For Sara, compañera John Beverley I don't know when I first met Sara. I was invited to give a talk at Dartmouth in the mid-seventies, just barely tenured myself. But she was away from campus during that visit. I do remember the younger faculty who were my natural cohorts during the visit speaking of her with a kind of fear and trembling. I don't know the ins and outs of everything, and in any case wouldn't broadcast them here, but what I can say is that by the early eighties Sara and her colleagues had built at Dartmouth one of the most forward-looking Spanish Departments in the country, already leaning towards a Latin American focus, resolutely feminist, and a pioneer of what would become the postcolonial turn. Unfortunately, this achievement was probably somewhat wasted on the future lawyers, doctors, middle–managers and CIA agents who made up the bulk of Dartmouth's undergraduates then, still mostly male. (Maybe it benefitted mostly the CIA guys.) At Hopkins, Sara was in a more traditional "foreign languages" set up, and she had to work hard to get out from under the hegemony of the Hispanists. But she had superb graduate students, and over the years turned out some of the most brilliant names in the field, now in mid-career and in senior positions. It occurs to me now that Sara and I might have crossed paths earlier without knowing it. We were both raised in Peru in the forties and early fifties; she is an Arequipa, and I was a third-culture kid living in Lima, where my father worked for something called the International Petroleum Company, a small piece that would be absorbed into what later became Exxon. She did her BA, MA and PhD at UCLA in the sixties. I went to the University of California San Diego to work on my PhD between 1966 and 1969. I used to go up to UCLA to use [End Page 372] its library, and sometimes both to UCLA and USC to listen to talks. So it's possible. But whether we crossed paths or not, both our lives and work are somehow shadowed by that period in Peruvian history, where the conflict between APRA and the State was quite intense. The best portrait of this period is probably Mario Vargas Llosa's novel Conversación en la Catedral. Where Sara and I linked up more definitively was through the conferences of the Institute for Ideology and Literature at the University of Minnesota, which we both attended. Hugo Achúgar and I had been trying to persuade Alfredo Roggiano, the long-time editor of the Revista Iberoamericana, that a new school of post-Stalinist Marxist and socio-criticism had emerged in Latin America in the seventies—at that time it was centered around the Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Rómulo Gallegos, in Caracas, where Domingo Miliani was director, Ángel Rama was nearby, and many of the contributors to the volume, exiles from dictatorships in their respective countries, were located. Surprisingly, Roggiano agreed, and even lent his name to the project. The result was a special issue of the journal called "Ideología y crítica literaria en la América de habla hispana" (Revista Iberoamericana, 114–116). I approached Sara about contributing an essay. She replied, I remember, saying something like "Thanks John, but I'm not a Marxist." I said it doesn't matter; what you do fits with the idea of the special issue. And it did, perfectly: her essay "Huamán Poma y el espacio de la Pureza" became one of swing points of the postcolonial "turn" in Latin American criticism in the eighties and early nineties. It should be recalled too that, at that time, the figure that dominated a lot of our attention was Michel Foucault, not a Marxist either but a follower of Althusser's fundamental work on ideology in the 1960s–hence the emphasis in our title on ideology, perhaps hinting at the possibility of literary criticism as an ideological practice, that is, as what came to be known as Latin Americanism. That sense of a looming postcolonialism fits also...
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