La resistencia cultural: La nación en el ensayo de las Americas

Abstract

Thomas Ward’s La resistencia cultural is based on a profound knowledge of the essay genre and its most prominent Latin American practitioners. The extensive footnotes evidence serious research within the area of literary studies. The general theme of the book echoes Eduardo Devés Valdés’s recent Del Ariel de Rodó a la CEPAL (Biblos, 2000). Ward describes ideas of the nation presented by Argentinean, Peruvian, Caribbean, Central American, Mexican, and North American writers, many considered cultural heroes in their respective countries: José Martí, D. F. Sarmiento, José Vasconcelos, José Carlos Mariátegui, and José María Arguedas. Others, in the author’s scheme, represent alternative or subaltern positions: Rigoberta Menchú, Omar Cabezas, B. D. Tatum, Malcom X, and Cornel West. The book’s greatest achievement is to recreate a dialogue among men and women of different nationalities, languages, times, and social loyalties.However, more than an essay on nationalist ideology, the book develops as an essay in favor of nationalism. The author’s position is essentialist — the national ideal is fixed by history, language and “race” — and not instrumentalist — the national ideal is associated with the will of individuals. The preface presented the book as an attempt to “formulate a Latin American theory of the nation” (p. 20). However, throughout the text, this formulation takes the form of a political digression supported by historical texts, clearly sending the message that “the solution is in the nation” (p. 41). This is most clear in the concluding chapter, where the author states that his most relevant intellectual finding in response to the classic question “what is the nation?” is the persistence of a “race” or “ethnic group” (p. 351): “True cultural roots, whether ethnic or national, are valuable in resisting new forms of humiliation — for indigenous peoples, blacks, women, and for all that have been subjected to neocolonial domination” (p. 368).The author has a clear moral purpose, and in this sense, the text is difficult to evaluate from a historiographic point of view. It presupposes that history offers lessons and certitudes about the future, something that appears questionable to most contemporary historians — especially since it resists the current academic conventions on the construction of nations and nationalism.Ward takes great care to repeatedly criticize the notion of the nation as a construction and nationalism as the modern political ideal as developed in texts by Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, and E. J. Hobsbawm. Ward argues instead that historical conditions — especially those of an ethnic and racial nature, which he calls “cultural roots” — constitute true nationality. The nation is a topic that has caught the attention of researchers during the last two decades, and it is undeniable that nationalism’s multiple definitions and models of interpretation often overemphasize concepts such as “invention” and “imagination.” Even when contemporary social research is oriented by the presumption that nations are cultural-historic constructions and not natural-objective products, ethnic, linguistic, and social differences have not been left out of the analysis. Historiography has privileged the study of strategies, negotiations, and conflicts implied in the political and cultural ideals of nationalism. These studies analyze not only printed literature but also a wealth of other written sources, as well as iconographic, archaeological, and ethnographic material. Political culture, public health, education, land property rights, bureaucracy, and mass media are only some of the topics such research has touched upon. In this sense, the construction of the nation means above all that it was necessary to redefine ethnic, linguistic, and social difference according to a new social order.La resistencia cultural illustrates one of the ideological dilemmas of nationalism in Latin America: identity versus modernity. In the intellectual discourse of the twentieth century, this dilemma adopted the form of a fight between Ariel and Caliban (following Rodó’s formula, later adopted by Devés Valdés and Ward): beauty against the machine, and “Latin races” against “Anglo-Saxon races.” Recently, this “arielismo” seems to have gained further legitimacy in social research in an attempt to answer the challenges presented by the economic system. However, there are many historical arguments against such a framework. Even though currently we can recognize the opposition between identity and modernity, and its strategic use at different moments and by diverse subjects, it is not necessarily considered conceptually adequate as a guide for social research.