Latin American Identity Research Articles

The Other Side of the Popular: Neoliberalism and Subalternity in Latin America (review)

Williams, Gareth. 2002. The Other Side of Popular: Neoliberalism and Subalternity in Latin America. Durham: Duke University Press. $64.95 hc. $22.95 sc. xii + 375 pp.In 1971, Argentine critic Eduardo Galeano published Las venas abiertas de America latina (The Open Veins of Latin America). Through metaphors of addiction and dependency, Galeano offers a withering Marxist analysis of U. S. hegemony and its perpetual impoverishment of Latin America. After Cuban revolution, in an era that marked rise of left in Latin America as well as strong emergence of Latin American culture (e.g., Boom), Galeano wrote with confidence, and his was one of many voices proffering anti-hegemonic and calling for a more thoroughgoing independence of Latin America from dominion of North. In decades since, though, that sought after independence has been fleeting at best. The U. S. aggressively defeated or neutralized left in places like Chile and Nicaragua while abetting rise of right in Argentina, Chile, and Peru while forging economic ties (e.g., NAFTA) that have furthered Latin America's neo-colonial dependence.In The Other Side of Popular, Gareth Williams writes within current context of globalization and with knowledge of Latin America's continued failures to liberate itself from U. S. dominion. The book reads as if Williams is trying to pick his way through a minefield of failed analyses in search of materials and methods out of which he can piece together a viable approach that posits possibility of a liberatory analysis for Latin America. As a resuk, Williams's efforts are more cautious and nuanced than strident anti-hegemonic arguments of Galeano and his cohort, because Williams questions ability of any master narrative, leftist or otherwise, to not act hegemonically and, thus, never really engages problem of hegemony. In a struggle for power, one unquestioned assumption is power. In struggle between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forces, one unquestioned assumption is hegemony. Williams wants to question that assumption, and he uses concept of subaltern to produce a post-hegemonic analysis that escapes reductive binarity of hegemony/counter-hegemony. Williams uses Gayatri Spivak's definition of subaltern (the absolute limit of place where history is narrativized into logic (2002, 1)). Moreover, subaltern subject sits beyond hegemony and thus can be used as an active means of disrupting neoliberalism and its effects. But rather than producing a totalizing system with its own particular zones of inclusion and exclusion, Williams endeavors to deconstruct narrative closure, using fragmented, marginalized status of subaltern to discuss the ways in which distinct histories, realities and representations can be evaluated at current time in cultural and political terms . . . within ruins of modern history's foundational narratives (3).The first section of book, entitled Closure, serves as theoretical justification for Williams's own work to illuminate contemporary Latin America. Williams offers a history of Latin American identity from failed nationalist projects (e.g., transculturation and national fictive identity [Chapter 1]) to contemporary transnationalism (Chapter 3). He critiques earlier attempts at Latin American identity construction as well as other positions on neoliberalism (e.g., Jorge Casteneda, Nestor Canclini (Chapter 3)) for playing into hands of U.S. hegemony, and he explores problems of subaltern studies, sketching out proper enactment of subaltern as liberatory intellectual discourse, free of northern hegemonic bias. In second section of book, subdivided into Intermezzo . . . Hear Say Yes and Perhaps, Williams develops post-hegemonic analyses through a varied set of hegemonic and post-hegemonic cultural artifacts (e.g., novels, literary criticism, testimonio, film and photo-essay). …

O RECURSO DO MÉTODO – UMA LEITURA INTERTEXTUAL

This essay studies the Cuban novel El Recurso del Método by the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier,precursor of the “marvelous realism” in the Americas from a comparative perspective of literary theories andnotions such as intertextuality, the cultural decolonization process, deterritorialization, literary and culturalhybridism and the search for cultural identity within the historical, social and political framework ofCarpentier’s literary rendering. Some fundamental notions about the historical evolution of comparativeliterature are dealt with to better comprehend the importance of Carpentier’s literary work, his contribution to agenuine Latin American identity as well as the inclusion of this peripheral literature into the world literature.Providing some examples of this literary device present in the novel, the origin and definition of the so-called“marvelous reality” are focused. The intertextual nature of Carpentier’s text and its carnavalized discourse, itshybrid features and the transcultural issues are outlined in this essay as well.

Exploring Identity in Latin American History

The historiography of Latin America, which for decades centered on the twin cold-war concerns of revolution (and the repression thereof) and economic development, has within the past few years begun to explore questions of identity-the ways in which the ideologies and subjectivities of ordinary people have intersected with material conditions. In the Latin American context, analysis of social identities has centered primarily on class, ethnicity, gender, race, and nationality, considering ways in which elite and nonelite actors have tried to fashion the meanings of labels such as woman, Maya, or peasant. Other categories, such as sexual, generational, and regional identities, have begun to attract some scholarly attention but thus far have taken a back seat to categories more conventionally associated with Latin American studies. This scholarly turn is hardly divorced from interest in revolutionary movements, however. Examining levels of repression and exploitation in the region, many historians of Latin America have speculated on why no larger and more successful resistance movements have blossomed. Exploring identity as an analytical category uncovers the fissures that often gaped under pressure from repressive military forces, foreign intervention, and elite domination. Alternatively, these studies also reveal the important ways in which social identities provided the cultural glue that bolstered solidarity under these same pressures. The success of these recent explorations of Latin American identities thus hinges upon the examination of social markers as historically specific rather than essential and inherent. The four books under review here form part of a larger body of literature that has fundamentally shifted the terrain in Latin American studies. Edited collections such

Divergent Modernities: Culture und Politics in Nineteenth-Century Lutin America by Julio Ramos

Intertexts, Vol. 7, No. 1,2003 Ramos, Julio. Divergent Modernities: Culture und Politics in PHneteenth-Century Putin America. Trans. John D. Blanco. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. xlvi +328 pp. Todd S. Garth DivergentModernitiesisthetranslationintoEnglishofJulioRamoss groundbreakingDesencuentrosdelamodernidadenAmericattna,as publishedin1989.Thisisatimelyandvaluabletranslationofavoliunemat respondedtoafundamentalneedinthestudyofLatin.^encan and,insodoing,bothopenedfruitfulterritoryandanticipatevit questions.Whilenotappropriatefortheundergraduateclassroom,s isanessentialsourceforanyscholarpursuingagreaterimderstanS Latin American cultural paradigms. Specialists of subaltern arid postco oiu studies, even outside of LatinAmerican interests, will fin muc material here. . , Scholars have long acknowledged that Latin Amenca s^ modernity requires atheoretical apparatus that correspon rather than to the experience of modermty mthe U.S.„--uing norRamos is one of the first critics successfully to articulate an ove traitoftheoriginsofLatin Americanmodermtybasedonso evidence. He succeeds because he is an excellent student o ory,Foucaultinparticular.Ratherthan“applying”Foucas NewHistoricistreadingoftexts,Ramosisinspiredtoposequ challenge the assumptions underlying the analyses of those RaLs is thus led to two guiding ideas: first, that “.. . organized, demarcated field of identity does not exist pnor to the mter vention of agaze that seeks to represent it ( ^ ^rv^La^' America “uneven” experience of modernity in nineteenth-century Latm Amenca produced an imevenness of “autonomization r.r>««ihlp “produced an irreducible hybridity in the literary subject and made possible the proliferation of mixed forms—the chromcle, the essa Ramos accordingly then uses chronicles, apreviously overlooked form understand and analyze the elaboration of the modern Latin American subject in its social and political context. ● . r Thebookbeginswithanoverviewofcanonicalessaysofthepenodof some of the misapprehensions of Angel different’ a n of literature, which in turn a s a m e a n s t o nation formation. Ramos corrects Rama’s pioneering La ciudad letrada (The Lettered City), noting the com- I N T E R T E X T S 1 0 8 plex, evolving relationships between institutions of power and literary expression—relationships that Rama oversimplified. Ramos argues convinc¬ inglythattheemergenceofanautonomousliterarysubjectandvoicewas uneven,incompleteandfraughtwithtensions.Thesetensionsresultedfrom disagreements among influential essayists and powerful politicians (often the men)regardingthepurposeofhighereducation,theneedfor(orpos¬ sibility of) “pure” literary expression and the role of journalistic reporting in the creation of acoherent Latin American identity. Domingo F. Sarmiento, AndresBello,EugenioMariaHostosandJoseEnriqueRodo,amongothunder Ramos’s scrutiny.At the center of these tensions is the conbetween Rodo’s aestheticizing “arielismo,”'which defined Latin Ameri¬ ca’s “spiritual” identity strictly in contrast to the perceived utilitarianism of the United States, versus Sarmiento’s positivist vision of Latin American societies shaped in the mold of U.S. “progress.” But the heart of Divergent Modernitites is its extensive examination of Cubanjournalist,essayist,poet,andpatriotJoseMarti.Indeed,Ramosulti¬ mately approaches Marti’s hybrid identity as paradigmatic for modern Latin America.Marti’spositionasanexileinNewYork,servingascorrespondent for periodicals in various LatinAmerican capitals, placed him in acritical juncture with regard to the emerging literary market, its dependence on journalism, Latin America’s sense of “otherness” with respect to the U.S. and the potential for literary authority in awriter who mediates among tliese conflicting phenomena. Ramos argues that it is precisely this position that determines Marti’s heterogeneous, sometimes self-contradictory, authorial identity, an identity that both prefigures and determines the formation of a modern Latin American subject. According to Ramos, the very character of literature as aspecific “dis¬ cursive field” in Latin America, and the nature of an autonomous literary authority, was shaped by these conflicts. Marti’s style, and, by extension, the style of all Latin American chroniclers, is afunction of their will to literary specificity and autonomy. This willed style, moreover, as ameans to repre¬ sent genuine Latin American reality, was also meant to provide acritical ingredient to good government. Ramos demonstrates how Marti’s writing was driven by a“nostalgia” for the supposedly coherent society of apremod¬ ern Latin America. This nostalgia responds to the perceived severe fragmen¬ tation wrought by an impersonal, commercial, fast-changing urban moder¬ nity. Modernity threatened, among other things, the very literary autonomy it facilitated; Marti and other chroniclers, Ramos argues, were wary of being co-opted by the journalistic market that made their writing possible. Marti’s solution is to “re-invent” the city’s social and spatial landscape, using the intimacy of achronicler’s gaze to invert public and private spaces, and suc¬ ceeding in representing the “unrepresentable” incoherence of modern urban life. Ramos concludes that in addition to an...

Espacio - identidad - América Latina.

Short description
 The essay describes the problem of space and identity in Latin American countries. In this context, it is hard to designate the definition of space. The definition of space in Latin America has aspects and dimensions. It escapes mono-dimensional definitions. In general it can be argued that both physically existing spaces and the concepts of space are involved in the creation of Latin American identity.
 Short description written by Michał Gilewski

Respecting Relationships and Dia de Guadalupe: Q'eqchi' Mayan Identities in Livingston, Guatemala

When identities are understood as relationships between individuals, histories. and systems of power, tile dichotomies traditionally used to understand Latin American identities (i.e. indio vs. ladino) do not hold up under scrutiny. This article explores identity formation among Q'eqchi' Mayan migrants in Livingston, Guate‐mala by examining the festival of the Virgen de Guadalupe and by analyzing a sociocultural model of meaning created and reproduced through everyday practice and processes of identification. By revealing how Q'eqchi' identities, and the cultural framework which shapes them, emerge from historic and contemporary relations, the author demonstrates not only the constructed nature of identities and cultural models, but also their means of reproduction as multifaceted reflections of interpersonal and translocal systems of power.

How a Samovar Helped Me Theorize Latin American Jewish Writing

Samovars can be used for brewing more than tea. My essay proposes a theory of Latin American Jewish literature through part serious, part playful commentary on Eduardo Stilman's story, "El samovar de plata" (The Silver Samovar). I suggest that Latin American Jewish Studies forge stronger links with Jewish and Holocaust studies, focus on broad cultural fields, and become multigenerational and multilingual. I call for a pluralization of our discipline to achieve a kaleidosopic diversity within an enveloping oneness.

The Demythologization of Language, Gender, and Culture and the Re-Mapping of Latin American Identity in Luis Rafael Sánchez's Works

The Demythologization of Language, Gender, and Culture and the Re-Mapping of Latin American Identity in Luis Rafael Sánchez's Works

Victoria Ocampo and Alfonso Reyes: Ulysses's Malady

Ocampo (Argentina, 1890-1979) and Reyes (Mexico, 1889-1959) were arguably Latin America's most influential writers and cultural catalysts in the first half of the twentieth century. They met in Argentina in 1927 and their friendship and correspondence lasted until Reyes's death. Over three decades of private and public discourse, they articulated a similar vision of Latin American identity and its future potential. Because they were both internationally known—Ocampo as founder and director of the literary review SUR, and Reyes as a diplomat and intellectual leader—their ideas found resonance in the Americas and Europe. Two dramatic works they wrote before meeting, Ifigenia cruel (Reyes) and La laguna de los nenúfares (Ocampo), prefigure their approach to the Latin American condition through the themes of displacement and self-renovation. Ocampo and Reyes believed that it would be the task of an educated elite to lead Latin America toward a transnational cultural synthesis and renewal. Ulysses's malady was their metaphor for the postcolonial condition that enabled Latin American minds to be open to exploration and dialogue in search of an authentic identity.

THE BLACKNESS OF SUGAR: CELIA CRUZ AND THE PERFORMANCE OF (TRANS)NATIONALISM

Studies on transnational cultures have shown that local, national identities are not necessarily subordinated to, or erased by, the globalizing forces of the economy. Rather, the local mediates transnational cultures as well as it is transformed by the crossing of cultural boundaries. Likewise, emerging interdisciplinary and cultural studies approaches to Latin(o) popular music examine the ways in which musical production, circulation and reception create cultural spaces that challenge hegemonic notions of national identity and discrete cultural boundaries. This article examines the figure of the Queen of Salsa, Celia Cruz, and the tensions among the multiple, transnational subjectivities that are constituted through her musical repertoire, her performances on stage, the aesthetics of her body, and her public statements in interviews. Having spanned more than sixty years of performances and recordings, Celia Cruz's diverse repertoire and musical selections have served as a performative locus for the negotiations of her Cubanness (her exile and national identity) and a hemispheric, Latin American identity that also includes the United States. Likewise, her construction of blackness as an Afro-Cuban woman transforms and is transformed by her collaborations with African-American musicians and singers, from jazz to hip-hop. Celia Cruz has also crossed racial and cultural boundaries by collaborating with Anglo musicians and by tropicalizing rock music. Her staged persona and her body aesthetics also reveal the fluidity with which the Queen of Latin music assumes diverse racial, national and historical identities while she simultaneously asserts her Cubanness through the use of Spanish on stage. Celia Cruz serves as a complex and intriguing icon of the relational nature of nationalism and transnationalism.

Dealing with Diversity and Digital Culture

Cultural diversity is broader than ethnic and language considerations alone. It includes gender, age, economic or social conditions, education, technological infrastructure and computer and information literacy All of these have to be taken into account when digital information is received or provided. Understanding and respecting diversity in each country is a major issue for the country itself, as well as for the information providers from abroad. The main barriers for participating in the digital culture for Latin America are the differences of each of the countries: the few people that have access; the technological infrastructure; the lack of relevant contents in the primary languages; and the fact that English is the pre-dominant language of the Global Information Infrastructure. Nations should focus on three main areas: technological infrastructure, contents and access. Projects should be prepared so as to strengthen the Latin American identity.

Dealing with Diversity and Digital Culture

Cultural diversity is broader than ethnic and language considerations alone. It includes gender, age, economic or social conditions, education, technological infrastructure and computer and information literacy All of these have to be taken into account when digital information is received or provided. Understanding and respecting diversity in each country is a major issue for the country itself, as well as for the information providers from abroad. The main barriers for participating in the digital culture for Latin America are the differences of each of the countries: the few people that have access; the technological infrastructure; the lack of relevant contents in the primary languages; and the fact that English is the pre-dominant language of the Global Information Infrastructure. Nations should focus on three main areas: technological infrastructure, contents and access. Projects should be prepared so as to strengthen the Latin American identity.

DAMNED, PLEASURE‐LOVING AND DEVOUT: WOMEN AND RELIGION

When speaking about question of religious coexistence in five hundred years of Americas, perhaps it is best to start from my own religious identity: I am a Protestant from Methodist Church. But, if intention is to study Americas, then it is better to start from my own cultural identity and to propose a reflection starting from Latin America, Latin American protestantism. Another possibility would be to articulate an analysis that grows out of work and of an ecumenical spirituality that is deeply rooted in popular struggles in Latin American continent. However, what I need and want to do is to construct my remarks starting from my identity as a woman. Latin American. Protestant. A feminist position that cuts through and puts into perspective religious and cultural identity and fidelity, creating a theoretical and practical link with many women's movements in Americas, reinforcing their popular and ecumenical vocation. Perhaps it is not easiest or most objective perspective to take - there does not yet exist sufficient clarity to illuminate roots and trajectories of what we are, women in Americas. Damned, pleasure-loving and devout, it is only in recent times that we have been able to put together our historical and theological memories. I beg to borrow a little of that, which historians, theologians, poets and sorceresses, witches and militants have been weaving together in these five hundred years, to think about religious coexistence. Ecumenism in Latin America? Where? Ecumenism was impossible in Americas in these five hundred years of invasion, conquest and exploitation. It is not possible to be ecumenical when structuring movement in society is one of exclusion. Exclusion of cultures, silencing of sacredness of the others, massacre of peoples, gestures, rights, prayers, voices. In whole continent, African religions and religions of indigenous peoples survived massacre through strong resistance, so that, within limits set by parameters of Christianity, they continue to worship their gods and goddesses. Syncretism or ecumenism? An evaluation of five hundred years of conquest of Americas cannot reject or underrate weight that religious question has, in a unique way, in formation of Latin American identity. Iberian catholicism has molded continent ideologically and culturally. Without restricting its civilizing influence to faithful alone, in all truth catholicism provides regulating matrix of behaviour and attitudes, it is a creator of norms and parameters. If it is true that catholicism, which was identified with state, made arrival of Protestant missions in South American continent more difficult, it is also true that protestantism on its arrival here did not offer alternatives that made viable another model for society, coexistence of Christians and other religions. Distinguished by its origin or out of interest in expansion of North American missionary models, Latin American protestantism participated in establishment of a climate of proselytizing and intolerance that characterizes inter-confessional relationships on continent. Other religions established on continent were forced to act Within a space defined by influence of official Catholic hegemony. Also in these cases a class-conscious proselytizing or an ethnic link defined limits that each group could aim for, so that they became a type of folklore or a tolerable curiosity because they did not question structures imposed by society. A single winner, violent liturgy, Christianity in Americas is confused with civilizing model of white, western man. Father, boss, lord, husband. Intransigent and intolerant, Christianity fought and devoured even its own variations and alternatives making dialogue between Christians almost impossible. …

Latin American Identity and Constructions of Difference.

Latin American Identity and Constructions of Difference.

Twentieth-Century Latin American Literary Studies and Cultural Autonomy

Twentieth-Century Latin American Literary Studies and Cultural Autonomy

Semiótic:a y mestizaje: modalidad del sujelo e interacción

The recognition of mechanisms of social discourse enables us lo interact in our context and in the world we tive in. This paper contains lhe pro posai of a research program which is based on the reconstuction o f meaning under lhe theorelical framework of greimasian semiotics . It focuses on lhe problem of lhe existence - or not - of interaction in the moda I construction of the subject insofar as Latin American identity seems to be based on the postulation of cultural relativism.This research will contribute lo the elaboration of a typology of Latin American discourse.

A Marxist reading of Fuentes, Vargas Llosa and Puig

Utilizing selected characteristics of Marxist Literary Theory, this book analyzes the society and environment of three Latin-American countries as presented in three major Spanish-American novels. It focuses on social stratifications, national and international exploitation and addresses the issue of Latin-American identity. Contents: Introduction; Marxist Literary Theory; A Marxist Reading of Vargas Llosa's La Casa Verde; A Marxist Reading of Fuentes's La Muerte de Artemio Cruz; A Marxist Reading of Puig's Boquitas Pintadas; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

Open Doors for the International Theatre School of Latin America and the Caribbean

Ed. note: Look what the tide's brought-a new section of TDR with reports from around the world on what's happening now. is the flow of events in their immediate political, theoretical, and historical contexts. An exchange of details, Currents is of value to people making performances or thinking about them, across cultures, races, genders, politics, ideologies, genres, disciplines. Currents complements TDR's articles, performance texts, and polemics by bringing in news on specific events from Lima to Moscow, Harare to Atlanta, Toronto to Beijing. In this issue, Susana Epstein, a native Argentinian (and TDR contributing editor) reports on a new international theatre school in Cuba which emphasizes Latin American identities. Rebecca Rovit, a dramaturg at Florida State University, reports on an intercultural collaboration between the USSR and the USA within a university context. And Induja Awasthi writes from India on a recent theatre retrospective in New Delhi. So what do you have to offer Currents? Send your message in a bottle addressed to: Rebecca Schneider, Currents Editor, TDR, 721 Broadway, Room 626, New York, NY 10003.

Latin America within the Third World: The Search for a New Identity, the Acceptance of Old Contents

Latin Americans have traditionally been ambivalent in their attitude towards the Third World. Since c. 1970 there has been a greater identification with African and Asian nations on nationalistic and development grounds, related especially to the widespread acceptance of dependency theory. A complex doctrine has been elaborated on the narrow basis of a simple but generally accepted principle, which conforms very well to collective prejudices and legends. But dependency theory remains tied to the notion of a linear historical process, implying acceptance of industrialization and economic growth as necessary goals. While the validity of economic development is not denied here, the author argues that its uncritical acceptance impedes recognition of the problematic nature of Third-World (and Latin-American) identity.