Latin American Identity in Online Cultural Production

Claire Taylor, Thea Pitman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135085551
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume provides an innovative and timely approach to a fast growing, yet still under-studied field in Latin American cultural production: digital online culture. It focuses on the transformations or continuations that cultural products and practices such as hypermedia fictions, net.art and online performance art, as well as blogs, films, databases and other genre-defying web-based projects, perform with respect to Latin American(ist) discourses, as well as their often contestatory positioning with respect to Western hegemonic discourses as they circulate online. The intellectual rationale for the volume is located at the crossroads of two, equally important, theoretical strands: theories of digital culture, in their majority the product of the anglophone academy; and contemporary debates on Latin American identity and culture.

1 Cartographic Imaginaries

Mapping Latin(o) America’s Place in a World of Networked Digital Technologies

This chapter analyses the work of three Latin(o) American digital media artists who engage, albeit in very different ways, with the topographical, geopolitical and/or conceptual mapping of Latin America, both in relation to the history of cartographic representations of the region, and/or in relation to Latin America’s place in the industrial practices and cultural imaginaries of (networked) digital technologies. It engages with recent research on the (neo-)colonialist impulses of mapping, both within cartography as a discipline (Harley 1989, Crampton 2001) and specifically in the mapping of the Americas/Latin America (Mignolo 2000 and 2005, Offen and Dym 2011). It also engages with debates in internet studies that have critiqued the early, neo-imperialist, ‘frontiersman’ discourse of the internet (Sardar 1995, Loader 1997, Dodge and Kitchin 2001b, Paasonen 2009), as well as with continuing debates on mapping out online space, specifically with respect to the politics of top-level domain names (Steinberg and McDowell 2003) and graphical representations of the internet and its traffic flows (Harpold 1999).

The chapter focuses particular attention on the Uruguayan net.artist, Brian Mackern whose netart latino database (2000–2005) both attempts to map out a place for Latin America in the global net.art community, and makes meta-critical comments on mapping and net.art as practices. It then goes on to examine more briefly the work of two Latina/o digital media artists: US-Salvadoran Eduardo Navas’s animation Plástico_2002_upDate (2002) and US-Colombian Praba Pilar’s Cyberlabia project (2005). Both Navas and Pilar further problematise the representation of Latin America through their deliberate inclusion of the Latino communities of North America and/or through their representation of this expanded Latin(o) America as part of a wider phenomenon in global relations in an era of informational capitalism supported by (and represented in) digital technologies. The chapter argues that these works evidence a desire to continue to revise hegemonic cartog-raphies that seek to circumscribe, or even ignore entirely, Latin(o) America, and that they also engage in a sustained critique of its marginal place and role in cyberspace itself. Instead, they propose alternative cartographies and epistemologies of Latin(o) America and its place in a globalised world.

Starting first with the discipline of cartography, developments in the discipline from the 1980s onwards started to question the purported ‘transparency’ of the map and ‘objectivity’ of map-making as a process, and instead have encouraged us to understand cartography as a geopolitical enterprise. Harley’s groundbreaking work in the 1980s on ‘deconstructing the map’ was one of the first to explore cartography as ‘historically specific’ (Harley 1989:3), and flagged up the need to ‘search for the social forces that have structured cartography and to locate the presence of power—and its effects—in all map knowledge’ (Harley 1989:2). More specifically, Harley urged that:

we have to read between the lines of technical procedures or of the map’s topographic content. They are related to values, such as those of ethnicity, politics, religion, or social class, and they are also embedded in the map-producing society at large. […] In the map itself, social structures are often disguised beneath an abstract, instrumental space, or incarcerated in the coordinates.

(Harley 1989:5)

This understanding of maps as naturalising representations necessitates our ‘read[ing] between the lines of the map—“in the margins of the text”—and through its tropes to discover the silences and contradictions that challenge the apparent honesty of the image’ (Harley 1989:3). Subsequent generations of scholars have built upon Harley’s work, such as Crampton, who, summarising the understanding of cartography post-Harley, notes that this involves challenging the prevailing notion of cartography as ‘the communication of information from the cartographer to the map user’, and instead investigating how ‘maps are part of a general discourse of power, which both enables and abridges possibilities for people to act’ (Crampton 2001:236). This notion of maps as simultaneously enabling and abridging is central to the works under consideration in this chapter; that is, an understanding of maps as abridging entails exploring who is excluded from the map; while an understanding of maps as enabling entails exploring the possibilities of creating (temporary, tactical) alternative cartographies.

If such are the critiques of cartography as a global enterprise, in a (Latin) American context, notions of mapping as a geopolitical enterprise have been elaborated on in recent studies, in particular in the works of Walter Mignolo. Mignolo argues that the practice of mapping is integral to the very existence of the Americas as a whole:

Before 1492 the Americas were not on anybody’s map, not even on the map of the people inhabiting Anáhuac and Tawantinsuyu […] the mass of land and the people were there, but they named their own places. […] ‘America’, then, was never a continent waiting to be discovered. Rather, ‘America’ as we know it was an invention forged in the process of European colonial history and the consolidation and expansion of the Western world view and institutions.

(Mignolo 2005:2)

If the process of mapping is thus central to the conceptualisation and very exis-tence of the Americas as an entity, Mignolo also stresses that this is an imperial project; in other words, the process of mapping the Americas was integral to (European) projects of empire in which ‘modernity/coloniality’ are conceptual-ised as ‘two sides of the same coin’, and thus ‘the very idea of America cannot be separated from coloniality: the entire continent emerged as such in the European consciousness’ (Mignolo 2005:6–7). Extending Mignolo’s argument, the very act of mapping the Americas carries with it its baggage of imperialism; the shape and contours of the continent were drawn in the interests of European imperialism. Hence, mapping is both central to the very concept of the Americas, and at the same time is imbued with its imperialist heritage.

While many critics have argued that the concept of a specifically ‘Latin’ America stems from an attempt to articulate French geopolitical interests in the mid-nineteenth century, in concordance with the imperialist history outlined above, within Latin America itself scholars such as Arturo Ardao have convincingly attributed the creation and adoption of the term to Spanish-American intellectuals of a slightly earlier era who were seeking to draw out commonalities between the Spanish-speaking republics of the region (Ardao 1980).¹ In Mapping Latin America: A Cartographic Reader (2011), Karl Offen and Jordana Dym endorse this view of the early coalescence of a sense of regional identity and its conceptual mapping from within, and they go on to highlight the importance of the mapping of ‘Nuestra América’ [‘Our America’] that was in evidence in Jose Marti’s famous 1892 formulation that described the region as extending ‘from the Rio Bravo to the Straits of Magellan’ (Marti, quoted in Offen and Dym 2011:3–4). What is significant in Marti’s formulation—and the essay in which it appears—is that Latin America as geopolitical entity is constructed in explicit opposition to Anglo-America in the North. Furthermore, the fact that Martí felt the need to reclaim the region by discursively mapping out its contours in contradistinction to Anglo-America suggests that a sense of the power lying behind the hegemony of maps and mappings of the region had shifted by that point from Europe to the USA.

Over the course of the twentieth century and particularly in the Cold War era the concept of Latin America—now including Brazil with the Spanish- American states (Bethell 2010:478–79)—has been reworked to serve the United States’ strategic interests, and the outline ‘map-as-logo’ of the region that encompasses Meso-and South America, together with the Caribbean, particularly in its shrunken Mercatorial projection which leaves it looking diminutive in comparison with North America, is most emblematic of that drive to divide up the non-anglophone world into manageable chunks. Nevertheless, although, as Benedict Anderson notes, the origins of the ‘map-as-logo’ derive from imperialist map-making where states coloured ‘their colonies on maps with an imperial dye’, the outline forms of states— and arguably of geopolitical regions—‘penetrated deep into the popular imagination’ and, perhaps ironically, then began to serve as ‘a powerful emblem’ for anticolonial nationalisms (Anderson 1991:175) or, in the case of Latin America as a whole, for anti-imperialist resistance.

It can thus be argued that Latin Americans’ cartographic projections of the region as a whole specifically seek to reclaim this logo-map—this regional outline—for themselves. This is already apparent in Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García’s early inversion of the map of Latin America (of this, more later). It is even clearer in the depictions of Latin America that circulated in revolutionary Cuban posters and cover designs for the journal Tricontinental, with, for example, the messianic figure of Che Guevara intimately fused with multiple outlines of the logo-map of the region (north at top).² Contemporary artists who engage with the cartographic representation of Latin America must deal not only with the European colonialist and more recent US imperialist history that underpins the mapping of the region, but also, in many cases, with the legacy of Latin American revisions of its relationship to the outside world and to the USA in particular as expressed in the regional map-as-logo. The cartographic representation of a bounded entity known as Latin America, whether intended to be abridging or enabling in its function, is furthermore highly problematic for Latinas/os who do not fit within or identify with the traditional regional boundaries.

The need to interrogate the norms of cartography and the discursive features of the map as raised by scholars such as Harley and Crampton becomes of even greater importance when analysing works designed for and published on the internet. Scholarship over the past two decades has brought to our attention the problematic mapping out of cyberspace, both in terms of the early predominantly metaphorical or conceptual approaches to the internet, as well as the structural features of html coding itself, both of which come under scrutiny for their role in endorsing implicitly neo-imperialist map-pings of the internet. As Dodge and Kitchin note, the very term ‘cyberspace’ means ‘navigatable space’, the first part of the neologism being derived from the Greek kyber meaning ‘to navigate’ (Dodge and Kitchin 2001b:1), and the conceptual forms in which the internet is approached often tended, particularly in the work of earlier proponents, to reproduce (uncritically) a neo-imperialist, ‘frontiersman’ discourse. The notion of the ‘electronic frontier’, a term encapsulated in John Perry Barlow’s influential ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ (Barlow 1996), is particularly representative of this early, Wired-influenced conceptualisation of the internet,³ and has been much critiqued. Susana Paasonen questions the ‘deeply American metaphor’ underpinning this notion (Paasonen 2009:21), while Brian D. Loader pointedly notes that Barlow’s advocation of free speech ‘seemingly require[s] the world to speak English on the electronic frontier’ (Loader 1997:6). The most sustained critique comes in a seminal article by Ziauddin Sardar who describes the electronic frontier as a ‘mythic formulation’ which has direct parallels with the ‘colonization of non-Western cultures’ (Sardar 1995:777), arguing that ‘White man’s burden, then, shifts from its moral obligation to civilize, democratize, urbanize and colonize non-Western cultures, to the colonization of cyberspace’ (Sardar 1995:280). Such a conceptualisation has, as Kathleen K. Olson notes, now been largely superseded: the ‘Western frontier metaphor’ represented an early way of thinking about the internet which ‘lost its power as the web became increasingly commercialised and privatised. Fences went up, legal rules were enforced, and the digital “wild West” was enclosed and divided into private parcels complete with “keep out” signs’ (Olson 2005:15). Nevertheless, the influence of these earlier conceptualisations of cyberspace still lingers, particularly with regard to the politics of how the internet maps out space and reproduces geopolitical relations online.

More concretely, recent scholarship has focused on the assumptions encoded within the very protocols which structure or ‘map out’ internet content along neo-imperialist and/or nationstate lines. Here, the use of generic top-level domain extensions (gTLD) and country code top-level domain extensions (ccTLD) in URLs has been highlighted by scholars as both mapping out an implicit US neo-imperialism online, and at the same time attempting to draw boundaries around internet content in the interest of the nationstate. Steinberg and McDowell note how purportedly ‘generic’ top-level domains are in many cases available solely to refer to the US, with the .edu and .gov domains being particular cases in point. They go on to argue that the domain name structure reproduces the territorial divisions of the world, and that ‘the internet naming system has all the signs of reproducing United States hegemony’, since ‘the hegemon defines its own naming system as the generic’, while other states are given terms that are ‘are suboptimal for would-be global actors’ (Steinberg and McDowell 2003:55).

At the same time, the country code top-level domains have been critiqued for their assumption of English, or at least the twenty-six letters of Roman alphabetic and nonaccented script used in English, as lingua franca, as well as for their attempt to map out internet content according to nationstate boundaries. In the first case, it has been recognised that ‘the design of the DNS [Domain Name System] presents formidable technical challenges for the accommodation of languages that use non-Roman characters’, and even for those that simply use accents with Roman characters (Committee on Internet Navigation and the Domain Name System, National Research Council 2005:164). Nevertheless, speakers of key world languages such as Russian, have moved, in recent years, from an acceptance of their country code top-level domain as .su (later .ru in the wake of the break-up of the USSR), to the Cyrillic. pφ [the Russian Federation] to indicate their scriptural nonconformity with English, as well as ‘to signify the transnational, deterritorialised environment of the Russophone World Wide Web: that is the online activity of Russian-speaking communities in Russia proper, the near-abroad, Israel, the USA and other countries’ (Strukov 2012:1585).

This latter consideration leads on to the second critique made of the DNS— its attempt to fit all internet domains within the boundaries of traditional nationstates which is a particular concern of those linguistic, religious or ethnic groups whose identity transcends the boundaries of the state. Indeed, the central concept embedded within the two-character countrylevel domain names is that of the nationstate; in the case of the many nations that do not have states—or, to use the suggestive term employed by Keating and oth-ers, ‘stateless nations’ (Keating 2001)—no official national representation is available online. Within a Hispanic context, the campaigns by Catalan nationalists for a domain name, under the auspices of the Associació punt- CAT group, founded by Amadeu Abril i Abril, and which eventually led to ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) approving the domain ’.cat’ in September 2005, are particularly illuminating in revealing how issues of visibility and national identity are negotiated online via domain names, as well as how nonnationstates can make strategic use of existing domain name regulations to forge their own sense of nonnationstate identity.⁴ URLs, then ‘map out’ the geopolitical concerns of the offline world, and have come under critique by both scholars and campaigners for their reproduction of existing offline inequalities online.

In a similar vein, debates have also taken place regarding the attempts made by those now known as ‘internet geographers’ to produce graphical representations of the internet’s structure or its traffic flows. As will be discussed in more detail later on, all too often these maps of internet geography are based on the same kinds of assumptions and elisions as hegemonic cartographies of the offline world have been over history. These assumptions and elisions encompass both the choice of data used to generate the maps and the graphical conventions, including form of projection and the use of logo-maps, employed to render them meaningful to viewers. Furthermore, such maps may also be seen as functioning to reify the spatial configuration of informational capitalism such that subtleties are erased and real alternatives abridged. While research on this topic is not as voluminous as that concerning the problems of the domain name system, critics such as Har-pold (1999) have been quick to point out the ‘pernicious metageographical’ discourse evident in such representations.

Within this context, in which graphic and/or conceptual mapping both in offline and online domains, as well as the constant spaces of interconnection between the online and the offline, speaks to geopolitical concerns, the case studies in this chapter are seen as examples of resistant mappings; that is, mappings which tentatively speak back to some of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Approaches to Latin American Online Cultural Production
• 1 Cartographic Imaginaries: Mapping Latin(o) America's Place in a World of Networked Digital Technologies
• 2 Reworking the ‘Lettered City’: The Resistant Reterritorialisation of Urban Place
• 3 From Macondo to Macon.doc: Contemporary Latin American Hypertext Fiction
• 4 Civilisation and Barbarism: New Frontiers and Barbarous Borders Online
• 5 Mestiz@ Cyborgs: The Performance of Latin American-ness as (Critical) Racial Identity
• 6 Revolución.com? The Latin American Revolutionary Tradition in the Age of New Media (Revolutions)
• Conclusion: Latin American Cultural Practice Online: A Continuing Dialogue between Discourses
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index