ultimately reifying effect. (Insofar as it is
unable to think culture-as-object except in a conventionally empiricist sense,
cultural studies, notwithstanding its epistemological relativism, may even
be considered to represent a step backward from the classically "humanist"
affirmative concept of culture analyzed by Marcuse.) The deterritorialization
of culture in no way alters the alienated condition of the social whole of
which it is in integral part. "Transculturation" does not equal the transalien-
ation of culture. And Garcia Canclini's references to what would appear to
be radical transformations on the level of culture's material base suffer from
the same sort of vagueness and grandiosity that afflict so much of the cur-
rent shoptalk regarding "postmodernity," "late capitalism," "postindustrial
society," and other notions: in the end, there seems to be little if any con-
vincing evidence that such "global restructurings" as have actually occurred
add up to a rupture of truly epochal proportions.7 As to Garcia Canclini's
claim that the concepts of a capitalist periphery and a cohesive national
state have now become outmoded, even if only as concerns patterns of cul-
tural production and consumption — this strikes me as Utopian almost to
the point of the delusional.
But if the fundamental drawback of cultural studies is its tendency to
reify culture, to falsely divest it of its alienated, negative determination,
why, the question may be asked, turn to a critic like Schwarz for the anti-
dote? Why not resort directly to Frankfurt school-style "Critical Theory"
as the critical alternative?
In the first place, to elevate "Frankfurt" over "Birmingham" has its own
serious drawbacks as well. For it will be recalled that Adorno, Marcuse, and
company, in the wake of European fascism and disappointments with both
the Popular Front and "existing" Soviet socialism, proposed to restore neg-
ativity to the culture whose affirmative character they so relentlessly exposed
through the purely abstract, hypothetical, and nonpolitical subversions of
the modern "work of art." Frankfurt school critique, in its historical de-
spair, could only answer the false promises of industrialized culture with
the unfathomable and ineffable negations of the aesthetic avant-garde. I
have argued elsewhere that much of the radical impulse behind cultural
studies stems from a sometimes poorly understood but nevertheless totally
comprehensible exasperation with the left-aestheticism of the Frankfurt
 212 BRAZILIAN CRITICAL THEORY AND CULTURAL STUDIES

school and its many local offshoots.8 If nothing else, the experience of the
1960s inaugurated a state of permanent skepticism regarding the supposed
emancipatory role of vanguard aesthetics.
But Schwarz, despite sharing the Frankfurt school's hostility to the de-
based values of capitalist mass culture, does not share its radical aestheti-
cism. And herein lies his genuine importance as a critical theorist. To the
classical Marxist critique of capitalist forms of reification and alienation,
Schwarz joins not only the critique of the culture industry but likewise the
critique of imperialism — something he most assuredly did not learn from
Adorno! For Schwarz, as for Marx, the road to the disalienation of culture
and social life itself is that of social, not artistic, revolution, and its potential
agents are the exploited classes themselves, in Brazil and elsewhere. This
potential is something that the Frankfurt school tradition, albeit perhaps
sorrowfully, had long since regarded as a falsehood. The possibility that
the repeated disappointments of social revolutionary hopes in metropoli-
tan Europe and North America might be internally linked to the structure
of imperialism itself— something Lenin was among the first to propose
and which achieved a certain general currency in the 1960s with the popu-
larization of Maoism — did not enter the thinking of an Adorno, or if it
did, it found no echo there. Schwarz, on the other hand, premises critique,
if not on a note of revolutionary optimism, then nevertheless on the clear
recognition that it is the contradictions of capitalism as a world system —
its necessarily uneven and unequal division of labor and wealth — that de-
termines the course of development, whether political or cultural.
This, of course, is a perspective that Schwarz shares with an entire gen-
eration of radical intellectuals in Latin America and the third world. What
distinguishes Schwarz in this respect is his consistently critical attitude to-
ward the radical nationalisms and populisms that, beginning in the 1950s
and 1960s, proposed themselves as the revolutionary alternative to imperi-
alist domination. As we have seen in his treatment of the "imitation" com-
plex of Brazilian culture, Schwarz insists on rendering a class critique not
only of imperialism but of its nationalist antagonists as well. (It is unfortu-
nate to have to say so, but this rigorous fidelity to the demands of class
analysis, even when the answers it points to are highly controversial, makes
Schwarz a rarity in both North and Latin America.) The terms of this left
critique of anti-imperialist populism and cultural nationalism emerge al-
ready fully elaborated in "Culture and Politics, 1964-1969," an essay now
more than twenty years old. Here Schwarz straightforwardly points to the
Brazilian Communist Party's policy of alliance with the "patriotic" national
 BRAZILIAN CRITICAL THEORY AND CULTURAL STUDIES 213

bourgeoisie as a principal factor in the counterrevolution of 1964 and as

crucial to the "mistake ... at the centre of Brazilian cultural life since 1950"
(130). The essay proceeds to a critical exploration of a wide variety of cul-
tural and political developments in post-1964 Brazil (literature, architec-
ture, theater), the acuteness and subtlety of which invite comparison with
Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire. "Culture and Politics" remains, for me, the
best piece of critical prose on the "sixties" there is.
It is important to point out, however, that, even while exposing the lim-
itations imposed on cultural practices by the politics of populism and na-
tionalism, Schwarz does not simply condemn these practices out of hand.
"Culture and Politics" is, in large part, an effort to identify and analyze what
Schwarz calls the "disparity between reformist practice and its cultural re-
sults" (133). An example of one such disparity is the Movement for Popu-
lar Culture (MFC), active in Pernambuco before 1964 and out of which
grew Paulo Freire's radical pedagogy. Schwarz suggests a comparison of
this development (noting its immediate suppression by the military gov-
ernment) to the subsequent literary and artistic phenomenon of tropical-
ismo, in which there can be seen a superficially similar practice of bringing
together the rural and the urban, the traditional and the modern, and so
on. Despite this similarity, however, there is, says Schwarz, "nothing less
tropicalist" than Freirian pedagogy. "Why? Because the opposition be-
tween its terms can be resolved—people can be made literate. For the trop-
icalist image, on the contrary, it is essential that the juxtaposition between
old and new—either between content and technique or within the content
itself—should make something absurd, should be an aberration" (142).
That is, although both the activities of the MPC and tropicalism count as
"culture" in a broad sense, for the former, "transculturation" takes on a
genuinely emancipatory character, whereas for tropicalism it has become a
mere formality, no longer concretely linked to progressive social ends. The
crucial thing here is that Schwarz is able to draw this distinction, while the
"cultural studies" approach of a Garcia Canclini is effectively limited to
observing the abstract generality of transculturation, drawing from this,
moreover, the ultimately false conclusion that transculturation itself ren-
ders outmoded the very notion of integrating "old and new." Cultural stud-
ies, that is, looks not a little like a continuation of tropicalism as Schwarz
portrays it — suggesting, perhaps, that it operates within an analogous if
not identical set of political and ideological constraints.
To reframe this in terms of nationalism, we might say that, whereas
Schwarz, along with cultural studies, rejects the ideology itself, he is careful
 214 BRAZILIAN CRITICAL THEORY AND CULTURAL STUDIES

not to dismiss but rather to assess in a more dialectical spirit the cultural
expressions to which it has given rise, expressions in which, because he
analyzes them in class terms, he can look for the prefigurations of a higher
form of, shall we say, postimperialist social being.
Schwarz has taken what, in my days as a graduate student in Latin Amer-
ican literature, was still known as "dependency theory" and, without sacri-
ficing any of its sociohistorical content, raised it, as a theory of literature
and culture, to a qualitatively higher level. This he has done by applying
the core, dialectial insights of Marxism to the riddle that dependency the-
ory consistently ran up against but could not solve: what was or should be
meant by an autonomous "national culture" in social settings such as Brazil,
given that everything "Brazilian" was in some sense the derivative product
of other "nations" — Portugal, France, England, the United States — as well
as other, non- or pre-Brazilian cultures — the Guarani, the African, and so
on? If the result of colonization was to condemn local culture to the status
of a "copy," how could this local culture achieve originality? Dependency
theory proposed many provisional answers to this riddle: the originality of
local culture was said to reside in virtually everything produced after the
magical date of national independence; in romanticism, modernismo, or
the "boom"; in the truly "native," non-European cultures of the society; or
even in the fact of cultural hybridity itself, or what has come to be known
as the "transcultural." But no matter how far one went in the "subtraction"
or "elimination" (to use Schwarz's terms) of the foreign from the national,
the presence of the copy was still to be detected. In reaction against what
thus seemed a case of reductio ad absurdum, many of those schooled in
dependency theory finally embraced the idea, made available by poststruc-
turalist thinkers such as Derrida and Foucault, that originality, indeed, the
very belief in a "fixed," stable identity, was a myth, that hybridity was the
truth of all culture, and the more hybrid, in a sense, the better. "Depen-
dency" might even be a sort of advantage.
Faced with Schwarz's key insight into the ideology of "imitation," both
dependency theory and, as its would-be antithesis, the theoretical decon-
struction of the original/copy binarism, are revealed as being, in effect, "crit-
ical" versions of this same elite ideology. Writing in the essay "Misplaced
Ideas," Schwarz notes how, "in order to analyse a national peculiarity," he
is "driven to reflect on the colonial process, which was international' (30).
Schwarz, that is, thinks of the "national" as a product — social, economic,
historical — of the international, the global. The part is thought through
the whole. "Dependency," it now becomes apparent, could never, despite
 BRAZILIAN CRITICAL THEORY AND CULTURAL STUDIES 215

its formal grasp of imperialism and colonialism as global and systematic, do

otherwise than think the whole through the part, the international through
the national. Those who currently protest the anachronism of the "national"
as such, reducing all to a question of the "transcultural" and global hybrid-
ity, merely think the whole without the part, apparently "solving" the prob-
lem by conceptual fiat but in fact condemning themselves to theoretical and
political irrelevance.
Schwarz, by all reports a modest man, would no doubt object to this
judgment of his importance by pointing to his own debt to tradition — that
of Antonio Candido, of course, and even of Machado himself. True enough.
But the great advantage afforded by Schwarz's insight into the riddle of the
"copy" is that, read backward through it, this tradition, including the con-
siderable mass of empirical data accumulated by dependency theory, can
now take on a new relevance. In "Beware of Alien Ideologies," Schwarz
writes: "It is a fatal consequence of our culture of dependency that we are
always interpreting our reality with conceptual systems created somewhere
else, whose basis lies in other social processes" (39). In essays such as these,
I think we have the beginnings of a "conceptual system" based in the "social
processes" of Brazilian, Latin American, perhaps even postcolonial, reality
itself. This is an achievement that "postcolonial" critics and theorists of far
greater celebrity than Schwarz cannot even remotely claim for themselves.
One further question still remains to be touched on here, namely, is
there a connection to be drawn between Schwarz's critical-theoretical per-
spective and its Brazilian context as perhaps the former's "condition of pos-
sibility"? I suggest there is, insofar as Brazil has been the site, over the last
one or two generations, of major developments in the social critique of
imperialism and "dependency." (Think, here, of the tradition of Cardoso,
Marini, lanni, Fernandes, Weffort, et al.) Thus Schwarz becomes heir to
precisely the more progressive aspects of Brazilian populism and radical
nationalism even while acting as one of their most persuasive critics. But
perhaps there is still more to it than this. In the title essay of Misplaced
Ideas, Schwarz, with reference once again to the Brazilian "imitation" com-
plex, writes as follows:

Our ideological life ... did vary: at a distance, it followed in the steps of
Europe The tenacity of the basic social relationships [the "combination
of latifundia and unfree labour"] and the ideological volatility of the "elite"
were both a part of the dynamics of capitalism as an international system,
the part that it was ours to live out. The latifundia, little changed, saw the
baroque, neoclassic, romantic, naturalist, and modernist cultures pass by,
 216 BRAZILIAN CRITICAL THEORY AND CULTURAL STUDIES

cultures which in Europe reflected immense transformations in its social

order. We could well suppose that here they would lose their point, which
in part did occur. But this loss, to which we were condemned by the
working of the international system of colonialism, condemned the
working of that very system itself. (27-28)

This same "international system of colonialism" has, of course, undergone

significant changes; and contemporary Brazil, no longer dominated by the
reality of latifundia and slavery, boasts an industrial infrastructure and a
mass communications sector that make its place within this "system" look,
if less than "central," then more than "peripheral." But Brazil also "boasts"
one of the lowest wage levels in the world and continues to witness mas-
sive peasant migrations and even the horrific violence of modern capitalis-
m's encounter with tribal society. Thus, if the imported cultural paradigms
of the past could, in the Brazil of the latifundia, discover the material con-
ditions best positioned to expose their false universality, how much more
so today, in a Brazil in which all the extremes of contemporary world capi-
talism present themselves so emphatically? Brazil may be as fertile a soil as
any for the fetishized thinking of "cultural studies." But the very fact that
the contradictions of modern imperialism take so manifest a form here
surely makes these fetishes all that easier to "mis(dis)place."

1993
 Notes

1. Introduction
1. For a systematic and compelling treatment of this phenomenon see Mary Louise Pratt,
Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).
2. See, on the question of exoticism, Renata M. Wasserman, Exotic Nations: Literature
and Cultural Identity in the United States and Brazil (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).
3. A possible exception that comes to mind, of course, is Said's Orientalism (New York:
Knopf, 1993), at least as concerns a "West/East" axis. In a more recent work, Culture and Im-
perialism, Said has sought to broaden the focus so as to include a North/South dimension but
with what seems to me to be mixed results.
4. I allude here to Peter J. Rabinowitz's highly useful work Before Reading: Narrative
Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).
5. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 59.
6. For further discussion of this latter connection see chapter 5, "The 'Boom' Novel and
the Cold War in Latin America."
7. I note, however, that Van Gosse, in his 1993 study Where the Boys Are (London,
Verso) argues that in fact the Cuban Revolution did exert a definite political and cultural
sway over a significant segment of the North American population.
8. For more on the first North American reception of Hopscotch, see my "Cortazar and
Postmodernity: New Interpretive Liabilities," in Julio Cortazar: New Readings, ed. Carlos J.
Alonso (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
9. See, again, chapter 5, "The 'Boom' Novel and the Cold War in Latin America."
10. See The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge:
MTT Press, 1987), 7.
11. For more on the effects of "Theory" on Latin American literary studies see Sara Castro-
Klaren, "Situations," Latin American Literary Review, 20, no. 40 (July-December 1992): 26-29.
12. For a discussion of this latter development see chapter 8, "Aesthetics and the Ques-
tion of Colonial 'Discourse.'"
13. See Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 1-2.
14. The term "countercanon" is Aijaz Ahmad's; see In Theory.
15. In-text references are to an original version of the essay published in Modern Fiction
Studies, 35, no. 1 (spring 1989): 11-28. The essay has since been republished in Beverley's
Against Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), chapter 4, 69-86.
16. See Latin American Perspectives, 18, no. 3 (summer 1991): 15-31.
17. See "Rigoberta's Secrets," in Latin American Perspectives, 18, no. 3 (summer 1991):
32-50.
18. See Against Literature, 2-3.
19. See boundary 2 \8, no. 2, (1991): 1-21.
20. See, for example, "Marginality and the Ethics of Survival," in Universal Abandon?
The Politics of Postmodernism, ed. Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

217
 218 NOTES TO CHAPTERS 2~4

1988); for my own commentary on this essay, see chapter 14, "Postmodernism and Imperial-
ism: Theory and Politics in Latin America."
21. Santiago Colas, in "What's Wrong with Representation: The Case of the Latin Amer-
ican Testimonio" (unpublished manuscript), points to a "desire for immediacy, for an era-
sure of the distance that bears with it representation" as "smuggled in" here by Yiidice. About
Yudice's claim that the testimonial serves as a direct means of establishing "solidarity," Colas
notes the implication that "solidarity can somehow — perhaps, even, can only—be estab-
lished without representation." "Yiidice creates the false impression that since [Menchii] is
not an elite ... she must not be 'speaking for or representing the people'. But of course, one
could not be elite and still adopt a representative position — indeed, Menchu highly values
this quality in her father, as numerous references to it indicate."
22. See "Resistant Texts and Incompetent Readers," Latin American Literary Review, 20,
no. 40 (July-December 1992): 104-8.
23. See, for example, Mary Louise Pratt, who, in Imperial Eyes, claims to have "sought
ways to interrupt the totalizing momentum of both the study of genre and the critique of
ideology. These projects are both anchored, as I am, in the metropolis; to concede them au-
tonomy or completeness would reaffirm metropolitan authority in its own terms" (5). And
one should note here as well Amy Kaminsky's highly illuminating discussion of this "North/
South" crisis — here as instanced by the problem of how to translate the English term "gen-
der" (and thereby the "sex/gender" distinction) into Spanish. See "Translating Gender," in
Reading the Body Politic: Feminist Criticism and Latin American Women Writers Today (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 1-13.
24. See SamirAmin, Empire of Chaos (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1992), 114.
25. See In Theory, chapter 1, "Literary Theory and 'Third World Literature': Some Contexts."
26. For this discussion see my forthcoming work, Writing Off Revolution: A Critique of
Cultural Politics (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press).

2. Teaching Caribbean Texts: Outline for a Counterhegemonizing Pedagogy

1. An original version of this essay was presented as a lecture at a 1984 conference held
by the Society for the Study of Contemporary Hispanic and Lusophone Revolutionary Liter-
ature at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
2. Newsweek (November 7, 1983): 69.

3. "People without History": Central America in the

Literary Imagination of the Metropolis
1. Mary Louise Pratt, "Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrows Saw
in the Land of the Bushmen," in "Race," Writing and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 146.
2. See Writer and Critic and Other Essays, trans. Arthur Kahn (London: Merlin Press, 1970).
3. Joan Didion, Salvador (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983).
4. Denis Johnson, The Stars at Noon (New York: Knopf, 1986).
5. See /, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, trans. Ann Wright, ed.
Elisabeth Burgos-Debray (London: Verso, 1984), and Fire from the Mountain: The Making of
a Sandinista, trans. Kathleen Weaver (New York: New American Library, 1985).
6. One Day of Life, trans. Bill Brow (New York: Vintage, 1983), 160.

4. Narrating the trujillato

1. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World
Facism (Boston: South End Press, 1979), 243-44.
2. See, for example, Jose Israel Cuello, Roberto Cassa, and Ruben Silie, "50 anos de historia
 NOTES TO CHAPTERS 5~6 219

dominicana," in America Latino: historia de media sigh, vol. 2 of Centroamerica y el Caribe,

ed. Pablo Gonzalez Casanova (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1981), 467-98.
3. Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 21.
4. Miguel Barnet, Una Gestapo en America (Santo Domingo: Alfa y Omega, 1981).
5. Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, De abril en adelante (Santo Domingo: Bibilioteca Taller, 1975).
6. Pedro Verges, Solo cenizas hallavas (bolero) (Valencia, Spain: Promoteo, 1980).

5. The "Boom" Novel and the Cold War in Latin America

1. Marshall Herman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1982).
2. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, trans. Arthur Holdham-
mer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
3. Lawrence H. Schwartz, Creating Faulkner's Reputation: The Politics of Modern Liter-
ary Criticism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988).
4. James Murphy, The Proletarian Moment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).
5. Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993).
6. The classic argument for "magical realism" — or the real maravilloso—is to be found
in Alejo Carpentier's original 1949 preface to El reino de este mundo.
7. Gerald Martin, Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twenti-
eth Century (London: Verso, 1989), 239.
8. Angel Rama, "El 'boom1 en perspectiva," in Mas alia del boom: Literatura y mercado,
ed. David Vinas (Mexico: Marcha Editores, 1981), 53 (my translation).
9. Jaime Mejia-Duque, Narrativa y neocoloniaje en America Latina (Bogota: Ediciones
Tercer Mundo, 1977), 86.
10. I refer here to the bitter controversy surrounding the jailing of poet Heberto Padilla
by the Cuban government for purportedly subversive activities.
11. In Mas alia del boom, 147-64 (my translations throughout).
12. See chapter 1, "Introduction."
13. For much of the information in what follows I rely on Alfredo Wagner Berno de
Almeida's highly informative study Jorge Amado: Politico e Literatua (Rio de Janeiro: Editora
Campus, 1979).
14. Cited in Wagner, forge Amado, 240 (my translation).
15. See Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991). For further commentary on
Sommer see chapter 12, "Nation and Narration in Latin America: Critical Reflections."
16. Wagner cites the criticism of Paulo Dantas, who sees in Gabriela not a process of
"maturation" but rather one of "accommodation," implying a "substantial loss in the most
primitive and authentic qualities [of Amado as] novelist" (248). Jacob Gorender, in Wagn-
er's citation, writes that "in Gabriela there disappears the revolutionary sense of the whole
that characterizes Amado's earlier works: the social conflicts are superficial, and the workers
come to occupy a very remote and secondary plane" (249; my translations). Gorender agrees
that in Gabriela Amado transcends some of the schematism of Os subterraneos da liberdades,
but not without paying the price of a political shift to the right.

6. Sport as Civil Society: Argentina's Generals Play Championship Socccer

1. Andre Gunder Frank, Crisis: In the Third World (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981).
2. For a theoretical sketch of these concepts and their interrelations see Antonio Gramsci,
"The Intellectuals," in Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and G. N. Smith (New
 220 NOTES TO CHAPTER /

York: International Publishers, 1971): "What we can do ... is to fix two major superstruc-
ture! 'levels': the one that can be called 'civil society,' that is the ensemble of organisms com-
monly called 'private,' and that of 'political society' or 'the State.' These two levels corre-
spond on the one hand to the function of 'hegemony' which the dominant group exercises
throughout society and on the other hand to that of 'direct domination' or command exer-
cised through the State and 'juridical' government" (12).
3. I shall hereafter use the term "culture" to refer to those discourses, practices, and
institutions that in a given social formation have acquired the official designation of be-
ing "cultural" as opposed to, for example, political. For purposes of exposition 1 explicitly
avoid reference to the concept of culture as developed, for example, by anthropology and
semiotics.
4. See Gunder Frank, Crisis: In the Third World, 265-66, for a partial catalog of this
legislation.
5. See Latin American Economic Report, 6, no. 7 (February 17, 1978): 56.
6. See Latin American Political Report (LAPR), 12, no. 21 (June 2, 1978): 165-66; and
LAPR, 13, no. 25 (June 30, 1978): 196-97.
7. LAPR, 12, no. 41 (October 20, 1978): 327.
8. LAPR, 12, no. 17 (May 5, 1978): 129.
9. According to some sources, the "national proposal [a "political structure envisaged by
the army" and referred to as the Movimiento de Opinion Nacional (MON)] will include a "law
of forgiving," by which the armed forces hope to induce collective amnesia concerning the
repression employed during the "war against subversion." LAPR, 12,12 (March 24, 1978): 90.
10. LAPR, 12, no. 25, 196-97.
11. See Laclau's essay "Towards a Theory of Populism," in Politics and Ideology in Marx-
ist Theory (London: New Left Books, 1977), 143-99.
12. Of course, one cannot base such a conclusion entirely on the interpretation of a
single text. Lacking a much more extensive investigation of the "discourse of power" cover-
ing the entire historical (and, as yet, unfinished) epoch in question, conclusions must re-
main hypothetical. Nevertheless, it should be noted that the provisional conclusions in-
dicated by this reading of the World Cup conjuncture (including Videla's discurso) are
in accord with much of the critical and historical thinking on the authoritarian state in
Latin America and in the southern cone in particular. This is especially so in the case of
Laclau; see his conclusion to the key essay on populism cited in note 12: "The capacity
of Latin American power blocs restructured under the hegemony of monopoly capital
to absorb the democratic demands of the masses is extremely limited [The] con-
sequence ... is that today the dominant blocs do not even attempt to take popular initia-
tives— that is to say, to articulate popular-democratic ideology into the discourse of power"
(193).
13. Gunder Frank, Crisis: In the Third World, 276.

7. Hegemony or Ideology? Observations on Brazilian Fascism and

the Cultural Criticism of Roberto Schwarz
1. See "Hacia un modelo general de la sensibilidad social literaturizable bajo el Fas-
cismo," in Fascismo y experiencia literaria: reflexiones para una recanonizacion, ed. Hernan Vi-
dal (Minneapolis: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literature, 1985), 1-63 (all trans-
lations are my own).
2. Citations are of the English translation of the essay, "Culture and Politics in Brazil,
1964-1969," in Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, trans. John
Gledson (London: Verso, 1992), 126-59.
 NOTES TO CHAPTERS 8-1O 221

8. Aesthetics and the Question of Colonial "Discourse"

1. See Rolena Adorno, "Nuevas perspectivas en los estudios literarios coloniales his-
panoamericanos," Revista de critica Hteraria latinoamericana, 14, no. 28 (1988): 11-27 (all trans-
lations are my own).
2. See, on this question, my own Modernism and Hegemony: A Materialist Critique of
Aesthetic Agencies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), xxvii-xliv.
3. See chapter 92 of Diaz, Historia verdadem de la conquista de la Nueva Espana (Mexico
City: Editorial Porriia, 1974), 174-75.
4. See Hernan Cortes, Cartas de relation de la conquista de Mexico (Madrid: Espasa Calpe,
1945), 72.
5. See Rolena Adorno, "Arms, Letters and the Native Historian in Early Colonial Mex-
ico," in 1492-1992: Re/Discovering Colonial Writing, ed. Rene Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 216.
6. See, for example, chapter 157, p. 376, of the Historia verdadera, in which the author
mentions the graffiti broadsides ("pasquines") written on the walls of Cortes's house in
Coyoacan: " . . . and others said that Cortes had us more conquered than the Mexico that we
ourselves had conquered, and that we ought better to be called the conquered rather than the
conquerors of Hernan Cortes" (my translation).
7. See Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Moscow:
Progress Publishers, 1968), 66.
9. Phenomenology and Colony:
Edmundo O'Gorman's The Invention of America
1. See Louis Uchitelle, "Mexico City Journal: In the Aztec's Land, Mixed Hurrahs for
Columbus," New York Times, September 6, 1992.
2. See Edmundo O'Gorman, The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature
of the New World and the Meaning of Its History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958),
3. See Robert C. Solomon, Continental Philosophy since 1750: The Rise, and Fall of the
Self, vol. 7 of A History of Western Philosophy (New York and London: Oxford University
Press, 1988), 135.
4. See "Existentialism," in Marxism and Human Liberation, ed. E. San Juan Jr., trans.
Henry F. Mins (New York: Delta, 1973), 247.
5. Here I leave aside Heidegger's distinction between "being there" (Dasein) and "be-
ing" (das Seiende) as irrelevant to the present argument.
6. See Georg Lukacs, The Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (Atlantic Highlands,
N.J.: Humanities Press, 1981), 493-94.
10. Split Nationalities
1. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). An original version of this essay
appeared as the foreword to Border Writing.
2. See, especially, Jameson's "Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capi-
talism," Social Text 15 (fall 1986): 62-87, and Said's Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978)
and Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993). For a more detailed critique of these
and other "anti-imperialist" postmodernisms, see chapter 14, "Postmodernism and Imperi-
alism: Theory and Politics in Latin America."
3. See Neil Lazarus's Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction (New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1990), Barbara Harlow's Resistance Literature (London: Methuen, 1987), and
John Beverley and Marc Zimmerman's Literature and Politics in Central American Revolu-
tions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).
 222 NOTES TO CHAPTERS 11-12

4. See Neil Larsen, Modernism and Hegemony: A Materialist Critique of Aesthetic Agen-
cies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).
5. See Modernism and Hegemony, xxxvii-xliv, and chapter 14, "Postmodernism and Im-
perialism: Theory and Politics in Latin America."
6. See Roberto Fernandez Retamar, Caliban and Other Essays, trans. Edward Baker (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
7. See Enrique Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation, trans. Aquilina Martinez and Christine
Morkovsky (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1985).
8. See my "Cortazar and Postmodernity: New Interpretive Liabilities," forthcoming in
Julio Cortazar. New Readings, ed. Carlos J. Alonso (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
9. See Ronald Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari (London: Routledge, 1989), 103.
10. Samir Amin, Euwcentrism, trans. Russell Moore (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1989).
11. See chapter 5, "The 'Boom' Novel and the Cold War in Latin America."

11. Indigenism, Cultural Nationalism, and the Problem of Universality

1. In Gayatri Spivak, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Gary Nelson and
Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 284.
2. See Neil Larsen, Modernism and Hegemony: A Materialist Critique of Aesthetic Agen-
cies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990) and — in chapter 14 of this volume—
"Postmodernism and Imperialism: Theory and Politics in Latin America."
3. Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, trans. Russell Moore (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1989).
4. Quoted in Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" 294.
5. See Jose Carlos Mariategui, "Literature on Trial," in Seven Interpretive Essays on Pe-
ruvian Reality, trans. Marjory Urquidi (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988), 182-287.
6. In Profession 91 (New York: Modern Languages Association, 1991), 36.
7. See Manuel Scorza, Redoblepor Rancas (Barcelona: Plaza & Janes, 1987), 9-10.

12. Nation and Narration in Latin America: Critical Reflections

1. Doris Sommer, "Amalia: Valor at Heart and Home," in Foundational Fictions: The
National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1991), 83-113.
2. See Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 8-9.
3. See Roberto Schwarz, "Nationalism by Elimination," in Misplaced Ideas: Essays on
Brazilian Culture, trans. John Gledson (London: Verso, 1992), 5.
4. See Samir Amin, Empire of Chaos, trans. W. H. Locke Anderson (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1992), 26-27.
5. See the essays collected in Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Rout-
ledge, 1990).
6. See Social Text, 15 (fall 1986): 69.
7. John Beverley and Marc Zimmerman, Literature and Politics in Central American Rev-
olutions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), ix.
8. See Neil Larsen, "DetermiNation: Postcolonialism, Poststructuralism and the Prob-
lem of Ideology," forthcoming in Dimensions of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Fawzia Afzal-Khan
and Kalpana Sheshadri-Crooks (Durham: Duke University Press).
9. The terms are those of Homi K. Bhabha. See "Signs Taken for Wonders: Ques-
tions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817," in "Race," Writ-
ing and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985),
163-84.
 NOTES TO CHAPTERS 13- 14 223

10. References to Martin Fierro are to the edition edited by Luis Sainz de Medrano (Madrid:
Catedra, 1987).
11. See Georg Lukacs, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke
Mander (London: Merlin Press, 1963), 40.
12. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, facundo (Buenos Aires: Espasa Calpe, 1970), 23.
13. In Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 61.

13. Latin American and Postmodernism: A Brief Theoretical Inquiry

1. See, inter alia, the work of Angel Rama, Antonio Cornejo Polar, Jean Franco, Alejan-
dro Losada, Nelson Osorio, Josefina Ludmer, and Julio Ortega.
2. For a more complete development of this idea, see my Modernism and Hegemony: A
Materialist Critique of Aesthetic Agencies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).
3. Sec Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Snow (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1983).
4. See Jiirgen Habermas, "Modernity—an Incomplete Project," in The Anti-Aesthetic:
Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), 11.
5. Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," in The Anti-Aesthetic,
113-18.
6. For a critique of The Stars at Noon, see chapter 3, " 'People without History': Central
America in the Literary Imagination of the Metropolis."
7. Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Mod-
ern Latin American Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985).
8. See Fernandez Retamar, Caliban: Apuntes sobre la cultura en nuestra America (Mex-
ico City: Editorial Diogenes, 1972) and Para una teoria de la literatura hispanoamericana y
otras aproximaciones (Havana: Casa de las Americas, 1975).
9. See, in this respect, my remarks on testimonial in the Introduction.

14. Postmodernism and Imperialism: Theory and Politics in Latin America

1. Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," in The Anti-Aesthetic: Es-
says on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), 112.
2. Stanley Aronowitz, "Postmodernism and Politics," in Universal Abandon? The Politics
of Postmodernism, ed. Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 50.
3. Chantal Mouffe, "Radical Democracy," in Universal Abandon? 52.
4. Ernesto Laclau, "Politics and the Limits of Modernity," in Universal Abandon? 66-67'.
5. Jean-Francois I.yotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans., Geoff Bennington and Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
6. Laclau, "Politics and the Limits of Modernity," 77.
7. Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Scientific and Utopian (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press,
1975), 46.
8. See Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat from Class: A New 'True' Socialism (London:
Verso, 1986); especially chapter 4, "The Autonomization of Ideology and Politics."
9. See, for example, Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Rad-
ical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), 97-105.
10. Georg Lukacs, The Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (Atlantic Highlands,
N.J.: Humanities Press, 1981), 395.
11. "The two moments — that of reason and that of its other — stand not in opposition
pointing to a dialectical Aufhebung, but in a relationship of tension characterized by mutual
repugnance and exclusion." Jiirgen Habermas, "The Entry into Postmodernity: Nietzsche as
Turning Point," in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cam-
bridge: MIT Press, 1987), 103.
 224 NOTES TO CHAPTER 14

12. In the area of Latin American studies these include, inter alia, George Yiidice, John
Beverley, Marc Zimmerman, Howard Winant, and Doris Sommer.
13. See the introductory chapter to my Modernism and Hegemony: A Materialist Critique
of Aesthetic Agencies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).
14. "The exterior is constituted by other discourses." Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy, 146.
15. See Lenin, What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1973): "All worship of the spontaneity of the working class movement, all belit-
tling of the role of the 'conscious element', of the role of Social-Democracy, means, quite in-
dependently of whether he who belittles that role desires it or not, a strengthening of the influence
of bourgeois ideology upon the workers" (39). "Since there can be no talk of an independent
ideology formulated by the working masses themselves in the process of their movement, the
only choice is—either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for mankind
has not created a 'third' ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms,
there can never be a non-class or an above-class ideology). Hence to belittle the socialist ide-
ology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois
ideology. There is much talk of spontaneity. But the spontaneous development of the working
class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology" (40-41).
16. Laclau, "Politics and the Limits of Modernity," 79-80.
17. Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration (London: Verso, 1987), 217.
18. "Interview with Cornel West," in Universal Abandon!'27).
19. See Social Text, 15 (fall 1986): 69.
20. See Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New
Left Review 146 (July-August 1984): 86-114.
21. Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1983), 241.
22. Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York and London:
Methuen, 1987), 209.
23. See Universal Abandon? 149-66.
24. See Craig Owens, "The Discourse of Others: Feminism and Postmodernism," in The
Anti-Aesthetic, 57-82.
25. See George Yiidice, "Marginality and the Ethics of Survival," in Universal Abandon?
220.
26. See Rigoberta Menchti, /, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, trans.
Ann Wright, ed. Elisabeth Burgos-Debray (London: Verso, 1984).
27. See Horacio Cerutti-Guldberg, "Actual Situation and Perspectives of Latin American
Philosophy for Liberation," Philosophical Forum 20, nos. 1-2 (fall-winter 1988-89): 47.
28. See Enrique Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation, trans. Aquilina Martinez and Christine
Morkovsky (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1985), 158-60.
29. Roberto Fernandez Retamar, Para una teoria de la Hteratura hispano-americana (Ha-
vana: Casa de las Americas, 1975).
30. See chapter 13, "Latin America and Postmodernity: A Brief Theoretical Inquiry."
31. See Aijaz Ahmad, "Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the 'National Allegory,'"
Social Text, 17 (fall 1987): 3-27.
32. See James Petras and Michael Morley, U.S. Hegemony under Siege: Class, Politics
and Development in Latin America (London: Verso, 1990), especially chapters 1 and 5; and
Latin America in the Time of Cholera (New York: Routledge, 1992), especially chapters 1
and 7.
33. See, for example, Benjamin Arditi, "Una gramatica postmoderna para pensar lo ac-
tual," Cultura, politica y democratizacion, ed. Norbert Lechner (Santiago de Chile: FLACSO/
 NOTES TO CHAPTERS 15-16 225

CLACSO/ICI, 1987), 169-87; Alcira Argumedo, Los laberintos de la crisis: America Latin: Poder
transnational y comunicaciones (Buenos Aires: ILET/Punto Sur, 1984); Atilio A. Boron, Es-
tado, Capitalismo, y Democracia en America Latina (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Imago Mundi,
1992); Jose Joaquin Brunner, "Notas sobre la modernidad y lo postmoderno en la cultura
latinoamericana," David y Goliath, 17, no. 52 (September 1987): 30-39; Arturo Escobar, "Imag-
ining a Post-Development Era? Critical Thought, Development and Social Movements," So-
cial Text, 31/32 (1992): 20-56; The Making of Social Movements in Latin America: Identity,
Strategy and Democracy, ed. Arturo Escobar and Sonia E. Alvarez (Boulder: Westview Press,
1992); Nestor Garcia Canclini, Culturas hibridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la mod-
ernidad (Mexico: Grijalba, 1990); Norbert Lechner, La conflictiva y nunca acabada construc-
tion del orden deseado (Madrid: Siglo veintiuno and Centro de Investigaciones Socioldgicas,
1986); Jose Nun, La rebelion del coro: estudios sobre la racionalidad politico y el sentido comun
(Buenos Aires: Editores Nueva Vision, 1989). See also New Social Movements and the State in
Latin America, ed. David Slater (Amsterdam: CEDLA, 1985).
34. See Adolfo Sanchez Vasquez, "Marxism in Latin America," Philosophical Forum, 20,
nos. 1-2 (fall-winter 1988-89): 114-28.
35. Greg Dawes, Aesthetics and Revolution: Nicaraguan Poetry, 1979-1990 (Minneapolis;
University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 25.
36. See, for example, Orlando Nunez and Roger Burbach, Democracia y revolution en las
Americas (Managua: Editorial Vanguardia, 1986).
37. Literature and Politics in Central American Revolutions (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1990); "The Politics of Latin American Postmodernism," in Beverley's Against Litera-
ture. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 103-22.
38. Cited in Petras and Morley, Latin America in the Time of Cholera, 134.
39. Roque Dalton, Miguel Marmol, trans. Kathleen Ross and Richard Schaaf (Williman-
tic, Conn.: Curbstone Press, 1982), 119.

15. The Cultural Studies Movement and Latin America: An Overview

1. See chapter 13, "Latin America and Postmodernism: A Brief Theoretical Inquiry,"
and chapter 14, "Postmodernism and Imperialism: Theory and Politics in Latin America."
2. See Gary Nelson, "Always Already Cultural Studies: Two Conferences and a Mani-
festo, "Journal of the Midwest Modern Languages Association, 24, no. 1 (spring 1991): 24-38.
3. See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a
Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).
4. See, to take only one random example, Donna Haraway's remark that "biology is the
fiction appropriate to objects called organisms; biology fashions the facts 'discovered' from
organic beings." Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of
Modern Science (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 5.
5. See John Brenkman, Culture and Domination (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1987).
6. See Patricia Hills "s useful review of the show "Bleeding Hearts, Borders and Post-
modernism," in Art New England, 21 (December/January 1991-92): 35-39.

16. Transcultural/Subpolitical: Pitfalls of "Hybridity"

1. William Rowe and Vivian Schelling, Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin
America (London: Verso, 1991).
2. See Neil Larsen, Modernism and Hegemony: A Materialist Critique of Aesthetic Agen-
cies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), chapter 3.
3. See chapter 14, "Postmodernism and Imperialism: Theory and Politics in Latin
America."
 226 NOTES TO CHAPTER I/

17. Brazilian Critical Theory and the Question of Cultural Studies

1. Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, trans. John Gledson et
al., ed. John Gledson (London: Verso, 1992).
2. See James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Lit-
erature and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
3. Garcia Canclini "Cultural Reconversion," in On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary
Latin American Culture, ed. George Yudice, Jean Franco, and Juan Flores (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1992), 29-43.
4. William Rowe and Vivian Schelling, Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin
America (London: Verso, 1991), 12. For further commentary see chapter 16, "Transcultural/
Subpolitical: Pitfalls of'Hybridity.'"
5. "The dense web of cultural and economic decisions leads to asymmetries between
producers and consumers and between diverse publics. But these inequalities are almost never
imposed from the top down, as is assumed by those who establish Manichaean oppositions be-
tween dominating and dominated classes, or between central and peripheral countries." Garcia
Canclini, "Cultural Reconversion," 34 (my emphasis).
6. In Herbert Marcuse, Negations, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968),
94-95.
7. See, in this regard, Alex Callinicos's Against Postmodernism (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1990), especially chapter 5, "So What Else Is New?" 121-53.
8. See chapter 15, "The Cultural Studies Movement and Latin America: An Overview."
 Index

Abstract Expressionism, 6, 65, 68 Appadurai, Arjun, 206

Achebe, Chinua, 51 aprismo, 203
Adorno, Rolena, 103-9 Arbenz, Jacobo, 116
Adorno, Theodor, 64, 191-94, 210-12; and Arditi, Benjamin, 179
Horkheimer, 191,209 Argentina, 20; fascism and, 81-92, 126, 128;
aestheticism, 156, 192 nationalism and, 86, 89-91, 140-41,
aesthetics, 103-9 144-45, 148, 150-52
"affirmative culture," 210-11 Arguedas, Jose Maria, 122, 137-38;
agency, 170, 212; aesthetics and, 156-57 Quechua poetry of, 202; Yawar Fiesta,
Ahmad, Aijaz, 19, 141-42, 177; In Theory, 138
4, 16 Argueta, Manlio, 176; Un dia en la vida, 51
alienation, 209, 211-12 Argumedo, Alcira, 179
allegory, 147-50, 172 Aristotle, 105
Allende, Salvador, 71 Aronowitz, Stanley, 165-66, 184
Alliance for Progress, 47 Asturias, Miguel Angel, 67-68
alterity, 162, 172, 176-77, 181; colonial Athayde, Tristao, 76
Latin American literature and, 103, authoritarianism. See fascism
106-9 Avalos, David, 195
Althusser, Louis, 95, 105, 146, 152, 167-68, avant-garde, 211-12
182,200,210
Althusserianism. See Althusser, Louis Barnet, Miguel, 57; Biografia de un
Amado, Jorge, 4, 20, 73-78; Gabriela, cravo e cimarron,S, 161-62
canela, 73, 75-77; Os subterraneos da Barthes, Roland, 126
liberdade, 73-74, 130; Sao Jorge de Baudrillard, Jean, 126
Ilheus, 74-75; Seara Vermelha, 73; Beckett, Samuel, 191
Terras do sem fim, 73-75 Beijing opera, 194
Amalia. See Marmol, Jose Benjamin, Walter: The Origin of German
Amin, Samir, 16, 19, 142; Eurocentrism, Tragic Drama, 147, 150
128-29, 134 Bergson, Henri, 180
analectics, 175-76 Berman, Marshall: All that Is Solid Melts into
Andrade, Joaquim Pedro de: "Macunaima," Air, 65
98 Beverley, John, 8, 15, 21, 121, 195; Against
Andrade, Mario de, 67, 73 Literature, 11-13; (with Zimmerman)
Andrade, Oswald de: Manifesto antropofago, Literature and Politics in Central
122 American Revolutions, 144, 181-84;
Angola, 27 "The Margin at the Center," 9-11;
anticommunism, 116, 168, 171. See also "The Politics of Latin American
Cold War Postmodernism," 181, 183
antropofagia, 121-22, 124 Birmingham school, 190, 194, 196, 206, 211

227
 228 INDEX

Bishop, Maurice, 32 Centra de Cultura Popular, 96

Blanco Aguinaga, Carlos, 21 Certeau, Michel de, 123
Bogue, Ronald, 127 Cerutti-Guldberg, Horacio, 175
Bolivar, Simon, 130 Chamorro, Violeta, 183-84
"boom" in Latin American fiction, 3, 8, 122, Chile, 4, 20; fascism and, 82, 91, 93
130, 202, 214; modernism and, 67-68; Chinese revolution, 134
theories of, 68-71 Chomsky, Noam, and Herman, Edward:
border culture, 209. See also Hicks, D. Emily The Washington Connection, 56
Borge, Tomas, 183 Christian Democratic Party, 91
Borges, Jorge Luis, 3, 67-68, 125, 159-61, Cinema Novo, 97-98
183 civil society, 82-85, 87-88, 93-94, 143
Boron, Atilio, 179 Cixous, Helene, 174
Brazil, 205-6, 212-16; abertum and, 91, class, 203; analysis of culture and, 109, 214;
96-97; Communist Party of, 74-75, culturally constructed nature of,
97; cultural nationalism and, 141; 192-93; reductionism and, 192
fascism and, 83-84, 91, 95-99; literary Clifford, James, 206
exceptionalism of, 73; slavery in, 216 Colas, Santiago: "What's Wrong with
Brecht, Bertolt, 98, 194; "alienation effect" Representation," 218 n. 21
and, 37 Cold War, 4, 13, 17,65-78, 116, 130;
Brenkman, John, 194 modernism and, 194
Brooks, Cleanth, 66 colonial Latin American literature, 103-9;
Brunner, Jose Joaquin, 179, 206 concept of "discourse" and, 103-5;
Byrne, David, 196 historicism and, 104, 106-7; "new
paradigm" in criticism of, 103-9
Cabezas, Omar, 51 colonialism, 133. See also imperialism
Caldwell, Erskine, 66 Columbus, Christopher, 114; "Letter to Luis
Caliban, See Fernandez Retamar, Roberto de Santangel," 1
Cambaceres, Eugenio: En la sangre, 72 communism, 158,168-69, 179
Camus, Albert, 77 Concha, Jaime, 21,106
Candido, Antonio, 21, 215 "consumptive production," 122
cannibalism. See antropofagia Cortdzar, Julio, 6, 67-68, 130; Hopscotch
"canonical decolonization," 7, 15-16 (Rayuela), 3, 5, 61, 125; Libra do
capitalism, 81, 93, 129, 134, 158, 168-69, Manuel, 125
179; center and periphery of, 207, 211, Cortes, Hernan: "Cartas de relaci6n," 1,
216; mass culture and, 191; 108-9
schizophrenia and, 127; tribalism and, critical theory See Frankfurt school
216; as world system, 212 Cuauhtemoc, 109
Cardenal, Ernesto, 121 Cuban revolution, 3-4, 17, 27, 69-71, 77,
Cardoso, Eernando Enrique, 215 122
Caribbean literature, 28-38 Cuevas, Agustin, 21, 106
Carpentier, Alejo, 4, 51, 67; El reino de este cultural nationalism, 119-21, 123-24,
mundo, 219 n. 6; Los pasos perdidos, 127-30, 134-35,138, 141-42, 171,
159 208-9; in Latin America, 159-60
Cartesianism, 111-12 "cultural politics," 180,192-95, 201-3
Castro, Fidel, 77 cultural studies, 20, 119-20, 189-94,
Castro-Klare"n, Sara: "Situations," 217 199-201, 206-12; Brazil and, 205,
n. 11 212-16; Latin America and, 189,
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. 194-98,202-4
See Birmingham school culturalism, 134, 136-37, 139, 201-2, 204
 INDEX 229

culture: epistemology and, 194; fascism and, Engels, Friedrich, 109. See also Marx, Karl
83; hermeneutics and, 207; hybridity Ercilla, Alonso de: La Araucana, 108-9
and, 103, 123, 125, 198-204, 207, 209, Escobar, Arturo, 179
214-15; "postnationalism" and, 208-9; essentialism, 165, 173, 200, 210
power relations and, 201; semiotic Estado Novo, 130
theory of, 200 Eurocentrism, 7, 105-6, 114, 128-29,
culture industry, 209; in Brazil, 122 132-34, 137-39
existentialism, 176
Da Cunha, Euclides: Os sertoes, 73
Dalton, Roque, 145; Miguel Mdrmol, 162, Fabian, Johannes, 44
184-85 fascism, 168-69, 211; Argentina and, 81-92,
Dantas, Paulo, 219 n. 16 93; Brazil and, 83-84, 91, 95-99;
Dante: Divine Comedy, 11 "homeostatic function" and, 94-95,
Dario, Ruben, 121, 182 97-98; Latin America and, 178;
Dasein, 112-14 literary culture and, 94-95
D'Aubuisson, Roberto, 42 Faulkner, William, 6, 65-66, 68
Dawes, Greg: Aesthetics and Revolution, 181 feminism, 171, 177; narrative and, 50-51
deconstruclion, 159-61, 163, 190, 214 Fernandes, Florestao, 215
Deleuze, Gilles, 133, 169, 176; (with Fernandez Retamar, Roberto, 21, 123,
Guattari) Anti-Oedipus, 127 133-34, 175-76; Caliban, 36, 70, 162
de Man, Paul, 21; "The Rhetoric of Fiske, John, 206
Temporality," 147, 150 Flores Galindo, Alberto, 199
dependency theory, 207, 214-15 Foley, Barbara: Radical Representations, 66
Derrida, Jacques, 21, 135, 165, 169, 176, 214 Fonseca, Carlos: Ideario, 182
Desai, Anita, 121 foquismo, 96, 178-79, 195, 203
deterritorialization, 127-28, 211 Foucault, Michel de, 106, 133, 165, 169, 171,
developmentalism, 92, 107 174-76, 190-91, 194-95, 200-201,
Dews, Peter, 171 210,214
dialectical materialism, 158, 161, 164, "foundational fictions." See Sommer, Doris
167-68, 175, 185 foundationalism, 165, 169, 177
dialectics. See dialectical materialism Franco, Jean, 21, 195,206
dialogical, the, 106-7 Frankfurt school, 12, 191-95, 210-12
Diaz del Castillo, Bernal, 2; Hisloria Freire, Paulo, 96, 213
verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva Freudianism, 145-47, 152, 200
Espana, 108-9 Freyre, Gilberto, 121
Dickens, Charles: Hard Times, 11 FSLN. See sandinismo
Didion, loan: Salvador, 41, 45-47 Fuentes, Carlos, 3, 6, 67-68
Diedrich, Bernard: "Images from an
Unlikely War," 32-35 Gadhafi, Mu'ammar, 177
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 113 Galeano, Eduardo, 114, 176
disciplinary boundaries: the humanities, the Gallegos, Romulo: Dona Barbara, 159
social sciences and, 207 Gaos, Jose, 110
Dominican Republic, 55-63 Garcia Canclini, Nestor, 179, 195, 206,
Dussel, Enrique, 123; Philosophy of 207-11,213
Liberation, 134, 162, 175-76 Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, 3, 6, 67-68, 71,
120, 122, 202; El general en su
Echeverria, Esteban, 59 laberinto, 130; El otono del patriarca,
Eisenstein, Sergei, 194 77, 159, 161; One Hundred Years of
El Salvador, 20, 184-85 Solitude (Cien anos de soledad), 5, 125
 23O INDEX

Garcilaso de la Vega, el Inca, 2 Hobson, John Atkinson, 27

getulismo, 203 homophobia, 171
Goethe, I. S. von, 176 Horkheimer, Max. See Adorno, Theodor
Gold, Mike, 66 Hostos, Eugenio Maria de, 59
Gonzalez-Echevarria, Roberto: The Myth Humboldt, Alexander von: Cosmos, 111
and the Archive, 21; "Reflections on Husserl, Edmund, 111-15
my Crystal Ball," 20-21; The Voice of hybridity. See culture
the Masters, 159-62
Good Neighbor Policy, 116 lanni, Octavio, 205, 215
Gorender, Jacob, 219 n. 16 Icaza, Jorge, 130
Gosse, Van: Where the Boys Are, 217 n. 7 ideology, 99, 114-15, 127; journalism and,
Goulart, Joao, 97, 208 43-45; violence and, 45-46
Gramsci, Antonio, 82, 95, 169, 194, 201, imperialism, 91-93, 120-21, 128, 130, 133,
203; Prison Notebooks, 219-20 n. 2 139, 177, 184, 209, 212, 214-16; in
Grenada, 32-35 Central America, 41, 43, 46, 49;
Guatemala, 116 opposition and critique of, 164, 172,
Guerra, Rui: "Os fuzis," 98 177, 180, 195,212,215
Guevara, Ernesto "Che," 57, 121, 178, 181, Inca Viracocha, 1
195-96 indigenism, 135-39
Guilbaut, Serge: How New York Stole the "indirect apologetics," 169-70
Idea of Modern Art, 65-66 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 142,
Guimaraes Rosa, Joao, 67-68, 73 183
Gunder Frank, Andre, 81, 91 Invention of America, The. .SeeO'Gorman,
Gutierrez Alea, Tomas, 20 Edmundo
Iranian revolution, 142
Habermas, Jiirgen, 6, 98, 156-57 Irigaray, Luce, 174
Hall, Stuart, 190, 194, 206 Ixtlilxochitl, Alva, 108
Halperin Donghi, Tulio: "Nueva narrativa y
ciencias sociales hispanoamericanas en James, William, 169
la decada del sesenta," 71-73 Jameson, Fredric, 2, 19, 108, 120, 156, 158;
Haraway, Donna, 206; Primate Visions, "Third World Literature and the Era
225 n. 4 of Multi-national Capitalism," 143,
Harlow, Barbara, 121 172-73, 177
Hebdige, Dick, 194 Jimenes Grullon, Juan Isidro: Una Gestapo
Hegel, G. W. F., 110-11, 167 en America, 56-60
hegemony, 99, 169-70, 193, 203; crisis in, Johnson, Denis: The Stars at Noon, 41,
81-82,84,90,93-94 47-51,158
Heidegger, Martin, 111-15, 169, 176, 221 n. 5 Joyce, James, 6; Ulysses, 13
Heine, Heinrich, 26
Herbst, Josephine, 66 Kahlo, Frida, 195-96
Hemingway, Ernest, 33-34; Islands in the Kaminsky, Amy: Reading the Body Politic,
Stream, The Old Man and the Sea, 33 218 n. 23
Henriquez Urena, Pedro, 21 Khoury, Elias, 121
"hermeneutic map," 2, 29-30 Khrushchev, Nikita, 169; speech to the 20th
hermeneutics, 111, 113 Party Congress of the CPSU, 74-75
Hernandez, Jose: Martin Fierro, 140-41, Kipnis, Laura: "Feminism: The Political
144-46, 148—52; gender relations and, Conscience of Postmodernism?" 174,
149 177
Hicks, D. Emily: Border Writing, 119, kitsch, 195-96
124-31 Kubitschek, Juscelino, 76
 INDEX 231

Lacan, Jacques, 128, 144,145, 147, 200 Marmol, Miguel, 184-85

Lacanianism. See Lacan, Jacques Marti, Jose, 59, 176, 178, 181; "Nuestra
Laclau, Ernesto, 89, 95, 195, 220 n. 12; America," 37, 121
Mouffeand, 144, 165, 167, 182, Martin, Gerald, 21, 70
192-93; Hegemony and Socialist Martin Fierro. See Hernandez, Jose
Strategy, 169-70, 174 Marx, Karl, 167, 176, 179-80, 212; The
Nation, La, 87, 89 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Larsen, Neil: Modernism and Hegemony, Bonaparte, 93, 106, 213; and Engels,
19-20 167, 176
Lazarus, Neil, 121 Marxism, 105, 114-15, 128, 134, 146, 164,
Lechner, Norbert, 179 167-71, 179-80, 182, 185, 194, 205,
Lenin, V. I., 27, 97, 203, 212; What Is to be 214; dialectics and, 214; Latin
Done? 177, 224 n. 15 American literary criticism and,
Leninism, 19, 77, 164, 167-69, 178, 182 19-22; theory of culture and, 201
Leon-Portilla, Miguel, 110, 135 mass culture. See popular culture
Levinas, Emmanuel, 176 materialism, 113
liberalism, 106-7 Mejia-Duque, Jaime, 69
liberation theology, 175. See also Dussel, Menchu, Rigoberta, 8-10, 12, 14-15, 51,
Enrique; philosophy of liberation 145, 162, 174-77; /, Rigoberta Menchu,
Libya, 174 135-36
Losada, Alejandro, 21 Mexican muralists, 199
Ludmer, Josefina, 21, 141, 195, 199 Mexico, 3; revolution and, 72, 122
Lugones, Leopoldo, 150 Mignolo, Walter, 105
Lukacs, Georg, 19, 56, 99, 112-13, 192; The Miguel Marmol. SeeDalton, Roque
Destruction of Reason, 65, 168-69; Moctezuma, 1, 108-9
"The Ideology of Modernism," 150; modernism, 109, 150, 156-57, 160; canon
The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, and, 6-7, 13; ideology, politics and,
65; "Narrate or Describe?" 43-44 64-67; Latin America and, 67-68,155,
LuHsun, 177 160; Latin American literary criticism
Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 156, 166 and, 106; New Left and, 17-18; realism
and, 19
Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria, 20, 215 modernismo, 67, 214
Madonna, 195 modernity, 198; ontology and, 166
magical realism, 5, 67, 176 Monsivais, Carlos, 199
Mahfouz, Naguib, 121 Moreno Fraginals, Manuel: The Sugar Mill,
Mallarme, Stephane, 156 21
Mannheim, Karl, 115 Mouffe, Chantal, 166. See also Laclau,
Maoism, 212 Ernesto
Mao Zedong, 203 Movimento de Cultura Popular (Movement
macjuiladoras, 127-28 for Popular Culture; MFC), 95-96,
Marcuse, Herbert, 211; "The Affirmative 213
Character of Culture," 210-11 multiculturalism, 130, 133, 196
marginality, 171-72, 174, 177 Murphy, James: The Proletarian Moment, 66
Mariategui, Jose Carlos, 21, 72, 106, 121,
135-37, 178, 184, 203; "Literature on nation, the: global capitalism and, 214-15;
Trial," 21 literature and, 26—28; narration and,
Marinetti, F.'!'., 50 140-52. See also nationalism
Marini, Ruy Mauro, 215 national culture. See cultural nationalism
Marmol, Jose, 59; Amalia, 140-42, 145-46, national liberation movements, 142, 162,
148; gender relations in, 149 177
 232 INDEX

national security, doctrine of, 84 Petras, James, and Morley, Michael: Latin
nationalism: allegory and, 147—50; America in the Time of Cholera, 179,183-
Argentina and, 86, 89-91, 140-41, 84; US. Hegemony under Siege, 178-79
144-45, 148, 150-52; Brazil and, phenomenology, 111-16, 176; the "epoche"
208-9, 213, 215; "cultural pathology" in Husserlian, 111-12
and, 145-46, 152; ideology and, philosophy of liberation, 123, 175. See also
144-45, 152; imperialism and, 142; Dussel, Enrique
Latin America and, 72, 160-62, 203, Plekhanov, G. V., 194
210 Poma de Ayala, Felipe Guaman: New
naturalism, 43-45, 158, 161 Chronicle and Good Government,
Neruda, Pablo, 75 135-36
New Criticism, 13, 66, 105 Poniatowska, Elena, 176
New Left, 17,65 popular culture, 190-93; Latin America and,
new social movements, 177-79, 184, 203 195-204; liberal and elitist views of,
New York Intellectuals, 66 203; romantic and modernist myths
Newsweek, 32 of, 199-200
Nicaraguan revolution, 4, 20, 27, 181-84; popular-democratic, the, 94—95
ideology of culture and, 204; literacy Popular Unity, 82, 91
campaigns, poetry workshops and, populism, 91-92, 96, 178-80,195, 203,
203-4. See also sandinismo 212-13, 215; aesthetics and, 99; Latin
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 168-69, 181 America and, 160-62, 202
Nun, Jose, 179 positivism, 106, 210
postcoloniality, 215; literary studies and,
"occupation text," 36-38 132-34
O'Gorman, Edmundo: The Invention of postindustrial society, 211
America, 110-16 postmodernism, 7, 13, 50, 64, 109, 115,
Olalquiaga, Maria Celeste, 206 120-21, 133, 155-58, 206, 211; anti-
Old Left,194 imperialism and, 164, 171-76; Latin
Onetti, Juan Carlos, 4 America and, 159-63, 176-85, 189-90,
ontology, 111-13 194; philosophy and, 164-71
organic intellectuals, 178, 181 postmodernity. See postmodernism
Ortega, Daniel, 183 poststructuralism, 7,13, 105-6, 123-24,
Ortiz, Fernando, 121 126, 133-34, 147, 163, 165-66, 169,
other, the. See alterity 172-73, 176, 190, 193, 195, 200, 214
Owens, Craig, 174 Pratt, Mary Louise, 43-44; "Arts of the
Contact Zone," 136; Imperial Eyes, 217
Padilla, Heberto, 69 n. l , 2 1 8 n . 2 3
Palcy, Euzhan, 121 Prestes, Luis Carlos, 130
paralogy, 166 proletarian novel, 65-66, 130; Jorge Amado
Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI), and,73-76
203 proletariat, 167, 192
Partisan Review, 66 Puenzo, Luis: "La historica oficial," 20
Paz, Octavio, 121
Penley, Constance, 206 Quadros, Janio, 76
"people without History," 44-45 Queiros, Rachel de, 73
Pereira dos Santos, Nelson, 20; Vidas secas, 98 Quijano, Anibal, 114
Peron, Juan, 77
Peronism, 82, 203 Rabinowitz, Peter J.: Before Reading, 217 n. 4
Peru, 181 radical democracy, 166, 169-70
Perus, Francoise, 21 Radio Marti, 32
 INDEX 233

Radway, Janice, 206 Sarduy, Severo, 159

Rama, Angel, 121-22, 195; "El 'boom' en Sarlo, Beatriz, 21, 199
perspectiva," 69; Transculturadon Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino: Facundo, 59,
narrativa en America Latina, 21, 72
198-99, 202 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 76-77, 123; Nausea, 126
Ramirez, Sergio, 184 Schelling, Vivian. See Rowe, William
Ramos, Graciliano, 73 Schoenberg, Arnold, 191
rationalism. See reason Schwartz, Lawrence H.: Creating Faulkner's
realism, 19-20,64, 105, 109, 150, 157, 162, Reputation, 65-66
193; Brazilian literature and, 73-78; Schwarz, Roberto, 19, 21, 195, 199, 206,
Latin American literature and, 71-73; 208-16; "Beware of Alien Ideologies,"
proletarian and Popular Front, 65-66, 215; "Culture and Politics," 20, 95-99,
194; socialist, 194 206, 212-13; "Misplaced Ideas,"
reason, 165, 167-68 215-16; "Nationalism by
reification, 209,212 Elimination," 146, 206, 208; Urn
representation, 193-94 mestre naperiferia do capitalismo, 20
"resignification," 198, 202 Scorza, Manuel, 20; Redoble par Rancas (La
revolution: literature and, 25-28, 38; social guerra silendosa, vol. 1), 130, 137-38
vs. aesthetic, 212 Second International, 179-80
Revueltas, Jose: El luto humano, 72 Sembene, Ousmane, 177
Reyes, Alfonso, 21 semiotics, 190
Richard, Nelly, 195 sexism, 181
Rincon, Carlos, 21 Shining Path, 203
Roa Bastos, Augusto, 202; Yo, el Supremo, Sholokhov, Mikhail, 51
159 Sicard, Alain, 21
Rocha, Glauber: "Deus e diabo na terra do sixties, the, 213
sol" and "Terra em transe," 98 soccer. See World Cup
Rod6, Jose Enrique, 121; Ariel, 159 socialism, 168-69, 179, 192-93; Popular
romanticism, 214 Front, Soviet, 211
Romero, Oscar, 42 socialist realism, 72, 130
Rorty, Richard, 165, 174 Solanas, Fernando, 20
Ross, Andrew, 206 Solas, Humberto, 20
Rowe, William, 21; (with Vivian ScheUing) Solomon, Robert C, 111-12
Memory and Modernity, 197-204, 206, Sommer, Doris, 8, 15, 21; Poundational
208 Fictions, 76, 140-47, 149-50;
Rufinelli, Jorge, 21 "Rigoberta's Secrets," 9-10, 14
Rulfo, Juan, 4, 67-68; El llano en llamas and Somoza, Anastasio, 39, 160
Pedro Paramo, 202; orality and, 202 Sorel, Georges, 180
Russian revolution, 134 Soto, Pedro Juan: Usmail, 30
Soyinka, Wole, 121
Said, Edward, 120, 133; CAiltme and Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 172-74, !77;
Imperialism, Orientalism, 217 n. 3; The "Can the Subaltern Speak?" 133, 135
World, the Text, and the Critic, 173, spontaneity, 170, 177-78, 180-82, 184-85
177 Spottiswoode, Roger: Under Fire, 41-47
Sanchez Vasquez, Adolfo, 179-80 Stalin, Joseph, 74-75, 168
sandinismo, 12,91-92, 142, 181-84. Seealso Stallone, Sylvester, 40
Nicaraguan revolution state, the, 209; fascism and, 93; fascism in
Sandino, Agusto Cesar, 182, 195-96 Argentina and, 82-84, 88-90, 92
Sanjines, Jorge: "[.a sangre del condor" Stone, Oliver: Platoon, 40; Salvador, 41-47
Santo Domingo. See Dominican Republic structuralism, 105
 234 INDEX

subaltern, the, 173 Veloz Maggioio, Marcio: De abril en

subject: psychic, linguistic, discursive adelante, 56, 61-62
theories of, 200 Verdi, Giuseppe, 26
"subversive particularity," 177 Verges, Pedro, 26; Solo cenizas hallaras
(bolero), 62
Tate, Allen, 66 Vidal, Hernan, 21, 94-96, 98
Teatro Arena, 97-98 Videla, Jorge Rafael, 85, 87-90
telenovela, 202 Vietnam War, 4-6, 16-17, 40, 81
testimonial literature, 8-16,18, 72, 138, 176; Vtnas, David, 141
and postmodernism, 161-63 Virgin of Guadalupe, 198-99
Third International, 130, 180
Time, 32, 40 Wagner Berno de Almeida, Alfredo: Jorge
Todorov, Tzvetan, 123 Amado: Politico e literatura, 219 n. 13
Torrijos, Omar, 77 Wasserman, Renata M.: Exotic Nations, 217
transcuituration, 121-22, 124, 136, 138, n.2
198-99,209,211,213-14 Weffort, Francisco, 215
Traven, B., 130 Weltliteratur, 176
tropicalismo, 97-98, 213 West, Cornel, 171-72
trujillato. See Trujillo, Rafael Leonidas Wexler, Haskell: Medium Cool, 43
Trujillo, Rafael Leonidas, 55-63 White, Hayden, 108
Turner, Frederick Jackson, 116 Williams, Raymond, 190-91, 206
Wood, Ellen Meiksins, 167; The Retreat
unequal development, 177 from Class, 170
Union nicaraguense de oposicion (UNO), World Bank, 124
183 World Cup, 84-90
universalism, 119, 128-29, 131, 133-34, Wright, Richard, 66
138-39, 170-71
Uruguay, 93 Yale School, 21, 160-61
Yudice, George, 8, 174-75, 177, 195, 200;
Valenzuela, Luisa, 130; "Cambio de armas," "Testimonio and Postmodernism,"
125-26; Cola de lagartija, 128 9-10, 14
vanguard party, 203
vanguardismo, 67 Zenil, Nahum, 195
Vargas, Getulio, 73-74, 130 Zeno Gandia, Manuel: La charca, 30
Vargas Llosa, Mario, 3, 67-68,104 Zimmerman, Marc, 121, 206. See also
Vasconcelos, Jose, 121 Beverley, John
 Neil Larsen teaches Latin American literature as well as cultural and
postcolonial studies in the departments of modern languages and English
at Northeastern University. He is the author of Modernism and Hegemony:
A Materialist Critique of Aesthetic Agencies (Minnesota, 1990) and
publishes frequently in the areas of Latin American literature and literary
and cultural theory. His forthcoming book is Writing Off Revolution:
A Critique of Cultural Politics (Minnesota).