Crisis Cultures: The Rise of Finance in Mexico and Brazil by Brian Whitener

Abstract

Reviewed by: Crisis Cultures: The Rise of Finance in Mexico and Brazil by Brian Whitener Alberto Ribas-Casasayas Whitener, Brian. Crisis Cultures: The Rise of Finance in Mexico and Brazil. U of Pittsburgh P, 2019. Economic criticism of culture has had a robust comeback after the Great Recession. Arguably, though, most scholarly work has tended to focus on the cultural production of richer countries. In this context, Crisis Cultures by Brian Whitener represents a fundamental contribution to cultural approaches to contemporary Latin America from the perspective of finance and economics, and, more extensively, to global cultural critique. The stated objective of the book is to investigate “how the rise of finance has impacted social and cultural life” (13), with a focus on cultural production in Mexico and Brazil from the last decade of the twentieth century to present. Whitener’s account contextualizes this production beyond neoliberalism, which he understands as a modulation of a longer-term downturn originated in the decrease of capital returns in the 1970s and the hyperinflation and debt crisis of the 1980s. Whitener’s analysis is sustained by a comprehensive and solid theoretical grounding paired with a thorough understanding of the concrete particularities of political economic developments in both Mexico and Brazil. The book opens with a thorough and substantial introduction situating the importance of a financial approach to culture after nearly 40 years of a state of crisis, “and perhaps a Marxist and antistate critique of it” (9). Whitener understands that the rise of financial forms of accumulation were “fueled by a secular declining rate of profit or ongoing, underlying problems in the sphere of production” (11). Whitener understands that, after nearly 40 years in a crisis cycle in Latin America, we cannot ignore the cultural impact of economy and finance, particularly when, in a context of increasing surplus capital and surplus population, states resort to policing and violence to subordinate the latter. Whitener eschews traditional critiques of the “shrinking state” under neoliberalism, attending instead to infrastructures that organize bodies and producing them as weak individuals and collectivities defined by—borrowing an expression from Ruth Gilmore—“group-differentiated individuality to premature death” (19). Chapter one focuses largely on Jorge Volpi’s novel En busca de Klingsor as an intellectual response to the embedding of chaos and indeterminacy in Mexican consciousness—the result of dramatically deteriorating living conditions following the 1982 and other successive crises. Whitener’s interpretation of the novel is thorough and internally consistent, suggesting that the novel’s “schatologic” discourse attests to the institution of a “catastrophic and chaotic” concept of history (47). Hence, “the novel’s ontology that reality is indeterminate and that believing [End Page 885] in determinism tendentially leads to illiberalism” (50). Whitener further argues that Volpi’s novel partakes in a general conceptual recodification that leads to the expansion of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous discourse to the more tenuous blanket identifier of “delincuencia” to surplus population in an escalating drug war conflict (44–46), a claim that may require more extensive verification and contrast with contemporaneous discourse. Nonetheless, Klingsor arguably “allows us to register this specific sense of the end of history and of the ideologies of progress in its context of semi-peripheral financial crisis” (52) and demonstrates “the deep roots of the tropes of ontology and catastrophe within a response to financial and state crisis and their continued importance in both literary and popular discursive spheres” (52, 53). Chapters two and three, focused on Brazil, elaborate on this latter point with particular pertinence to urban culture and society by means of an insightful discussion of Zuenir Ventura’s chronicle Cidade partida, Paulo Lins’s novel Cidade de Deus, the blockbuster film Tropa de elite, and the soap opera Cheias de charme. Chapter two explains how the socialization of crisis through hyperinflation and unemployment, inflected by an accelerated State violence, and aimed particularly towards the urban periphery, was accompanied by the development of an intellectual production that refashioned racial and discursive formations. The social forms that arose from local conditions of financial crisis reveal how debilitated national narratives such as “racial democracy” and the failure of social synthesis were animated by forces inherent to racialization and “real...