Latin American Cultural Studies: A Reader

Jens Andermann, Ben Bollig, Lorraine Leu, Daniel Mosquera, Rory O'Bryen, David Wood, Jens Andermann, Ben Bollig, Lorraine Leu, Daniel Mosquera, Rory O'Bryen, David Wood, Jens Andermann, Ben Bollig, Lorraine Leu, Daniel Mosquera, Rory O'Bryen, David M. J. Wood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351852517
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Featuring twenty-five key essays from the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (Traves/sia), this book surveys the most influential themes and concepts, as well as scouring some of the polemics and controversies, which have marked the field over the last quarter of a century since the Journal's foundation in 1992.

Emerging at a moment of crisis of revolutionary narratives, and at the onset of neoliberal economics and emergent narcopolitics, the cultural studies impetus in Latin America was part of an attempted intellectual reconstruction of the (centre-) left in terms of civil society, and the articulation of social movements and agencies, thinking beyond the verticalist constructions from previous decades.

This collection maps these developments from the now classical discussions of the 'cultural turn' to more recent responses to the challenges of biopolitics, affect theory, posthegemony and ecocriticism. It also addresses novel political constellations including resurgent national-popular or eco-nativist and indigenous agencies. Framed by a critical introduction from the editors, this volume is both a celebration of influential essays published over twenty five years of the Journal and a representative overview of the field in its multiple ramifications, entrenchments and exchanges.

War and Cultural Studies: Reflections on Recent Work in Peru and Argentina

WILLIAM ROWE

Memory and the Cultural World

At a recent festival of Quechua theatre in Peru, one of the plays took as its theme the widespread disappearance of people in the Emergency Zones, where the state is engaged in what is known as a dirty war with the forces of the Communist Part of Peru, better known as Sendero Luminoso. Disappearances have occurred over the past two decades in a large number of Latin American countries. How does one investigate their cultural effect? For a start, they imply a network of threats, silences and other invasions of violence into the web of symbolic production. In the play I refer to, the stage is divided into three simultaneous spaces: one of them shows a young man being taken away by the army; in the second, his family are weeping for the absent son; in the third, the dead man himself appears and recounts his experience. Obviously, the multiplication of spaces comes out of the need to recompose a divided reality, where memory, communication and knowledge have been broken into fragments.¹ What is most moving is perhaps the presence of the dead man on the stage; the dead, in this circumstance, are memory — and without the accumulations of memory there is no culture. Specifically, where there is no social memory there can be no ethics. Historically the state has presented itself as guarantor of order and meaning, offering itself, as Pedro Morandé shows, as a coherent body in the face of the chaos of discontinuity (Morandé 1987, 95–96). And yet if the state cannot exist without its representation of continuities, these are selective, since we find states engaged in the deliberate creation of social amnesia.

These conclusions are obvious, perhaps. But if the debate about cultural studies does not confront the question of memory and violence — military, social and symbolic — then it will become increasingly nostalgic and irrelevant. A study of social amnesia in the shantytowns of Córdoba, Argentina, during the last military government shows that memory does not survive without a social space where it can be articulated. The inhabitants remembered perfectly well the times before 1976, but the period of military government was a kind of blank space. The reduction of the capacity for memory even affected their personal lives. The researchers reached the conclusion that the main cause was the suppression of the usual contexts of communication: ‘the forms of continuity most affected were those connected with people’s ways of relating to each other, that is with symbolic processes, rather than with modes of economic reproduction…people did not get together any more, not even to play cards or to talk about football on a street corner…in the schools, the students were not allowed to have meetings or singing sessions during break, on pain of military intevention.’ Predominantly, though, the amnesia effect owed less to direct state intervention than to self-surveillance: ‘ “it was a society which patrolled itself” ’ (Mata et. al. 1988, 241–242).

The two examples given draw attention to a conflict between state and culture, not at the level of cultural policy [las políticas culturales] but at the more fundamental one of the cultural world and its bases. The term cultural world is the one used by Merleau-Ponty to refer to the way in which the composition of perceptions into a perceived world depends upon and contributes to a shared cultural world (Merleau-Ponty 1989, 23–25, 346–365). In the civil war in Peru, both material and cultural bases of Andean life are under threat of destruction, and in response the indigenous peasantry are inventing ways of reconstituting their universe. More precisely, in the Quechua play, it is a question of reinventing a space in which to reflect upon experience — without that the cultural field becomes simply a network of obediences. Under the Argentine military government, the suppression of social memory appears to have been carried out with considerable success. Quite probably, opposite examples could be found in each country — the aim is not to classify the historical processes. What I would like to suggest is that the study of culture needs to ask the question: what are the conditions of existence of a given cultural field? And in what ways is the cultural field in which we find ourselves currently changing? Clearly these are questions that can never fully be answered, especially the second one; but I believe they are vital for defining the bases for cultural studies.

The destruction of symbolic processes is not the exclusive property of states of open war. In an analysis of the first year of Carlos Menem’s government, Beatriz Sarlo has noted that this government imposes ‘the idea that politics consists merely in the taking of decisions and not in the construction of the alternatives within whose limits one chooses’; this diminution of the political sphere ‘ends up in a government that operates as if it was always having to confront states of emergency. That is exactly what happened with the sending of Argentine troops to the Gulf.’ The neutral, de-ideologising [desideologizante] appearance of the decisions hides something else, the imposition of a new rationalisation: ‘The neutral mask of decisions expresses both that the politics of rationalisation is the only possible one and that it is not the product of any ideology.’ In the final analysis neutral would be that which is not marked by evaluative codes, in other words an apparently non-cultural sphere; the italics are in Sarlo’s original, reflecting the violence implicit in the obliteration of cultural signs, in ‘the concealment of evaluative aspects’.

‘The danger of this type of intervention’, writes Sarlo as she develops her argument, ‘is the emptying of the symbolic [vaciamiento simbólico]; once the narrative and myths of historical peronism had been deconstructed, they were only replaced by the bourgeois novel of market rationalisation, very poor material for replacing the political identity which Menemism proposes to dissolve’ (Sarlo 1990, 7–8). That thinning of the texture of politics in which Menem and Fujimori (other names could be added, such as Collor) have taken the lead, carries with it an undeclared violence: not only against the economic situation of the millions of inhabitants who are not functional for end-of-century capitalism, but also against those signs of identity which are not functional either. This violence is as legal as the other one of open war, and external war and the use of the methods of war within the nation have become closely interconnected. The connections had already appeared in the National Security State, but new dimensions have accreted in the past two decades. When Mario Vargas Llosa, whose presidential programme has been adopted in broad measure by Fujimori, resorts to external and internal war in The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, he does not do so in order to condemn war ethically but to reduce cultural differences to a simplified political polarity. The whole sphere of cultural signs is affected by the debilitation of symbols of difference, and this is done not merely with the aim of demonstrating the unviability of socialist ideology, something he had already attempted in The War of the End of the World, but in order to create an ethical and political vacuum, fillable only with neo-liberal rationalisation. The Storyteller finishes off the job. Political emptiness and emptyness of the symbolic become the same thing. The parody of indigenism and anthropology destroys the possibility of any linguistic or cultural plurality as constitutive of the nation. In fact the emptying goes further: the possibility of there being a repertory of symbols which could be called national disappears and there remains a scenario capable of being written only in neo-liberal language. The question therefore arises, what are the alternatives to market rationalisation and the weakening of the symbolic? A provocative solution is given by Morandé: if market rationality is not neutral and value free, but actually as sacrificial a form of communality as the traditional Christian notions of the social, which have had a longer history in Latin America, then why not return to the Christian idea? (Morandé 1987, chapters 5, 6, 10, 11).

Some brief points need making here regarding the debate about the effects of the mass media. Until recently, and most often on the basis of the Chilean experience of the Pinochet government, it was said that the mass media, given their imperialist orientation, were bound to debilitate national cultures. Lately, however, there has been increasing recognition that this attitude rested upon the supposed passivity of the audience and ideological omnipotence of the media. It is therefore becoming accepted that criticism should not be directed at the presumed messages in isolation from the larger cultural field, and that it needs to consider the media as forms of cultural mediation — mediation of popular memory, for example. When codes of reception are taken into account, the telenovela can then be investigated as an encounter between popular memory and the mass imaginary (Martín-Barbero 1987). The question, once again, is that of the continuities and discontinuities of the symbolic. If television converts distances into simultaneities and floods local spaces with global images, it is also capable of reformulating local cultural materials. Of themselves, therefore, the media do not provide an answer to the problem.

The emptying of the symbolic field on the one hand, and the reinvention of continuities (whether by subaltern or hegemonic groups) on the other, can be understood within a larger historical context. Crucial among the changes that affect the current horizon is the fact that ‘ “the notion of an authentic culture in terms of an autonomous and internally coherent universe is no longer viable” either in the Third World or the First, “except perhaps as a useful fiction or revealing distorsion.” ’

The statement is made by Néstor García Canclini in Culturas híbridas: estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (García Canclini, 1990a). Among the effects of cultural hybridism is the fact that ‘at the end of the century, access to multicultural perspectives is not confined to writers, artists and exiled politicians, but is available to people from all social strata.’ A vast migratory process is occurring and it includes cultural materials as well as human beings; you don’t have to be a rural Mexican migrant to the USA in order to experience the flows which cross frontiers: it’s enough to stay at home and turn on the television. Hybridization cuts across any polar opposition between continuity and destruction; in this context change as a process requiring chronological interpretation is less important than lateral movements, and these are not unifiable and require multiple perspectives.

Deterritorialization/Reterritorialization

The word culture itself is affected by these destabilisations. Its traditional referent, bound up with the formation of nation-states, is becoming irrelevant: ‘Why go on thinking culture in an etymological sense, as the “cultivation” of a territory, when national frontiers become porous, when the disarticulation of both urban and peasant forms casts doubt on whether the key to cultural systems can be found in the relationship between populations and particular types of territory which would generate particular behaviours?’ (García Canclini 1990b, 9) García Canclini points to two processes which can help to understand this situation: decollection [descolección] and deterritorialization: ‘There was a time when the identities of groups were formed through two movements: the occupation of a territory and the constitution of collections — of objects, of monuments, of rituals — in terms of which the signs distinguishing a group were affirmed and celebrated. To have an identity was, above all, to have a country, a city or a neighbourhood, an entity within which everything shared by those who inhabited that place became identical or interchangeable. Those who did not share the territory and therefore did not have the same objects and symbols, the same rituals and customs, were the others, the different ones. What is left of that paradigm in the epoch of the decentralization and planetary expansion of big companies, of the transnationalization of communications and of multidirectional migrations?’

To respond to deterritorialization without nostalgia can be difficult, but the difficulty must be faced. Otherwise, if one fails to grasp the movements of deterritorialization and is drawn into defence of a past which is being destroyed, this is no answer to neo-liberal market pragmatism, increasingly dominant in Latin America. And it becomes difficult to explain cultural continuities except one-sidedly, in terms of crass inertia and repetition. Take for example the successful promotion of the Gulf War as a Just War, a phenomenon which epitomizes the continuities celebrated by the dominant Western states. It is not enough to say that the ideology of Just War goes back to the Crusades and to point to its continuities as a theme of Western superiority. It is also necessary to ask what possibilities of redistribution of regional power made necessary its most recent resuscitation, and what were the communicative forms of this resuscitation. The shifting grounds and forms of inscription need to be analysed, not just the context.

As soon as deterritorialization occurs, pressures for restabilization, for reterritorialization also occur. That is why it is difficult to think within the terms of García Canclini’s proposition. The pressures for reterritorialization are immediate and simultaneous and often more perceptible than the movement of deterritorialization. Continuities and traditions that occur on the back of deterritorialization are not therefore returns to or of the past, however much they may seem that. ‘The force and obstinacy of a deterritorialization can only be evaluated through the types of reterritorialization that represent it; the one is the reverse side of the other’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 316).

If we consider the actions of Sendero Luminoso in these terms, there are ways in which the attempt to destroy existing political forces and institutions, although carried out in the name of social revolution, could be argued to constitute a form of reterritorialization. This raises a further issue: what deterritorialization does the latter coincide with? The most obvious face of its actions is the use of violence. If in some ways this seems merely indiscriminate and excessive, it does on the other hand have an exemplifying and codifying function. That is, the cruelty with which victims who are members of the local population are treated has two sides. There appears to be an attempt to eradicate all cultural signs, leaving mere emptiness and silence. Considered as a tactic, this links with the decision not only to eliminate the presence of the state in the ‘liberated zones’ but also that of all popular organisations apart from Sendero — to liquidate the officials, the habits and the signs of all other organisations. This seems to have been the aim when the leaders of the mining unions in the central highlands, a key force in the labour movement, were murdered. The other side is the attempt to emplace itself as the sole popular organisation: a new authoritarian territorialization, through which Sendero takes on the characteristics of a state. This is accompanied by a lack of interest in Quechua culture: Sendero’s political programme is concerned only with class, not with cultural differences of an ethnic type.

If the current political violence in the Andean region is accelerating change, the question arises how far is it change towards authoritarianism and dogmatism. The mixture of rapid change with rigid containment can be traced in the ways authoritarian violence has been legitimated. In the first place, Sendero substituted an already existing social violence, connected with the structures of gamonalismo, in other words with the power relations of precapitalist commercial capital. Peasants were able to consider this violence as ‘normal’, while it could also appear to be ‘the foundation of a new order’ (Manrique 1989, 165). But if at first the victims were those peasants who had become part of gamonalista structures, ‘the category “enemies of the revolution or of the party” would later become terrifyingly all-inclusive, referring to anyone who stood in the way of Sendero’s aims, or who simply refused to collaborate.’ The logic shows considerable symmetry with the rules for a Just War that were used to draw up the notorious Requirement of the sixteenth century, a document to be read out by Spanish forces to the Indians, requiring the latter to show allegiance to the crown and threatening them with war should they fail to do so. But if an antimodernizing violence resting upon a pre-political violence is the most visible feature of this war, it nevertheless obscures a massive deterritorialization of Andean culture arising out of the increasing migration of populations and of cultural features. This is the ‘time of convulsion’ explored ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. War and Cultural Studies: Reflections on Recent Work in Peru and Argentina
• 2. The Reconfigurations of Post-dictatorship Critical Thought
• 3. For Whom the Eye Cries: Memory, Monumentality, and the Ontologies of Violence in Peru
• 4. The Last Sacred Image of the Latin American Revolution
• 5. Hemispheric Domains: 1898 and the Origins of Latin Americanism
• 6. Patagonia as Borderland: Nature, Culture, and the Idea of the State
• 7. The Return of Coatlicue: Mexican Nationalism and the Aztec Past
• 8. A Short Andean History of Photography: Yawar Fiesta
• 9. Cuba: A Curated Culture
• 10. Argentina’s Secret Poetry Boom
• 11. Tin Tan: The Pachuco
• 12. (Queer) Boleros of a Tropical Night
• 13. Heavy Metal Music in Postdictatorial Brazil: Sepultura and the Coding of Nationality in Sound
• 14. Sabina’s Oranges: The Colours of Cultural Politics in Rio de Janeiro, 1889–1930
• 15. Mob Outrages: Reflections on the Media Construction of the Masses in Venezuela (April 2000–January 2003)
• 16. The City Cross-dressed: Sexual Rights and Roll-backs in De la Rúa’s Buenos Aires
• 17. Conspicuous Consumption and the Performance of Identity in Contemporary Mexico: Daniela Rossell’s Ricas y Famosas
• 18. From Urb of Clay to the Hypodermic City. Improper Cities in Modern Latin America
• 19. Obverse Colonization: São Paulo, Global Urbanization and the Poetics of the Latin American City
• 20. Favelas and the Aesthetics of Realism: Representations in Film and Literature
• 21. Amores Perros: Exotic Violence and Neoliberal Fear
• 22. Post/Colonial Toponymy: Writing Forward ‘in Reverse’
• 23. Material Culture, Slavery, and Governability in Colonial Cuba: The Humorous Lessons of the Cigarette Marquillas
• 24. Indigenous Media and the End of the Lettered City
• 25. Subjective Displacements and ‘Reserves of Life’
• Index