Capitalism and its Discontents: Power and Accumulation in Latin American Culture by John Kraniauskas

Abstract

 Reviews de Copacabana en el Perú (), and brings the study back to Gongorine pastoral, now a vessel for the ‘submerged tales of the mythical indigenous past’ (p. ). e book’s limitations are relatively minor: beginning each chapter, or part thereof, with a recapitulation of the relevant critical opinion works well in the studies on Soto de Rojas, Carvajal y Mendoza, and Valverde, but proves simply overwhelming in the case of Quevedo, who furthermore forms the basis of the book’s least cohesive chapter. Holloway might have made more explicit the commonalities that can be extracted from the four studies; and it is odd not to find some mention in Chapter  of Lope’s Pastores de Belén (), even if this was published aer the composition of Carvajal y Mendoza’s poetry. ese caveats aside, this is an important and timely work likely to galvanize scholarship in the field. U  E J D B Capitalism and its Discontents: Power and Accumulation in Latin American Culture. By J K. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. . xi+ pp.£. ISBN ––––. In the words of its author, this is ‘a book about the present, from the perspective of its recent prehistory, and as expressed in both literature and in film; as well as a contribution to a materialist criticism’ (p. xxiii). A compendium of works published over decades, the focus of John Kraniauskas’s intellectual project is consistent: how literary and filmic culture reveals the intimately entwined forms of capitalism and the state in a region in which the reproduction and accumulation of the former is dependent on the ‘extra-economic violence’ of the latter (p. xvii). Capitalism and its Discontents unfolds as a critique of transculturation, subalternization, and, most significantly perhaps, as an updating of the Marxian notion of ‘primitive accumulation ’—here revealed to be anything but temporally confined to a pre-capitalist past. Kraniauskas’s readings are rhizomatic in the most creative sense. In the opening chapter of the first section, ‘Walter Benjamin and/in Latin America’, he picks out fragmentary moments when Benjamin thought about the region—in a dream, a job offer, an early desire to learn Nahuatl—and develops an ingenious discourse on intuitive insights into the nature of the ‘colonial unconscious’. Chapter  continues to engage the political efficacy of humour by contrasting Benjamin’s and Mariátegui’s responses to Charlie Chaplin films. e section concludes with a Benjaminian take on Arguedas’s Yawar Fiesta (), read as being about and aer a ‘wrong’—modernizing and developmentalist—Mariátegui. e second section, ‘e “Maldoblestar” of Literature’, develops the idea that the Latin American dictatorship novel, ‘which narrates the state and its institutionalization—is a regional transformation of the historical novel: a military coup at the level of the literary’ (p. xx). Althusser’s ‘primitive political accumulation’ is worked through in a reading of how Miguel Ángel Asturias’ El Señor Presidente () is expressive of the ‘state [. . .] reterritorialised as nation’ and how ‘rural dispossession, control and capitalisation are felt (and imagined) in the capital city’ MLR, .,   (p. ). Chapter  concerns the ‘overdetermination’ of the Latin American state qua the market in Augusto Roa Bastos Yo el supremo (), illuminating ‘not the fetishism of the commodity but the fetishism of the state’ (p. ). Kraniauskas proposes that it is through cinematic qualities that the novel represents a ‘paradigm of historical narrative [. . .] adequate to these times of the technological ideology-image’ (pp. –). ere follows a chapter on the understudied El fiscal (), also by Roa Bastos. Here the again the concern is with the relation of cinema and literature, a melancholic ‘hybrid image of Paraguayan conservative modernity’ (p. ). In the stand-out Chapter , ‘e State is a Monkey’, Kraniauskas expands on the dialectical coexistence of freedom and unfreedom under capitalism through a reading of José Revueltas’s El apando () as an illustration of what, in his theoretical work, Revueltas termed ‘allotropic negation’—the process produces a change of political form without a change of content (p. ). Bodies—human, architectural, and social—combine in the ‘geometria enajenada’ of prison and the Mexican state appears as an ‘alienated social form that alienates, producing species regression’—a cage of monkeys (p. ). Chapter  reads Osvaldo Lamborghini...