Resistances of Latin Americanism

Abstract

Resistances of Latin Americanism Samuel Steinberg John Beverley. 2004. Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. The journal Dispostio/n has recently made a welcomed reappearance with a special issue dedicated to a trend that assumed and soon lost a certain conceptual dominance (or, at least, ubiquity) within Latin American studies in the nineties. I speak of Latin American subaltern studies, whose search for “not only . . . new ways of looking at the subaltern . . . but also of building new relations between ourselves and those human counterparts whom we posit as objects of study” (Latin American Subaltern Studies Group 1993, 121) one was hard-pressed not to find seductive. Yet the deadlock (or impasse) that the project grew to face seems to have largely interrupted its rule.1 However, despite evidence to the contrary—namely the generally documentary, archival approach to Latin American subaltern studies that one finds operative in the recent edition of Dispositio/n—I dare not say yet that [End Page 263] subaltern studies has lost all of its force, at least insofar as subaltern studies hoped to “build new relations” between intellectuals and their marginalized counterparts. It would seem that Latin Americanism continues to reflect upon the distance between itself and its object, unless of course, Latin Americanism is now defunct. While change appears to be in air—that is, fearing that Latin Americanism will tire of its own irreducibility and will repress its own impossibility—it might be useful to consider recent efforts to trace this distance, indeed, an effort that breaks its head upon this distance. John Beverley’s Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth (2004), a series of previously published essays on testimonio (with a new introduction), documents an attempt to locate the conditions for thinking past or otherwise than artisticpolitical deadlock, positing culture as a means by which to recreate at least certain limited kinds of social relations, that might lead to a contemporary form of radical emancipatory politics. If at one moment culture was thought as a mode of bringing into (symbolic) modernity a larval Latin American social subject, Beverley’s recent book exploits an existing art-politics link as a mode of producing new relations between the elements and nonelements of the social field, as a way of imagining and at times producing new forms of association between social entities, which becomes increasingly necessary following the end of the planning/national-popular state’s capacity to structure and provide meaning to such relations. To summarize, the perceived decline of the political potential of the national-popular state and its aesthetic analogue, the Spanish American narrative boom—a last great moment of the literary, characterized as it was by an attempt to produce the symbolic modernity of Latin America and thus by its attempt to suture the inadequacies of the state—open onto new configurations of cultural politics to be discussed here. Before I turn to Beverley’s formulations in their particularity, it is worth underlining that such new configurations of culture comprise a critical response to the ways in which the arts have been used in Latin America— from nineteenth-century statecraft to forms of fictive ethnicity, state pedagogy, and national-popular articulation. To be sure, such new formulations respond most directly to defeats of the even more recent past—defeats of insurrectionary dreams and the socialist option. That is, Beverley’s move [End Page 264] toward thinking in terms of the subaltern is related very much, it seems, to his personal experience of the vicissitudes of political effectivity. As he writes, “My interest in postmodernism and subaltern studies was a way of both mourning and reflecting critically on the reasons for the defeat or the collapse of the illusion of radical social change in Latin America and the United States I had shared with the protagonists of testimonio” (2004, xii). Gören Th erborn remembers this defeat, writing of the period following the sixties when “suddenly, the high water withdrew, and was followed by a neoliberal tsunami” (2007, 64). His metaphor describes the seemingly quick transformation from the radical cultural and political atmosphere of the sixties and seventies to the order of the present, between which stands...