The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader

Abstract

The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader. Ed. Ileana Rodriguez. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. 459 pp. 0-8223-2701-5; 0-8223-2712-0 (paper). Nuevas perspectivas desde/sobre America Latina: el desafio de los estudios culturales. Ed. Mabel Morana. Santiago, chile: Editorial Cuarto Propio; Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2000. 514 pp. 956-260-185-4 (paper) Moreiras, Alberto. The Exhaustion of Difference; The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. 350 pp. 0-8223-2726-0; 0-8223-2724-4 (paper). Egan, Linda. Carlos Monsivais: Culture and Chronicle in Contemporary Mexico. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2001. xxvi + 276 pp. 0-8165-2137-9. Gruzinski, Serge. Images at War: Mexico from Columbus to Blade Runner (1492-2019). Trans. by Heather MacLean. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. 284 pp. 0-8223-2653-1; 0-8223-2643-4 (paper). Quiroga, Jose. Tropics of Desire; Interpretations frorn Queer Latino America. New York: New York UP, 2000. xv, 286 pp. 0-8147-6952-7; 0-8147-6953-X (paper). Fiol-Matta, Licia. A Queer Myth for the Nation; The State and Gabriela Mistral. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002. xxix + 269 pp. 0-8166-3963-9; 0-8166-3964-7 (paper). Perhaps the first well defined profile for Latin American cultural involved the attempt to accommodate the concept of studies to the case of Latin America. Building on the concept of subalternity as developed by the South Asian Subaltern Studies groups (most famously known through Gayatri Spivak's critique of their proposals contained in her much cited Can the Subaltern Speak and subsequent essays), the Latin American Studies group, whose work goes back now over a decade, developed a series of proposals that would offer a significant shift in the focus of Latin American (see Founding Statement: Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, Boudary 2 20.3 [Fall 1993]: 110-21; special issue on The Postmodern Debate in Latin America). This shift is two-fold: on the one hand, it meant--in line with a fundamental axiom of contemporary cultural studies--understanding cultural production (itself a contested site as to what culture includes, or at least, how to bracket specific cultural practices, if the concept even continues to be useful) as part of larger process in the exercise of the power and rights of symbolic representation: cultural production is one (often privileged and selectively legitimated) symbolic practice whose full sociohistorical function can only be understood if it is seen in terms of larger issues involving the creation of meaning and the exercise of power through symbolic representation in a society. Second, it is crucial to understand how the control of symbolic representation determines necessarily the speaking subjects of a society are and what constitutes all of the parameters of their speaking: what it is proper to speak about and what the permissible discourse practices of the speaking are. Subaltern Studies, as an intellectual and academic practice, involves as much the discovery of a record of subaltern speakers (from a cultural history point of view, works that have been produced but ignored, marginalized, repressed, destroyed) as the analysis of the complexities regarding the insertion of subaltern voices (themselves an unstable and shifting sphere) in the sociohistorical record: the concessions and compromises of the intersection of the subaltern and hegemonic practices of production, the representation of subalterns by hegemonic practices, the perception of the incursion of subaltern voices as a possible subversion of the hegemonic by the subaltern (e.g., when a subaltern voice seems to take over a text in often surprising and unsuspected ways). In short, what is fundamentally involved is the proposition that history be rewritten from the multiple vantage points that can be called subaltern, as much by the subaltern subjects themselves as by those who would assume a political and ideological commitment vis-a-vis the subaltern. …