Decolonial Approaches to Latin American Literatures and Cultures

Juan G. Ramos, Tara Daly, Juan G. Ramos, Tara Daly

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137603128
• eBook ISBN: 9781349933587
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Literature

Decolonial Approaches to Latin American Literatures and Cultures engages and problematizes concepts such as "decolonial" and "coloniality" to question methodologies in literary and cultural scholarship. While the eleven contributions produce diverse approaches to literary and cultural texts ranging from Pre-Columbian to contemporary works, there is a collective questioning of the very idea of "Latin America, " what "Latin American" contains or leaves out, and the various practices and locations constituting Latinamericanism. This transdisciplinary study aims to open an evolving corpus of decolonial scholarship, providing a unique entry point into the literature and material culture produced from precolonial to contemporary times.

Part 1
Undisciplining “Spanish” and “Literature”

© The Author(s) 2016

Juan G. Ramos and Tara Daly (eds.)Decolonial Approaches to Latin American Literatures and CulturesLiteratures of the Americas10.1057/978-1-349-93358-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Notes from the Field: Decolonizing the Curriculum/The “Spanish” Major

Sara Castro-Klarén¹

(1)

The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

Keywords

ColonialityColoniality of powerDecolonizationPhilological model“Spanish” majorCritical comparative perspective

End Abstract

In this chapter I propose to begin a discussion. I am taking for granted that readers of this volume are familiar with much of the theorizing done on the coloniality of power that was prompted by Aníbal Quijano’s thesis and by Walter Mignolo’s re-elaboration, dissemination, and potentiating of the concept in The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (xxv, 1, 2011). The coloniality of power makes it impossible to speak of power without having in mind always the history of empire. In that sense, all my remarks here are framed by the multiple questions opened by the imperial relations implied in both past and ongoing conquests, struggles, resistances, negotiations, and appropriations of both symbolic and material goods. In turn, these dynamics of empire interrogate means of productions at all levels of human activity, from birth and work to language, memory, writing systems, and governments. As understood today, Mignolo reminds us that a “decolonial critique stands as an epistemic political project” (xxv). Thus decolonizing the curriculum requires many far-reaching studies well beyond the “Spanish major.” Here I simply seek to open a discussion by offering some notes from the field, a set of first-line observations.

For the purposes of opening discussions concerned with our practices as teachers and intellectuals, the emphasis of these observations will fall on the intersection of power and epistemology as constituted in the colonial matrix. Decolonial thinking shows that all epistemes need to be localized and cannot be treated abstractly without running the risk of reproducing or misunderstanding them. Thus, the object of this discussion will be the “Spanish Major” in US universities. This object is chosen because a good many of the participants in this discussion work in departments of language and literature. However, the choice is more keenly prompted by the fact that, since the 1970s in the US academy, we have had a productive and vigorous discussion on Latin American culture and literature informed by questions posed from the perspectives of postmodern theory and cultural studies, as well as postcolonial and decolonial critiques, which have produced a great deal of revamping scholarship that needs to inform the curriculum in a more direct and incisive way. That is not to say that, as a whole, upper-level course offerings are not at least partially informed by this transformation of perspectives and epistemes that has occurred over the last 50 years.

My focus is rather the curriculum as an epistemic and political structure and a direction. In this regard, a central question to ponder in future discussions would be to inquire into the reasons why a closer fit between the new scholarship and certain assumptions in the curriculum has not yet occurred. Let us here only mention the recommendation made by both Néstor García Canclini (Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, 1995 and Imagined Globalization, 2014) and Walter Mignolo (The Idea of Latin America, 2005) with respect to theorizing time–space and the need to recognize that, given what we know about Latin American history, what we need is to think in terms of different and alternative temporalities. The temporal line that informs the organization of the curriculum could be a place where to begin. As I and others have already pointed out, the question of periodization (whether it be by century and/or by period as in premodern, modern, pre-Columbian, colonial, republican, postcolonial) is a topic that calls for critical attention because it expresses and affirms a Eurocentric reckoning of calendars that of course distorts ab initio our understanding of the passage and elaboration of lived time in such a vast and heterogeneous space as the term Latin America references. ¹ An inquiry into the organization of time as a question for historiography and canon formation in light of canonical disruptions caused by testimonio texts and teatro callejero—to name just two lettered (not necessarily literary) events—could lead to a revamping of both contents and organizational criteria that would spell out an object of very different characteristics than what is on the books now.

Intellectuals located in departments of Spanish literature and culture design courses for the department’s mission within the university. This praxis, framed by the “mission statement,” directly impacts conceptualizations of the production, representation, and dissemination of knowledge. Because of their growth during and after the Cold War, “Spanish” departments have come to constitute a first level of dissemination of the findings of the disciplines that study, and that by necessity constitute, the object known as Latin America. The field of study did not start with departments of Latin American studies in which instruction would have been in English and which might have privileged history or anthropology as the core fields of study. Instead, departments of “Spanish” begin anchored and tethered to language acquisition missions and models of study that serve students for whom the language in which the acquisition of knowledge takes place is a second language over which they have differing levels of mastery. The philological model that informed the original iteration of these departments was perhaps one designed for small groups of students who in time would become major scholars in the classical or modern languages and cultures of Europe (current graduate doctoral programs). Such a philological model was not designed for the massive instruction that takes place in the four short years of undergraduate work. And yet the design of the curriculum for majors, I believe, still presupposes command over the second language, which becomes the language of instruction because of the philological model, because of the stated mission and fit of the departments in the tasks involved in the distribution of knowledge in the university as a whole.

Despite this historical but prescriptive incongruence or misfit that causes a range of problems in the configuration of courses ideally intended to convey information and understanding about the object of study “Latin America,” a critical look at the curriculum offered is seldom attempted from a decolonial perspective. I would like to estrange this object—“Spanish major”—so that we can look at it beyond the practices that have naturalized it over a century of existence and expansion. I would like to step back, and from the distance created by decolonial theory, look at this artifact as an apparatus put together for the conveyance of more than just course work in “learning the language” or “learning language through content” or even “the history of the Spanish language,” as many of the courses offered in various programs organize the intellectual activity of the curriculum. This work of estrangement calls for an analysis of the assumptions upon which the “Spanish major” rests. In what follows, I can only take up two such assumptions: the work of the ideology of the “purity of the language” and the language base deterritorialization of knowledges not produced or encompassed by the “Spanish language” that an anxious and exacerbated philological model produces.

A shift in perspective allows us to view the object denuded from the vestments given to it by its naturalized locus in the academy. We can proceed to place the object in the grid of inter-imperial crosscurrents of coloniality at large. If we begin to consider the rationale that accounts for the very compartmentalization of the study of literatures and cultures separated by language stalls: French, Spanish, Yiddish, “Chinese,” Arabic, and so on, we begin to find a series of problems attached to the unilinear linkage made between language and culture and language of instruction and dissemination of learning. Beyond the thinking that speaks of the need and benefits of working in the original language, we might want to consider the counter evidence pointing to the problems of interpreting texts in the original language, when the language competency of the reader is much lower than that of a comparably educated native speaker.

Here, I will permit myself a personal anecdote. There was a time when I was going to teach for a second time a course on the modern Spanish American short story. Drawing from my first experience with the course, I decided that this time I needed to choose texts that were no longer than five to seven printed pages. I hoped that, with very short texts, majors could in fact read them before class and then engage in incisive critical analysis of the text. After two days of unsuccessful search among the Spanish-American canonical writers of the twentieth century, I realized that the criteria I had devised for selecting my texts had betrayed the objective of the course. The objective of this course in literature was not to advance language training as much as to present a view of the historical and cultural diversity of Latin America together with a sense of the artistic complexity of the authorship of the writers included in the selection. This experience troubled me and led me to ask if the students and the professor would not have been better served by a canonical selection to be read along with a translation, that is to say, with the benefit of a bilingual approach that enhanced everyone’s critical possibilities.

Concomitantly we could ask: how is it that we, as intellectuals, operate in this unilinear and restrictive link of language to culture and to knowledge in which we have been placed by the academic distribution of knowledges and expertise by language departments, which demand that in order for “language” departments to justify their existence, all or most of the instruction be done “in the language?” A critical look at this arrangement “by stall,” could consider the idea that language majors are exclusively language-based because they correspond to a convenient administrative arrangement based on “antiguas tradiciones imperiales,” as Hernán Vidal pointed out in Treinta años de estudios literarios/culturales latinoamericanistas en Estados Unidos (“Prólogo,” 2008). Would this diagnosis also apply to French or English departments? Or, should we not look also into a genealogy of how national literatures were constructed in Europe with respect to the link between hegemonic national French, high German and culture, and the operations of how Castilian was turned into Spanish, the latter case especially in view of the “literary production” of its colonies in America, which landed in “Spanish departments” here?

A decolonial perspective might inquire into the extension of Antonio de Nebrija’s imperial dispositions on both the unity of the language and the idea that empire rides on language’s shoulders. Nebrija’s language ideology would seem expressed in the design of courses such as the “Hispanic Short Story,” “Approaches to Spanish and Spanish American Literature,” or “Introduction to Lyric Poetry.” These courses mix freely any sociohistorical apparatus or texts classified as “shorts stories” or “lyric” produced in different geo-cultural locations and times. Besides the epistemic maneuver of “genre classification” operating in “The Lyric since Medieval Times,” we see an erasure of the colonial difference, for the “lyric” presupposes a given history of subject formation that is not universal, but rather particular to Europe at a certain time in its own history of consciousness. That is not to say that writing in Spanish America does not have a tradition of “lyric” poetry, but such an understanding requires an historicization that is informed by a problematic that does not allow us to read in the same grid of interpretation Fray Luis de León, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Pablo Neruda, and Alejandra Pizarnik. Similar constraints and objections can be leveled in relation to courses entitled “Legal Spanish” or “Medical Spanish,” for they gloss over, given the assumption of the atemporal unity of the language, the huge cultural differences in the formation of the legal systems in the Iberian metropolis and the different colonial locales, the latter heavily and differently impacted by the adoption of Napoleonic Law after the Wars of Independence (1810), not to mention the different conceptualization of the body, health, and illness coming from the Amerindian worldview.

The unity of the language is the presupposition that erases temporal and spatial cultural differences. Such a problematic assumption is, of course, nowhere better illustrated than when it comes to the use of Spanish by American born, “heritage users” of Spanish who attend Spanish language courses in order to correct or standardize the practices inherited from current use in their language communities. There is a deterritorialization occurring here as the language inherited from home is displaced by the standardized grammar and usage rules. While academic administrators may not conceive of their administration of the language stalls as a monitoring of the purity of the imperial language in Nebrija’s term, the Cervantes Society seems to consider the incorporation of Spanish spoken or written in the USA into the imperial grid as one of its missions. For example, the Instituto Cervantes Observatory at Harvard University has recently started a research project that aims to “better understand the role played by Hispanic literature in the overall evolution of Spanish in the United States” (e-mail to me from Winston Groman, Research Assistant at the Instituto Cervantes at Harvard, 08/10/2015). The question at hand is an interesting and complex inquiry that assumes an area of contact where Spanish speakers in the USA encounter “Hispanic literature” in a way in which the literature impacts the evolution of the uses of the language. That contact zone is of course the “Spanish departments” where “heritage speakers” learn to read literary texts, and thus experience a re-enforcement of the “correct” and literary uses of the language.

However, such presupposition does not account for the internal workings of course offerings where the colonial difference is erased in order to underscore erroneous notions of contiguity and continuity in the fractured and contested history of coloniality. The “unity of the language” not only denies the history of Castilian in relation to the other neo-Latin languages spoken and written in the peninsula across time and space but also suffuses “Spanish” with a sort of fixity (“Introduction to Lyric Poetry,” “Major Poets of the Hispanic World,” or “Hispanic Literatures from Medieval Times to the Present”) that no living language has ever exhibited. Such courses also affirm a territoriality that devolves all language use to the peninsula and even to Roman times when Latin was first used in what is today Spain’s national territory. Courses designed under this presupposition do not imbed a comparative perspective, for if they were to do so, they in fact would self-destruct in as much as comparison presupposes differences and breaks. The temporality of the unbroken line would have to give way to the introduction of different geographies and spaces and moments in time. A comparative approach would recognize different and alternative temporalities. Nor are these courses predicated on the “unity of the language” germane to new programs in Global Studies or Cosmopolitan Studies, all of which engage a plurotopic world of languages and literary texts in competitive circulations and subject to different hermeneutics as texts travel in different cultural spaces.

In stark contrast with this approach that erases the colonial difference across time and space, we begin to find courses that are not only structured around this difference but also find a way of presenting writing culture in conjunction with other complementary cultural artifacts. Although not many, these courses seem to be informed by a problematic drawn from cultural studies and the many strong books published in its wake. ² A few examples are di...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Undisciplining “Spanish” and “Literature”
• 2. Decolonizing Translation and Representations of the Indigenous
• 3. Material Culture and Literature as Decolonial Critiques
• 4. Decolonial Options, Indigenous Sovereignty, and Transregional Alliances
• Backmatter