Urgencias del latinoamericanismo en tiempos de globalizacion conflictiva

Tributo a John Beverley

Elizabeth Monasterios Perez

• Editorial: Editorial A Contracorriente
• Año: 2020
• ISBN de la versión impresa: 9781945234576
• ISBN del libro electrónico: 9781945234583
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia de Latinoamérica y el Caribe

Urgencias del Latinamericanismo en tiempos de globalización conflictiva. Tributo a John Beverley, es un libro colectivo escrito al calor de los desafíos que la actual reconfiguración mundial le está planteando al latinoamericanismo, empujándolo a incorporarse en el horizonte de lo que ya es un mundo conflictivamente globalizado y desentendido de las fracturas que él mismo genera. Discutir con qué estrategias, incertidumbres, voluntad autocrítica y carga histórica camina el latinoamericanismo hacia este devenir-global del mundo, orienta el proyecto del libro y permite abordar algunas de las cuestiones más acuciantes del pensamiento crítico latinoamericano en torno a la viabilidad/inviabilidad de las utopías sociales y soberanías culturales que (todavía) se disputan en la región. Crucial en el proyecto de este libro es un diálogo crítico con los debates, polémicas y construcciones teóricas que plantea la obra del desafiante latinoamericanista que es John Beverley.

1. Testimonios

Algo sobre John Beverley

Roberto Fernández Retamar (La Havana, 9 de junio 1930 - La Havana, 20 de julio 2019)

CASA DE LAS AMÉRICAS

Me enteré con sorpresa que John Beverley, a quien recuerdo como un joven audaz, sabio y sonriente nacido por azar en Venezuela, pero estadounidense de raíz, va a retirarse, después de más de cuarenta años de admirable labor, de la actividad docente en la Universidad de Pittsburgh. Lo que no debía extrañarme, porque yo, que tanto lo aprecio y quiero, cumpliré pronto, si los dioses son propicios, ochenta y ocho años. Ese accidente y quebrantos de salud me han impedido escribir, como me lo pidió, honrándome, la Profesora Elizabeth Monasterios y yo hubiera querido hacer, la conferencia magistral de este Simposio. Pero en vista del hecho, la Profesora Monasterios me ha solicitado un texto corto en referencia a mi relación intelectual con el trabajo de John. Eso es lo que intento en estas líneas tan pocas como sinceras.

No recuerdo con exactitud cuándo supe por primera vez de John Beverley, pero de seguro fue al leer en alguna revista un trabajo de él que me impresionó. A partir de ese momento, busqué trabajos suyos, hasta que nos encontramos personalmente. Durante décadas hemos participado en reuniones de trabajo en Cuba y los Estados Unidos: en el primer caso, sobre todo en la Casa de las Américas (en cuya revista homónima he tenido la satisfacción de hacer publicar varios de sus agudos textos); en el segundo, sobre todo en la Universidad de Pittsburgh.

Se conoce de sobra la riqueza de su faena intelectual, que va del estudio de la poesía barroca y la picaresca españolas al testimonio hispanoamericano, la literatura centroamericana y la situación del área (en compañía de un colega); y más allá de la literatura (uno de sus libros más resonantes se titula Against Literature [1993]), el debate sobre el posmodernismo en la América Latina (1995) o los estudios subalternos (1999), y sin duda otras tareas que desgraciadamente no conozco. A John Beverley lo caracteriza una constante vivacidad cultural que, además de encarnar en obras propias, se ha hecho patente en numerosos discípulos y discípulas tanto de su país como de nuestra América.

Hace años, al escribir sobre la lengua española, cité esta observación de John, procedente de su libro Del Lazarillo al sandinismo. Estudios sobre la función ideológica de la literatura española e hispanoamericana (1987):

Fue la Revolución Cubana la que dio origen al gran incremento de estudios latinoamericanos en la década de 1960 y principio de la de 1970. Además de Cuba, el boom latinoamericano de los años 60 (tanto en el sentido económico — las altísimas tasas de crecimiento de la mayoría de las economías latinoamericanas — como en el sentido cultural de boom de la narrativa) tuvo o tiende a tener efectos estructurales muy profundos en el propio campo del hispanismo. Antes de la Revolución Cubana, el paradigma del español que se impartía en la escuela norteamericana era el castellano [de Castilla]; hoy en día, en lugar de ello, tiende a ser una especie de “promedio de laboratorio” latinoamericano. La literatura latinoamericana, que cuando yo era aún estudiante se consideraba como la última de las literaturas en idioma extranjero, tiene hoy un prestigio y una influencia excepcionales. (33-34)

Añadí que yo podía dar testimonio de lo afirmado al final por John, desde el otro lado del aula, ya que fui profesor en la Universidad de Yale entre 1957 y 1958, cuando dar clases de literatura hispanoamericana (Beverley dice “latinoamericana”) parecía casi una excentricidad. Ello me permitió, dicho sea entre paréntesis, comprar por centavos ediciones originales de autores como Jorge Luis Borges en la amada Nueva York, ya entonces, y desde hacía tiempo, capital del siglo XX, como Walter Benjamin escribiera que París había sido la capital del siglo XIX.

Voy a concluir mencionando (y agradeciendo) lo mucho que debo a John Beverley en cuanto a cierta difusión de algunas obras mías en los Estados Unidos. En primer lugar, referida a mi ensayo más conocido, “Caliban”, que él también comentó generosamente en español, en el Diccionario enciclopédico de las letras de América Latina (1995). Tengo entendido que fue sobre todo gracias a gestiones suyas que la editorial de la Universidad de Minnesota publicó en 1989 (y ha republicado después en varias ocasiones) mi libro Caliban and Other Essays, con admirable prólogo de Fredric Jameson. John ha propuesto después un acercamiento distinto a aquel ensayo, acercamiento que ha llamado ingeniosamente, teniendo en cuenta que el nombre del personaje de Shakespeare Caliban es (con licencia de Harold Bloom) anagrama de caníbal, con otro anagrama: “By Lacan”.

Además, John me ha entrevistado para Critical Inquiry, y ha traducido para boundary 2 mi ensayo “La enormidad de Cuba”, que dediqué a él (y en que se alude a la observación de Unamuno sobre las palabras “anormal” y “enorme”), y más tarde el ensayo mío de los años sesenta del pasado siglo donde dio un giro mi tarea: “Martí en su (tercer) mundo”. De manera que debo decir, repito, que sobre todo gracias a él soy algo conocido en este país, que visité por primera vez en 1947, cuando muchos y muchas de quienes escuchan estas palabras no habían nacido todavía, y cuyos ámbitos universitarios me han acogido cálidamente en no pocas ocasiones, como esta misma.

Quisiera añadir otras cosas sobre la faena intelectual de John Beverley, pero en ese caso este dejaría de ser el texto corto que se me ha pedido y es lo que puedo escribir en la ocasión. Le deseo a él larga vida, y crecimiento, más allá de su retiro universitario, de una obra que nos es fundamental, pues enlaza admirablemente lo mejor de los Estados Unidos con lo mejor de nuestra América, y ello es imprescindible sobre todo en los tiempos que nos ha tocado vivir y no es necesario calificar.

Muchas gracias.

Conversing with John Beverley

Margaret Randall

INDEPENDENT WRITER

It is an honor to be at this symposium celebrating the work of John Beverley. Thank you for inviting me. John is a friend and mentor. My intention, here, is to hold a kind of conversation with his thought and work, through which I can thank him for his contributions to a field in which I’ve also been present, and perhaps also point to some considerations for its future.

When John and I met in Havana in 1977, the world was very different from the one we inhabit today. Left social change appeared to be ascendant. The Cuban Revolution still seemed healthy and remained, despite the ongoing attempts to destroy it and its own missteps, an example for those working to create social justice. John and I come from very different intellectual backgrounds — he had been a student of Fredric Jameson, one of the truly brilliant Marxist political theorists and literary critics of our time, and was beginning to make his own mark in the U.S. academy; I had no formal studies, but was developing a left political analysis from my experience on the ground.

Our paths crossed and would cross many times in the years to come, sometimes in person but more often in our shared passion for what was then beginning to be known as testimonio. A literary genre and political tool, this particularly Latin American version of oral history was a natural outgrowth of the people’s movements gaining ground across the Continent. No longer would the victors (almost always rich white men) be the only ones telling our stories. We needed a literary form that would give voice to those who made the history: the long-silenced men and women who had always been voiceless, protagonists of the dramatic social change that then seemed to have a viable future. Testimonio was that form. It emerged out of a practice of struggle, and also served that practice. At the same time, it was a literary genre, with its own evolving conventions.

In the preface to his 2004 book Testimonio: The Politics of Truth, John writes that the genre is “a new form of narrative literature in which we can at the same time witness and be a part of the emerging culture of an international proletarian/popular-democratic subject in its period of ascendancy” (x). In an earlier book he’d been concerned with “the way in which what conventionally counts as literature — poems, essays, novels — became a crucial ‘ideological practice’ […] of the Central American revolutionary movements” (Beverley, 1990, p, xiii).

I began my work in oral history, or testimonio, in Cuba, with my early book about that country’s women, Cuban Women Now (1974). It would be the first of more than a dozen I would produce in the genre. In 1970, newly arrived on the Island, I was invited to be a poetry judge at the Casa de las Américas literary contest. My colleagues on that jury were Ernesto Cardenal, Roque Dalton, Washington Delgado, and Cintio Vitier; the first two were writers who had written or would soon write important books of testimonio. The new genre was being talked about. That was also the year the Argentinian journalist Rodolfo Walsh, whose book Operación masacre had contributed powerfully to the field, suggested that Casa add testimonio to the contest’s literary categories. Forty-one years later, in 2011, I would be invited back as a judge in that category. In those forty-one years, I not only produced my own books of testimonial literature but was intimately involved with the genre as it was growing and changing. So was John.

And right here I want to stop and say something I feel is particularly important to John and me: the fields in which we worked were never mere intellectual exercises, disciplines in which we might make a point or two in discussions held with colleagues in the safety of the classroom or at forums and conferences. Because John was also an activist in the important solidarity movements of those years, his work had an authentic context and quality. Because I lived and worked among people on the forefront of the struggle for social change, my ideas and practice were also more grass roots-oriented.

In 1977, the year we met, the Cuban Revolution was already in its second decade of life and remained an emblem of struggle throughout the Americas. Ernesto Che Guevara’s guerrilla actions had crossed borders and taken Cuba’s example into the internationalist arena. The foco theory, described by French journalist Régis Debray in his pamphlet Revolution in the Revolution, provided a theoretical framework for armed struggle. Che himself had penned a practical manual of guerrilla warfare. The Heroic Guerrilla, as he was called, had been ambushed and murdered in Bolivia in October of 1967, and his methods were beginning to be called into question. Still, liberation struggles continued to take place throughout the underdeveloped world and even inside the United States, and many of us believed they were the surest road to victory.

While many of us abhorred violence and war, and had joyously welcomed Chile’s peaceful transition to socialism, what we were discovering on the ground was that only armed struggle was capable of standing up to the Empire’s vastly superior and multi-pronged forces. There was abundant evidence that revolutionaries demonstrated a fairness and generosity when forced to go to war, while authoritarian regimes killed wantonly, without concern for what they casually refer to as collateral damage. And only armed struggle, costly as it was, seemed able to give birth to sustainable change. The model had a David and Goliath aura to it, and represented homegrown resistance to local authoritarianism and imperialist rule. In this, as in so much else, we misjudged how far the Empire was willing to go in its efforts to defeat equality.

I believed in armed struggle, because it was what I was living. John believed and wrote eloquently about it because his scholarship and solidarity work led him to a similar conclusion. This was something else we had in common. And within the U.S. academy, John’s wasn’t a popular position. What is more interesting, perhaps, is not that we believed in armed struggle then, but that almost forty years later, after so many devastating defeats and traumatic personal losses, we haven’t abandoned our convictions. Both of us, attentive to an evolving history, have more nuanced analyses now. But we refuse to discard the concept as so many of our contemporaries have done. John and I, each in our own way, has looked with profound respect at the methods favored in those years, analyzing what didn’t work and why, and tracing lines of influence to later progressive formations.

John himself eloquently elucidates our shared vision of armed struggle in remarks he made at a special session that honored my oral history work at the October 2004 meeting of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) in Las Vegas, Nevada. He starts his contribution to that session in this way:

[T]estimonio always invokes Walter Benjamin’s warning in his Theses on the Philosophy of History that “even the dead are not safe” — even the past is subject to being obliterated or transformed by the enemy. That thought connects to an issue that is fundamental to Margaret’s work, as it is to my own: the armed struggle in Latin America, in the period that goes roughly from 1956 — the year of the landing of the Granma in Cuba — to 1990, when the Sandinistas unexpectedly lose the elections in Nicaragua. […] [This] progressive Latin Americanism […] points to a different future for the continent and its peoples, including the forty million or so Latinos in the United States itself, [and] cannot be articulated without in some way recovering the heritage of the armed struggle. (Beverley, 2004b)

Later he goes on to say: “I don’t know whether, in what remains of my life, it will be possible to revive a project of radical social transformation in the Americas, including the United States.”

In the years since John wrote these lines, the U.S. government took its eyes off Latin America to concentrate its lust for conquest in the Middle East. This, and their own experiences of struggle, enabled several Latin American countries (Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador, Bolivia, and Venezuela) to establish progressive governments. Today, with the groundwork laid down by Bush and, sadly, even Obama, and with Trump currently in office, most of those countries have reverted to some version of right-wing politics. They, like we, are riding the neo-fascist wave now sweeping much of the world. Only Bolivia, to some degree, and tiny Uruguay, still have administrations that continue to mostly put their peoples’ needs first.

At LASA, John went on to offer the most moving definition of armed struggle I have read:

[…] the armed struggle revealed Latin America in its most generous, creative, original, egalitarian possibilities; like the Sixties in the United States, with which it was closely bound up. It pointed to a genuinely different, more beautiful and joyful future than the dreary Restoration we live under today. It did not fail because of its internal contradictions — although they were many; it was defeated by a stronger, more ruthless enemy. It needs to be recuperated in its own right, then, as a great historical enterprise, an awed and, in its ultimate defeat, tragic enterprise, but also a noble and just one.

I don’t think the task of recuperating the armed struggle is an easy one — like trying to remember a dream, it recedes as you get closer to it. Still, we — the generation Margaret and I belong to — are probably the last generation that can undertake this task. Those of you who come after us do not have a “lived” connection to the experience of the armed struggle, and there is very little in contemporary Latin American culture to encourage you to recover it — just the opposite. (Beverley, 2007)

John’s reference to the 1960s is also relevant. That decade has too often been trivialized and misrepresented, just as has been true of the era of armed struggle in Latin America. Frequently it’s easier to idealize or romanticize than to explore such phenomena in all its complexity. For many who weren’t there, it’s been impossible to situate themselves in context. As John says, he and I are of the last generation able to take on the task.

In the long run, defeat has been as illustrative as victory. Sometime in 1989 or 1990, after the dissolution of the socialist world, my son Gregory said to me: “We have failed. All we have to pass on to our children is our failure.” The devastating sentiment was shared by many at that time. For those of us who had been actively involved in the struggle for social change, and in spite of our sharp critique of aspects of life in the Soviet Union, the loss of what we now call “real socialism” wasn’t simply a political loss; it was a loss of identity. We felt unmoored, empty, muted.

The next few years would see us pulling ourselves together, reexamining presumptions, emerging — as tenacious humans tend to do — with insights not only about the power that is now hegemonic and on its way to consolidating the cruel globalism we have today, but about our own fatal mistakes. Our analyses appeared in articles and essays, and in political discussions finally freed from the stifling allegiance to dogma and isms that dominated the preceding decades. It can also be found in other forms — the visual arts (especially the powerful posters of ...

Índice

• Portada
• Pagina del titulo
• La página de derechos de autor
• Dedicación
• Agradecimientos
• Índice
• Introducción
• The Failure of Latin America
• 1. Testimonios
• 2. El Potencial Teórico de Pensar Más Allá de Los Paradigmas
• 3. Literatura, Post-Literatura y Políticas de la Cultura: Lo Que Dicen Los Debates Actuales
• 4. La Circunstancia Global: Transnacionalismos, Post-Humanismos y Debates Por Las Soberanías Culturales
• 5. La Querella de Las Utopías y Formas Polémicas de Pensar en El Nuevo Milenio
• 6. Epílogo: Because we have So Many Stories to Tell …
• 7. Serie Fotográfica
• Contraportada