Transnational Crossings and the Development of Latin American Cultural Studies

Abstract

Marc Zimmerman Name-Dropping as Cultural Practice Many Latin American Studies specialists worry much today about the imposition of Europeanizing and occidental models with respect to our field. Some of us call it globalization; a persistent minority still prefers the term, cultural imperialism. But I concur with Ernesto Dussell and others who argue that the so-called third world is implicit in European modernism’s development, and those third world elements are always restructuring modernism, including radical, oppositional critiqueBand even modernism’s transnationalized and globalized monsteroffspring. All this might be cause for celebration; but postcolonial and subaltern deconstructions suggest that even a thousand Latin Americans producing general theory might not make that theory any less Euro-centric or colonial. Such questions and ironies mark this paper. At issue is the evolution of the literary/cultural left and its identification with counter-hegemonic forms of Marxism in the 1960s to cultural studies and now, in our globalized present, to a possible articulation with subaltern studies, and other dissident modes of critique into a working theoretical corpus that does indeed help us grasp Latin American and broader categories. Articulation is the key buzzword for this paper. And it’s tied to other words, like interpellation and appropriation. But to indicate what I mean by this constellation of words, let me do some name-dropping. And where better to start than with some French names? Paris the capital of nineteenth century high culture, and capital again in the 1920s, only regained its hegemony in the post-World War II period as part of a new worldwide division of intellectual, cultural and overall labor that can be related to the Marshall Plan, the Breton Woods