The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War Scott Pollard Franco, Jean . 2002. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. $52.00 hc. $22.95 sc. 352 pp. In The Sociology of Music, Theodore Adorno paints a dour picture of advanced capitalism's deleterious effect on music (e.g., the imposition of a culture industry which subverted creative genius and privileged repetition and replication), yet he consistently demonstrates a faith in the avant-garde to escape the ravages of capitalism and arrogate a space for creativity and exploration. In The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War, Jean Franco writes a similar kind of cultural history for Latin America since the Cold War. The book is framed by a pessimistic evaluation of the lose-lose [End Page 196] effects of the Cold War for Latin America, yet throughout the book Franco consistently turns to exemplary cultural figures, texts, art, and film to demonstrate how a creative work or an aesthetic practice was able to escape the pitched ideological battles of the Cold War, find its own voice, and preserve a Latin American particularity in the face of homogenizing global forces. Admitting, at best grudgingly, some sense of hope in the face of an otherwise grim analysis of Latin American society since the 1950s, Franco finds continued evidence of an "exuberant creativity" in Latin America that can liberate itself from imposed ideological boundaries, adapt and master foreign imports to its own ends, and successfully assert its inexorable difference in a globalized economy. In the initial chapters, Franco lays out how binary Cold War ideologies invaded Latin America to its detriment. Seen as a prize by the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Latin America became a battleground in the struggle of the two superpowers, and it lost: economically, culturally, and as a continent of autonomous nations. In Franco's judgment, neither of these imported political economies adapted to the particularities of the cultures, peoples, nations, and social milieus of the continent, and the poor fit resulted in inevitable and multifarious failures. Communism has not defeated poverty in Latin America nor met the needs of its marginalized communities. The Zapatista Revolution imagines Mexico as a multicultural society, but how can such a fight for freedom and autonomy be won when the revolution has been marketed as entertainment? The United States' ideological intervention was grounded in the duality of universalism (i.e., the preeminence of European culture) and the Soviet threat to that preeminence. Through the propaganda films of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, Disney, print media (Encounters, Cuadernos, Mundo Nuevo), and the recruitment and use of conservative Latin American intellectuals (e.g., Emir Rodriguez Monegal, Octavio Paz, Salvador de Madariaga), the United States pursued an ideological campaign in Latin America that used universalism as code for an attack on Latin American particularity, which was inevitably linked with Soviet ideals (e.g., class struggle). Correlatively, Franco looks at the failures and mismatches of Marxism in Latin America, focusing on the disjunction between austere Marxist political practice and the "exuberance and excess of the aesthetic" (3). She uses the Mexican writers José Revueltas and Elena Poniatowska to exemplify literature's critique of the failures of Marxism in Latin America, and then she turns to the Chilean Pablo Neruda to explore how poetry and Marxist practice could co-exist. Franco makes clear her own political preference here: The sins of the application of Marxism in Latin America can be corrected, while there is no corrective for United States imperialism. [End Page 197] In the following chapters, Franco plots a causal arc from the failed socioeconomic policies of the Cold War in Latin America to the resultant dictatorships and military interventions to contemporary neo-liberalism. At each stage of that arc, she investigates the consequent implosions for Latin American culture, delineating the internalized products of these changes (e.g., dictatorship, torture, death) and then against their backdrop analyzing the function of literature and art as revelatory if ephemerally liberating counter-narratives. Although Franco takes on conventional themes...