Contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies

Stephen Hart, Richard A. Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780340808221
• eBook ISBN: 9781134659821
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies is a collection of new essays by recognised experts from around the world on various aspects of the new discipline of Latin American cultural studies. Essays are grouped in five distinct but interconnected sections focusing respectively on: (I) the theory of Latin American cultural studies; (II) the icons of culture; (III) culture as a commodity; (IV) culture as a site of resistance; and (V) everyday cultural practices. The essays range across a wide gamut of theories about Latin American culture; some, for example, analyse the role that ideas about the nation - and national icons ? have played in the formation of a sense of identity in Latin America, while others focus on the resonance underlying cultural practices as diverse as football in Argentina, TV in Uruguay, cinema in Brazil, and the 'bolero' and soaps of modern-day Mexico. Contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies has an introduction setting the ideas explored in each section in their proper context. The essays are written in jargon-free English (all Spanish terms have been translated into English), and are supplemented by a concluding section with suggestions for further reading.

Part 1
Latin America and cultural studies

1
Cultural studies and revolving doors

Néstor García Canclini

1

How is it possible to determine, at this point, what is meant by cultural studies? In books with those terms in their title we find re-interpretations of the history of literature; debates on what is happening to culture and politics as they take over familiar institutions or free themselves from dictatorships; critiques of the weaknesses of the humanities and social sciences; polemics on the correct or politically most productive explanation of Derrida and Deleuze, Lacan and Laclau; on modernism and postmodernism, and globalization and its opponents: the subaltern, the postcolonial and the post-western. The list does not end here, and to enumerate it would serve only to exhaust our perplexity.

It would seem that something is happening with cultural studies today similar to what was happening 20 years ago with Marxism, when it was not clear whether it was still in one of the forms appropriated by the state or in its Althusserian, neo-Gramscian or guerrilla versions, until the demolition of the Berlin Wall made these distinctions less rigid. Some critics have implied that perhaps cultural studies was successful as a substitute for Marxism. However, the conditions in which the insufficiencies of cultural studies, social sciences and the humanities are raised are now different.

We need to talk about the reformulation of cultural studies in order to locate them among changes that are taking place without the noise of falling walls. Hence, I shall make some references to transformations that are different from those we perceived in 1989 and, of course, different from those that 30 or 40 years ago moved Raymond Williams, Roland Barthes, and others to undertake transdisciplinary readings on the hidden connections between culture, economy and power. If these characteristics still define the project of cultural studies, as they did back then, the problem is not one of choosing the correct or politically more effective interpretation of that legacy, but of discovering the roles of culture in the present stage of capitalism. My resources for re-thinking this question come above all from Latin America, but I shall take into account that one of the differences of the current moment is that we can no longer enclose ourselves in national or regional cultures.

2

One of the key tasks is to locate this quest in today’s redistribution of power in communications and the academic world. As we move from the twentieth to the twenty-first century, four forces predominate in the international administration of the image of what is considered ‘Latin American’: (a) Spanish publishing groups, ultimately subordinated to European mega-corporations (Bertelsmann, Planeta) and complemented in part by communications conglomerates (Prisa, Telefónica, and Televisión Española); (b) several US communications corporations (CNN, Time Warner); (c) Latin American Cultural Studies, concentrated in US universities and with small complementary enclaves in Canada and Europe; and (d) cultural studies in Latin America understood in the broad sense as the heterogeneous production of specialists in cultural, literary and scientific-social processes, whose exchanges are intense, but less institutionalized than those of US Latin Americanists. There is a fifth player, namely governments in Latin America and their cultural policies, but it is not easy to justify their place among the predominant forces on account of their diminished participation with respect to strategic trends in cultural development.

The rate of participation of audiovisual companies in relation to intellectual production is still low. A more extensive analysis would have to consider the current reconfiguration of images of Latin America in CNN journalism, the entertainment products distributed by Time Warner, Televisa, and Globo, and the distribution of recorded disks by the large corporations and other players in communications, who move their investments among written, audiovisual and digital media. Here I will be concerned above all with the recomposition of academic and publishing power.

Spanish publishers, who control the market for books in Spanish with a ratio of seven to three in relation to the total for Mexico City, Buenos Aires and the rest of Latin America, see the continent as a creator of literature and as an area of expansion of their Spanish clientele. They rarely publish cultural, sociological or anthropological studies by Latin Americans and, when they do, their affiliates in Argentina, Chile, Colombia or Mexico limit their circulation to the country of origin. Save for a few medium-sized publishers based in Barcelona, Mexico City and Buenos Aires, such as Fondo de Cultura Económica, Paidós and Gedisa, the international image of Latin America that has been created has been that of a provider of narrative fiction, not of social and cultural thought, to which only a domestic interest is attributed for the country that generates it.

The Latin Americanists in the United States and specialists in cultural studies, who pay attention not only to Latin American literature but also to socio-cultural research, must be recognized. More books by Roger Bartra, Jesús Martín Barbero, Beatriz Sarlo and ten other thinkers from Latin America are translated into English, taught in their universities and discussed in journals in that language than in Spanish universities and publications. But the cultural studies of the English-speaking world are devoted more to interpretations pronounced by authors from Latin America than to the socio-cultural and economic processes of the continent. As an exacerbation of the textualism of cultural studies, above all in the US, notions of the popular, the national, hybridization, and the modernity and postmodernity of Latin Americans are hotly debated, while the cultural and social movements to which such concepts allude are rarely studied. It has become more stimulating to confront authors from the south with those from the north than to work with them both in order to renew our view of high culture and the media, the disenchantment with the transitions to democracy, the war in Colombia and neighbouring places, or the recomposition of geo-politics and culture between the US and Latin America.

3

The textualizing tendencies of cultural studies has generalized introspective practices. Cultural Studies began as an emergency exit. For decades, the disciplines were reached by special doors, depending on whether you wished to enter Language and Literature, Philosophy, Anthropology or History. The spaces and subjects not reached in this way were grouped as area studies: there were departments of Spanish and Portuguese, French or Italian, Chinese, or African religions. Over time, interdisciplinarity, migrations, mass communication, and other disorders of the world made the walls that separated departments porous. Then came Cultural Studies, and also Latin American Cultural Studies, which are not the same as Anglo-American Cultural Studies, although they have a parallel transdisciplinary vocation. Entering by the door to philosophy, they found ways to Anthropology and discovered that what was being learned in Literature, Economics or Sociology served to get them into other buildings, even if it was by the windows.

The Cultural Studies that opened those emergency exits today seems at times like a revolving door. This does not mean that there are no changes while it is turning. You can enter a Derridian and come out a Homi Bhabhian, start out a logocentrist and take a turn towards deconstruction, go from the textual analysis of the door to the debate on the performativity of its hinges. What usually puts a stop to this compulsive circularity is that it is practised in conference papers and thus cannot last longer than 15 or 20 minutes.

4

In order to explain this better, it is necessary to differentiate between Cultural Studies and its different forms. One of these is the movement that brought together the – at times epistemological, at times generational – confrontations with the routine and the deafness in the humanities disciplines and the social sciences; research undertakings that reveal the connections of culture with power, of economic injustices with those in gender, of art with the cultural industries. All of that continues to thrive and gives uneven results, to be found in a few books rather than in journals. Frequently, the transversality of this non-discipline that is Cultural Studies was the key to a renewed exploration of culture: reading a literary text with the instruments of sociology, studying folk crafts or music as processes of communication, wondering about the stylistic resources with which a social scientist constructs an argument.

By saying that these studies constitute a non-discipline I am referring to the fact that they are formed by departing from the theoretical orthodoxies and routines of thought with which specialists customarily research such subjects. Cultural Studies progressed thanks to its irreverence with respect to the exclusivity of the segmentation of intellectual property, although this should not be taken to be synonymous with a disregard for science. The best specialists in Cultural Studies have learned to understand culture within a particular discipline: Raymond Williams, Jean Franco, and Beatriz Sarlo studying literature in order to turn later to intellectual history; David Morely and Jesús Martín Barbero undertaking research in communications in order to explain that the media are not to be understood except as belonging to cultural practices. Their works were produced by taking a field of knowledge seriously and by feeling at some moment a sense of unease similar to what we experience today in relation to gated communities.

From the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the structuring of disciplinary fields was like tracing streets and organizing autonomous territories at a time when it was necessary to defend the specificity of each branch of knowledge in relation to theological and philosophical totalizations. But the disciplines took on this urban task enthusiastically and, for security reasons, began to close streets and prevent them from being used for the purpose for which they were originally built: free circulation and passage from one district to another. Cultural Studies is an attempt to re-open avenues and pathways, and prevent them from becoming the private extension of a few houses.

I have recalled the disciplinary origin of some noteworthy specialists because it is sometimes thought that doing cultural studies does not require working the data with discipline and rigour. In fact, more data needs to be acquired, the statistics that those who study literature do not usually deal with or, alternatively, the narratives and metaphors that economists and sociologists use without problematizing them, need to be taken seriously. The task of cultural studies is not improved by substituting data with intuition, nor by getting away with an essay instead of developing a systematic enquiry. What gives them greater openness and intellectual density is daring to deal with connected issues that were not previously considered together when discussing a particular subject. Why do certain novelists, in addition to experimenting with rhetorical devices, do so from a position of ethnicity or gender? What makes the consumption of soap operas different when they are received in a metropolitan country or in one of the periphery, and in the context of stronger or weaker local traditions?

We know that over the years Cultural Studies also became the formula of a market-oriented academy according to which those initial undertakings, although still barely systematized, were converted into master’s and doctoral degrees, or subaltern, postcolonial and post-disciplinary canons, whereby knowledge was sometimes confused with access to academic tenure and at other times with the impossibility of obtaining it. In one way or another, by combining the hegemonic and ill-reputed sides of things, Cultural Studies offered a repertoire of quotable authors and authorized quotations, euphoric politicizations with no recipient, and a show of erudition in which the transnational never abandoned its local demeanour. In short, a self-corralled abundance. For this reason some volumes devoted to Cultural Studies convey the feeling that to work in this field is like going around in a revolving door.

I am not proposing to retrieve the initiative of the original movement, that of the Birmingham group, for example. The world has changed too much these past 30 years for that to be realistic. In fact, dozens of authors, daring ideas, and a few research undertakings that remained faithful to that origin by going along other paths have kept the project alive. I could mention the example of a few innovators, such as Stuart Hall and George Yúdice, but when I try to lengthen the list there come to mind authors who are almost never mentioned in the Citation Index of Cultural Studies conferences, people like John Berger, and texts that do not pretend to be cultural studies, like those of Norbert Lechner, for example. There are also some young researchers, both from Latin America and the US, who have read all there is to know about the study of culture, but whose goal in life is not to develop cultural studies, or to assert the politically and epistemologically correct. These are dissenting enquiries that raise or lower the gaze on current challenges to research in a different way: they speak of the different conditions under which culture is made when the success and failures of neoliberalism have modified what was understood as power and as a symbolic world.

5

In the 1990s, the debate focused on connecting and differentiating Latin American Cultural Studies and Cultural Studies in Latin America. A level of theoretical exchange was achieved that was at times productive and made it possible to understand better the various forms of intellectual practice in the US and Latin America (Beverley, Mato, Mignolo) and its different modes of moving between academia, politics and esthetic research (Achugar, Moreiras, Richard). Although these authors illuminate north/south socio-cultural relations, the bibliography identified overall as studies in culture or cultural studies has little to do with the socio-economic, political and communicational bases of recent cultural transformations. That is to say, the transformations in which the place of the protagonists is occupied by the transnational players previously cited as re-organizers of the image and conditions of existence of what is considered to be Latin American.

Cultural studies and Latin American studies in the 1980s and 1990s were linked to revolutionary movements that had reached their end or were discredited, or to social-democratic ‘alternatives’ in the processes of democratization, having failed as economic, social and cultural projects. Now we can only count on such points of reference in innovative social movements (Zapatismo in Mexico, Sem Terra in Brazil, human rights groups elsewhere), which are significant movements for confronting indigenous issues, extreme poverty and the historical effects of dictatorship, but which are insufficient as substitutes or to generate decisive change in the decadent party system. Thus, the absence of consistent players able to confront the processes of denationalization and transnationalization at a macro level (at Seattle, Davos and São Paulo it was only possible to make out a protest movement, not a programme) leaves with weak social support what in cultural studies was a strategic project. Here I can only point out a question that requires greater consideration.

Placing ourselves at this new stage requires returning to a key historical feature of cultural studies: the development of empirically based socio-cultural theory in order to understand the evolution of capitalism critically; not the assertion of politically correct positions, but the tense relationship between a utopian imaginary, that is only partly political, and an intellectual and empirical exploration that sometimes goes along with it and sometimes contradicts it. While neither the utopian imaginary nor the intellectual exploration of the 1960s or the 1980s may be repeated today, no philological restoration of the foundational moment is possible either; it is not a matter of suturing a wounded tradition.

In order to avoid such distractions, it is appropriate to focus on the tension between what the utopian imaginary and the intellectual exploration might be today: for example, the tension that occurs between the promises of global cosmopolitanism and the loss of national projects. What is new in this conflict? To what disciplines or to what kind of not specifically cultural knowledge is it necessary to link the study of culture?

In 1950, when Octavio Paz wrote in The Labyrinth of Solitude (Spanish original, 1950, English editions, 1961, 1985) that Mexicans felt themselves to be contemporary with all people for the first time, television and video did not yet exist, let alone the words that represent new forms of intercultural communication: compact disk, diskette, scanner, the Internet, cellular phone and TV shopping. We could never have been as cosmopolitan then as we are now, as contemporary with many cultures, and all without travelling. Suffice it to see how young people combine the new forms of neighbourhood territorialization such as graffiti with transnational musical and television messages.

But this stage also brings a loss of national projects. Until a few years ago we spoke of French, Italian and US cinema, of Mexican crafts and muralism, and Spanish or Argentinean literature. Those distinctions serve more as an historical evocation than to identify what is filmed, painted and written today. For similar reasons, nations are ceasing to be political players and even less as markers for locating cultural production. Those who decide what is produced and who also distribute it are called CNN, Sony and Time Warner. Even when they retain names of nationality – America on Line, Telefónica de España – their offices and their stock capital do not depend on one country in particular.

In the age of information, what is the most valuable property in the world worth owning? Jeremy Rifkin replied:

Radio frequencies – the electromagnetic spectrum – in the age of wireless communication an ever greater quantity of human communic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1 Latin America and cultural studies
• Part 2 Cultural icons
• Part 3 Culture as spectacle/commodity
• Part 4 Culture, hegemony and opposition
• Part 5 Cultural practices
• References
• Index