Intellectuals and Their Others: What Is to Be Done?

Abstract

John Beverley’s Subalternity and Representation is an impressive work of synthesis that maps the contours of the last twenty years of Latin American literary and cultural criticism in unusually lucid prose. Through a wide-ranging discussion of history, political economy, literature, and mass culture in the Americas (North and South), Beverley identifies the stakes in contemporary Latin Americanist theoretical debates by situating these debates in sociohistorical context while also engaging, from a Latin Americanist perspective, current trends in cultural theory in the North American academy. The essays that make up Subalternity and Representation are organically linked to a degree unusual in a collection of what is, for the most part, previously published work. Moreover, Beverley tackles a host of complex issues with a level of clarity admirable in a field cluttered with an arcane jargon it generates at several times the rate it produces genuinely new ideas. His central theme is the problematic relationship of the progressive academic to the oppressed peoples about and on behalf of whom she or he writes. If academic knowledge, he argues, “is a practice that actively produces subalternity … in the act of representing it” (Subalternity 2), how can the politically committed scholar represent the subaltern within the academy without being complicit in the reproduction of the very relations of domination and subordination such representations are meant to oppose? Because Beverley’s attempt to address this question engages in an ongoing set of debates, some definitions and unpackings of key concepts are in order, beginning with those that appear in the title itself.