Latin American Intellectuals Research Articles

Soviet internationalism after Stalin: interaction and exchange between the USSR and Latin America during the Cold War

The Soviet Union is often presented as a largely isolated and idiosyncratic state. Soviet Internationalism after Stalin challenges this view by telling the story of Soviet and Latin American intellectuals, students, political figures and artists, and their encounters with the 'other' from the 1950s through the 1980s. In this first multi-archival study of Soviet relations with Latin America, Tobias Rupprecht reveals that, for people in the Second and Third Worlds, the Cold War meant not only confrontation with an ideological enemy but also increased interconnectedness with distant world regions. He shows that the Soviet Union looked quite different from a southern rather than a Western point of view and also charts the impact of the new internationalism on the Soviet Union itself in terms of popular perceptions of the USSR's place in the world and its political, scientific, intellectual and cultural reintegration into the global community.

Wszyscy jesteśmy Kalibanami: (post)kolonialne wizje latynoamerykańskiego podporządkowania

<p class="Referat1">Dla Retamara wszyscy Latynoamerykanie byli w głębi duszy „Kalibanami”. Badacze ze szkoły postkolonialnej preferowali szersze spojrzenie na symboliczne znaczenie tej postaci. Analizując podejście Szekspira do kwestii języka, wiedzy, seksualności i władzy, widzimy wyraźnie, że w swojej sztuce zawarł wszystkie te kwestie, na które szkoła postkolonialna zwraca najwięcej uwagi. Badacze latynoamerykańscy mieli niewątpliwie znaczący wkład w to, jakimi torami podążyły postkolonialne interpretacje <em>Burzy</em>. Zafascynowani jej bohaterami i ich wzajemnymi relacjami, nieustannie próbowali odnosić fikcyjny świat <em>Burzy</em> do tego rzeczywistego. José Rodó i Roberto Retamar położyli na tym polu największe zasługi – pierwszy nie wiedząc, do czego doprowadzi jego twórczość, drugi zaś świadomie, w duchu rodzącej się myśli postkolonialnej.</p>

Medicine and Nation Building in the Americas, 1890–1940 by José Amador

Reviewed by: Medicine and Nation Building in the Americas, 1890–1940 by José Amador Gilberto Hochman José Amador. Medicine and Nation Building in the Americas, 1890–1940. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2015. ix + 219 pp. Ill. $29.95 (978-0-8265-2021-0). The challenge proposed by the author is to present an entangled history of medicine and public health that contrasts with the histories anchored in nation-states, which, according to him, have characterized the historiography of medicine and public health in Latin America and the Caribbean. By using the notion of “tropical America,” the book examines the relations between public health campaigns and ideas on disease, race, and nation in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Brazil and how they influenced Latin American intellectuals. As the author would have it, this tropical America is a transnational space characterized by the intersections, tensions, and sharing of ideas and practices, including nationalism, colonialism, and imperialism; more importantly, it is a space amalgamated by the emerging presence of the United States in the region in the first half of the twentieth century, most particularly of the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Health Commission. This histoire crusée of public health projects is meant to allow readers to recognize local agency within this transnational phenomenon, something ignored by national histories; help them understand discourses on race and nation as part of these projects; and prompt them to question the purely imperial, top-down nature of tropical medicine in these contexts. [End Page 558] Organized into three parts and five chapters, the book claims to be “the first cultural and social history of public health” (p. 6) that takes an integrated approach in analyzing sources from Cuban, Puerto Rican, Brazilian, and U.S. archives. The first part (“Visualizations”) presents a single chapter, which deals with how Brazilian, Cuban, and Puerto Rican intellectuals reflected on the race issue in the postabolition period, based on new theories in bacteriology and tropical medicine; it also examines the impacts of their ideas on health policies and practice. The second part (“Crossings”) consists of three chapters, each addressing the dynamics of asymmetrical relations between the United States, the Rockefeller Foundation, and disease control and eradication programs in Cuba (yellow fever), Puerto Rico (hookworm), and Brazil (hookworm, yellow fever, malaria). The third part (“Legacies”), also consisting of a single chapter, examines how these public health initiatives had an impact on important intellectuals like Cuba’s Fernando Ortiz, Brazil’s Gilberto Freyre, and Puerto Rico’s Antonio Pedreira and on their positive and anticolonial yet ambiguous reflections on race, miscegenation, and national identity and their views on the possibility of civilization in the tropics. The book’s announced promise of a new and entangled history of public health and medicine, however, goes unfulfilled. It is outlined in chapter 1 and partially explored in chapter 5, both of which address an intellectual history and a history of ideas. However, the three chapters dealing with health programs in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Brazil do not advance beyond the national frameworks so heavily criticized by the author. The common elements and intersections in these stories are not concrete or convincingly presented and appear to be somewhat arbitrary choices sourced from very diverse national realities. For example, neither the long-lived centrality of Bailey Ashford in the campaign against hookworm in Puerto Rico and his visit to Brazil in 1916 nor the experience of some Latin American intellectuals at Columbia University authorizes or produces, a priori, entangled histories. The narratives presented were arrived at by drawing from primary sources and secondary literature in an overly selective fashion. For example, the proposed relation between public health projects and a racialized vision coming from the state of São Paulo is unconvincing, and the approach to Gilberto Freyre’s ideas oversimplified. This derives from the fact that the author offers no effective dialogue with the immense historical production that has addressed health and medicine in Latin America and the Caribbean and the history of ideas and intellectuals. Since the early 1990s, this prolific bibliography has postulated the very same core issues that appear in the book and has developed them based on the analysis of various local and national...

O NOVO COMPARATISMO NA AMÉRICA LATINA: REFLEXOS NO ENSINO E NA HISTORIOGRAFIA LITERÁRIA

As a result of a process of colonization which lasted over three centuries and which can still be felt, though not from the same matrixes, in economical and cultural terms, Latin American intellectuals have always taken Western European ideas and institutions as paradigms and have always sought to internalize their world view. As such, the teaching and research of literature at the Latin American universities have usually been based on European models: at first, by means of Historicism, and later, through the critical currents, especially of an immanent character, that came from that context. In both cases, the idea of national literature was seen as a dominant element and the study of literature was centered upon the canon of each country, founded on nationalistic bases. However, with the advent of Deconstruction and of Cultural and Post-Colonial Studies in the second half of the twentieth century, this model has been deeply queried in Latin America, and has given way to a tension between those who try to maintain the hegemonic concept of nation on the one side, and those who approach literature as one among other expressions of the political affirmation of each group that compose the continent’s ethnic, social, cultural and linguistic mosaic on the other side. Considering the criticisms raised nowadays both to the hegemonic construction of the nation-states and to the responses that they have generated, particularly on the part of minority groups, our purpose in this paper is to draw a few questions regarding the teaching of literature and the writing of literary histories at the present time in Latin America.

Monteiro Lobato, Juan P. Ramos e o papel dos inquéritos folclóricos na formação cultural e política da nação

Este artigo visa analisar as perspectivas e ações de dois intelectuais latino-americanos, nos anos 1910 e 1920, voltadas a questões do nacional e da “cultura popular”. Trata-se, por um lado, do escritor Monteiro Lobato, mentor do chamado “Inquérito do saci” realizado pelo jornal O Estado de S. Paulo, em 1917, junto a seus leitores. Por outro, do argentino Juan P. Ramos, membro do Conselho Nacional de Educação durante o primeiro governo de Hipólito Yrigoyen (1916-1922), responsável pela realização, em 1921, da chamada “Encuesta Láinez”.

Jungle Fever: Exploring Madness and Medicine in Twentieth-Century Tropical Narratives by Charlotte Rogers (review)

Reviewed by: Jungle Fever: Exploring Madness and Medicine in Twentieth-Century Tropical Narratives by Charlotte Rogers Hans Pols Charlotte Rogers. Jungle Fever: Exploring Madness and Medicine in Twentieth-Century Tropical Narratives. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2012. ix + 234 pp. $55.00 (978-0-8265-1831-6). Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness narrates how Kurtz, an intrepid explorer who entered the jungle in search of untold riches, succumbed to debilitating diseases before descending into madness. Throughout the nineteenth century, concerns about the deleterious effect of tropical environments on the health and sanity of Europeans were commonplace in both medicine and popular culture. During the era of exploration, colonization, and empire building, physicians observed [End Page 358] high mortality rates from what we now know were nutritional deficiencies. Prior to the turn of the twentieth century, they had witnessed how disease regularly decimated colonial settlements and noted that most new arrivals would be dead within a few years. At the time, physicians ascribed these high mortality rates to the incompatibility of the tropical environment and white, European bodies, which originated in temperate zones. After a number of breakthroughs in tropical medicine around the turn of the twentieth century, these concerns were replaced by fears about pathogens that caused malaria, dysentery, yellow fever, and other debilitating illnesses. Even though physicians in the twentieth century were no longer concerned about the climate per se, they continued to ascribe mental illness, in particular tropical neurasthenia, to climactic factors. Popular concerns about the dangers of tropical living continued unabated. Medical apprehensions about life in the tropics had been present in medical writings for over a century when Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was published in 1899. Following Conrad’s example, novelists frequently elaborated on the intricate relationship between the tropical environment, disease, and madness. In Jungle Fever, Charlotte Rogers explores how medical understandings of health, disease, and mental illness in the tropics were reflected in literary works. Nineteenth-century romantic novels valorized the powers of nature and bucolic environments to restore disordered minds; these narratives of tropical madness emphasized the sinister powers of pristine nature on the European mind and included elaborate references to medical and psychiatric theories. In her innovative study, Rogers analyzes how medical theories have informed novels from a variety of national contexts. She details how the bountiful nature of tropical forests represented the opposite of civilized society, how inhabitants of these forests were imagined as humans in their most primitive form. These novels portrayed the tropics as sites of disease, decay, degeneration, and madness that overwhelmed and ravaged European explorers. After an extensive analysis of Conrad’s novel, Rogers explores these themes in four additional novels from four different national contexts: France, Colombia, Venezuela, and Cuba. To supplement her literary analysis, she explores the interests the authors of these novels had in medical matters, their exposure to medical theories, their experiences with illness, and their interactions with physicians. The strength of her work lies in her detailed attention to both medical and literary works by tracing the influence of the former on the latter. Progressive Latin American intellectuals generally sought to domesticate the landscape and its peoples, leading to tentatively positive appraisals of both. South American physicians were more optimistic about the viability of civilization in the tropics. Instead of narrating an irreversible descent into madness and death, the Latin American novels analyzed by Rogers detail the transformative experiences of explorers in tropical forests who all return to tell the tale. Rogers’s analysis of common literary tropes of intrepid explorers descending into madness in the jungle provides a welcome addition to the psychiatric thought in non-Western contexts and furthers recent work on the history of tropical neurasthenia. Rogers adroitly analyzes how medical and broader concerns about the [End Page 359] dangers of living in the tropics—epitomized by the experiences of white bodies in tropical forests—were common among physicians and the wider public but were articulated in different ways in different national contexts. By focusing her attention on South American novels, she successfully expands her analysis beyond Europe and North America. Hans Pols University of Sydney Copyright © 2015 Johns Hopkins University Press

La <em>Revista Puertorriqueña</em>: el periodismo cultural y sus redes hispanoamericanas

The main line of investigation on this paper is the place of the Puerto Rican Magazine in the history of local journalism and the group of West Indian and Latin American intellectuals who were part of it. The purpose is to highlight its purposes and internal organization; the tools used in the design and typesetting, and artistic and literary influences. It is thought that these were the conditions of the press in Puerto Rico in the last three decades of the nineteenth century and the cultural impact of the magazine in its social environment and outside the island territory. Finally, the ties and networks the reformist liberal intellectuals belonged to through the Puerto Rican Magazine as part of the centenary, prior to the flowering of Spanish American thought are analyzed.

Do Suez ao Canal do Panamá e além: A influência de Gamal Abdel Nasser na América Latina

Este artigo explora a influência do líder egípcio Gamal Abdel Nasser na América Latina. Na década de 1950, uma geração de intelectuais e políticos latino-americanos viram, no sucesso do emergente nacionalismo árabe, simbolizado por Nasser, um exemplo a imitar. No Panamá, a nacionalização egípcia do Canal de Suez, em 1956, desencadeou nova onda de demandas contra o controle e a posse do canal interoceânico pelos Estados Unidos. Em toda a região, frente ao aparecimento de regimes reacionários, intelectuais de esquerda enfatizaram a necessidade de um Nasser latino-americano; um caudilho moderno, que emergiria do interior das Forças Armadas imbuído de potente nacionalismo sem concessões e compromisso inegociável com o progresso social.

The ajiaco in Cuba and beyond

The ajiaco in Cuba and beyond

Polar bears, cactus, and natives: race, agrarian reform, and environmental determinism in Latin America (1920–1950)

Early twentieth-century environmentalism or environmental determinism, as it is more pejoratively known, has been widely denounced by critical human geographers on the grounds of its well-established role in imperialist dispossession and subordination. Recently, however, historical geographers have re-visited environmentalism in an effort to better understand its diverse and often contradictory deployments. This article examines environmentalist thought as a function of Latin American anti-imperialist reform movements in the first half of the twentieth century, arguing that progressive Latin American intellectuals emphasized constitutive links between race and place to support community claims to land and subsistence.

The Lures and Snares of “The Transnational”

The Lures and Snares of “The Transnational” Karen Mary Davalos (bio) Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico. By José David Saldívar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. 304 pages. $84.95 (cloth). $23.95 (paper). Latinamericanism after 9/11. By John Beverley. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 176 pages. $79.95 (cloth). $22.95 (paper). Culture Works: Space, Value, and Mobility across the Neoliberal Americas. By Arlene Dávila. New York: New York University Press, 2012. 241 pages. $75.00 (cloth). $22.00 (paper). The three books under review articulate a pivotal moment in the trajectory of area and ethnic studies. Foremost, they offer “roots and routes,” to borrow José David Saldívar’s phrase, out of the parochialism of American studies, the hegemonic orientation that dominates Latin American studies, and the invisibility that occurs with the disavowal of US Latinos and Latino studies. Each book exposes and expands the boundaries of disciplinary, nationalist, colonial, and Eurocentric thinking, and although orienting from different vantage points, makes the same call for new “field-imaginaries of Latin American studies, American studies, or US Latino/a studies [that] cannot be reduced to a single, monotopical paradigm …, arguing for a unit of analysis that is greater than that of the nation-state today” (Saldívar xv). Taking critical aim at US and Latin American intellectuals, Saldívar, John Beverley, and Arlene Dávila advance a trans-Americanism that engages with the new social and political forms that aim to ameliorate inequality and human suffering. That is, they do not simply ask, what would a trans-Americanism look like? They want to know what it could do. Embedded in these questions for a new field-imaginary are the anxieties of American studies, especially those that have circulated since the anti-exception-alist paradigm rose to authority in the discipline. The new field these authors seek is more than the invention of democratic area studies. Indeed, what drives [End Page 429] this review is the ways in which the three authors independently propose a new field that rejects the comparative model, which has continued to foster a hegemonic paradigm by consistently operating through a developmental or Eurocentric lens to understand difference. Because I wish to foreground how these works are in conversation around trans-Americanism or trans-Americanity and the potential for new intellectual and political practices, I offer admittedly truncated summaries of their claims, regrettably shortchanging some chapters. Americanity Otherwise Trans-Americanity is driven by the questions posed at the opening of chapter 4: How can we begin suturing a new set of contingent relationships to democratize an emerging trans-American studies? How can we begin mapping out space that situates the Américas in our age of globalization as a cohesive but complexly differentiated space? (75). Saldívar conceptualizes this planetary study through the political economy that emerges from colonialization, global capitalism, and neoliberalism. Trans-Americanity’s seven chapters, useful preface, and experimental ending offer broad intellectual coverage of Latin America, South Asia, and the Americas from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. The proposed field is therefore situated in Aníbal Quijano’s and Immanuel Wallerstein’s notion of “coloniality of power,” but for Saldívar it extends beyond the Rio Grande (xiv). I comment on his middle chapters to illuminate the proposed trans-Americanity and its significance for ethnic and area studies. Chapter 3, “Looking Awry at the War of 1898,” is one of the most illuminating chapters because it performs precisely what is proposed by trans-Americanity. Here Saldívar reads Theodore Roosevelt’s memoir The Rough Rider “against the grain” of Biografía de un Cimarrón, a Cuban novella testimonial by Miguel Barnet and Esteban Montejo, to show how American exceptionalism cannot account for insurgent Cuban mambises in defeating Spain’s imperial army (xxii). Tracking back to the United States but as part of Greater Mexico, Saldívar turns to Jorge Mariscal’s anthology of Chicano experiences of the Vietnam War to illustrate how activists and veterans within the US Empire critically respond to imperial wars. This coupling of texts across the Américas challenges how we think about 1898...

O moderno arcaísmo nacional: investimento estrangeiro direto e expropriação territorial no agronegócio canavieiro

Este trabalho visa compreender as reconfigurações territoriais desencadeadas no meio rural brasileiro a partir do início dos anos 2000 em decorrência da expansão dos monocultivos de cana destinados à produção de agrocombustíveis, bem como analisa a origem e montante dos investimentos estrangeiros diretos aplicados na produção brasileira de etanol. Para tanto, utiliza uma abordagem teórica que considera a existência de conflitos ambientais e territoriais associados à lógica operatória de exploração capitalista da natureza, e busca elucidar a presença de discursos hegemônicos direcionados a invisibilizar modos distintos e não dominantes de uso e apropriação dos recursos naturais. Ademais, inspirada nas contribuições de intelectuais latino-americanos aglutinados no que se denominou chamar paradigma modernidade-colonialidade, irá propor que a apropriação assimétrica dos recursos naturais tem sido parte integrante de uma condição de colonialidade na apropriação da natureza. Para sustentar essas análises, o artigo se vale da realização de dois trabalhos de campo conduzidos em áreas de expansão da monocultura de cana nos estados de Minas Gerais, São Paulo e Mato Grosso do Sul e do uso de estatísticas oficiais cotejadas pelo IBGE e pelo Banco Central.

Literary Culture in Cuba: Revolution, Nation-building, and the Book by Parvathi Kumaraswami, and Antoni Kapcia (review)

Reviewed by: Literary Culture in Cuba: Revolution, Nation-building, and the Book by Parvathi Kumaraswami, and Antoni Kapcia Ignacio López-Calvo Kumaraswami, Parvathi, and Antoni Kapcia. Literary Culture in Cuba: Revolution, Nation-building, and the Book. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2012. 265 pp. This book is a historical study of the role of literary culture (processes, institutions, policies, spaces, circuits) within the Cuban Revolution’s nation-rebuilding project that began in 1959. Instead of the traditional route of studying specific authors and works, the authors reach their conclusions through documentary research and the information gathered by interviewing over one hundred members of the Cuban literary world from 2004 through 2011. The introduction argues that the revalorization of literary culture had a basis in pre-1959 Cuba, with the literary groups around the magazines Orígenes and Ciclón, as well as the group Nuestro Tiempo. The first five chapters are devoted to the exploration of the program to create a literary culture among the masses, focusing on key actors, periods, and spaces. Kumaraswami and Kapcia claim that despite the tensions and economic crises, there is evidence of a sustained vision for the production, distribution, and consumption of literature since 1959. Chapter one provides the wider context of the evolution of the Cuban Revolution as a backdrop against which one can understand a parallel literary culture. Among several other landmark events, the authors mention Castro’s Palabras a los intelectuales speech in 1961; the Final Resolution of the notorious 1971 Congress on Education and Culture, where homosexuality was condemned and art was defined as a weapon of the Revolution; the Lunes and Padilla affairs; and the 1971-76 quinquenio gris. In their view, these events should not determine the interpretation of this period, as “cultural policy was not always defined” (22). We learn that the letters of protest against the treatment of Padilla sent by European and Latin American intellectuals were seen by the Cuban government as cultural imperialism, which was “slavishly European in their thinking” (28). Then, Kumaraswami and Kapcia mention the creation of important institutions, such as the Instituto Cubano de Artes e Industrias Cinematográficas, Casa de las Américas, Ministerio de Educación, Centro de Estudios Martianos, and Casas de Cultura. Other events discussed are the debates about cultural authority between the Nuestro Tiempo and Lunes groups, the camps for misfits (such as religious or homosexual youth) held by the infamous Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción, and the Mariel exodus that encouraged some intellectuals and artists (including Arenas) to leave Cuba. The second chapter articulates the theoretical approach of the book, which is based on cultural studies, Du Gay, Bourdieu, Appadurai, and Frow. It then proposes an alternative way to interpret Cuban literature and culture on the island since 1959 (the Cuban diaspora is excluded). According to the authors, despite the changing sociopolitical contexts, there has been an ideological continuum in the relationship between the individual and the state throughout the five decades of the Revolution. They also address the tension about the prioritization of political or aesthetic value. The chapter presents an overview of existing scholarship on Cuban literature since 1959, dismissing most of it as inadequate and simplistic. In their [End Page 657] view, it tends to focus either only on the moments of extreme conflict or on a supposedly all-powerful monolithic state, with the goal of showing evidence of the subjugation of art by socialist ideology. Incidentally, if the authors wanted to combat this purported stereotype, perhaps they should have chosen a different photo for the cover, where one can see a large photo of Castro at the entrance of a second-hand bookstore. They maintain that other books tend to assess Cuban literature using external paradigms (thus ignoring Cuban exceptionalism) and focusing on selected individual writers or on genres. Then, Kumaraswami and Kapcia sarcastically decry the “selective memory” of memoirs of exile that forget any sort of commitment to the Cuban system or the opportunities brought by the Revolution, to obey foreign publishers’ demand for “readable narratives that reinforce the horrors of the Caribbean gulag” (40, 41). The following three chapters analyze the evolution of Cuban literary culture from...

Becoming Part of the Moving Story: Jews on the Latin American Screen

Jews were among the pioneers of film and television in most of Latin America. The historiography of cinema, however, does not usually mention the ethnicity or religion of the filmmakers since Latin American intellectuals tend to reject ethnicity as an important analytical category, unless it relates to indigenous groups or people of African descent. This approach is shared by many intellectuals identified with specific ethnic backgrounds, such as Jewish Latin Americans, Arab Latin Americans, and Asian Latin Americans.Most of the meager information about Jewish contributions to filmmaking in the past can be found in the publications of community institutions, which endeavor to highlight Jewish contributions to various facets of life in Latin America. They are also available in personal memoirs and on websites. Moreover, several authors writing about the Jewish achievement in Latin America have not considered cinema as a worthy enough activity to be mentioned among their accomplishments. In his 1960s book on the Jews of Argentina, for example, Jose Liberman recounted the history of Jewish agricultural settlement in the country, discussed the establishment of community institutions, and added a long list of Jews active in politics, the economy, and culture, 1 but he did not mention Jews active in popular culture, such as movies, television, music, or sports. More than forty years later, Ricardo Feierstein, in his history of Argentinian Jews, devoted only five pages out of 459 to mentioning Jews who were prominent in these fields.2 In both cases, it is impossible to know whether the characterization of certain people as Jewish relied on research in archives or was merely based on pinpointing names that sounded Jewish or simply on personal acquaintance.In the past decade methodological and theoretical discussions, however, have encouraged new studies of Jewish Latin American experiences.3 Recent studies are less focused on political aspects, giving more weight to cultural and social facets. Scholars nowadays are less concerned with Jews as victims of anti- Semitism, xenophobia, or racism and more with their place and role as integral parts of society at large. Research is no longer based so much on communal and institutional sources as on testimonies produced by nonaffiliated ethnics, focusing on history from below and on oral testimonies rather than on official stories. Many authors currently favor comparative perspectives, both across ethnic divides within the nation and from a transnational viewpoint regarding the Diaspora links to its real or imagined homeland.4 The present issue of Jewish Film & New Media reflects the vitality and innovativeness of Jewish Latin American studies.When it comes to the bibliography on Latin American cinema, the challenges are no less significant. Since Jews are often identified with the hegemonic white population, the research focused on the Jewish contribution to film and television, or on the representation of Jewish experiences in movies, has been minimal or conspicuously absent until the rise of multicultural perceptions in the late twentieth century. Thus a dictionary of filmmakers published in the late 1990s includes four hundred entries for Latin American directors without mentioning their ethnic identity or religious faith. On the other hand, the dictionary includes special chapters on foreign directors who visited the Latin American continent, and on exiled Spanish filmmakers who found refuge in Argentina and Mexico following the victory of the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39).5 Similarly, a book of interviews with seventy well-known filmmakers from all over Latin America casually mentioned the Jewishness of only one of them, and ignored that of at least one other.6Moreover, before the upsurge of democratization in the eighties, and the integration of national economies into globalized markets from the early 1990s onward, very few films featured Jewish characters. …

Latin American Perspectives

In the mid-1960s a new forum for progressive work in Latin American studies was born in Southern California. It was initiated by junior faculty and graduate students who questioned the mainstream emphasis on institutional stability in modern capitalism. Negative effects of the market economy in Latin America such as social inequality, political repression, and external dependence, they protested, were absent from the agenda of mainstream research. Too often, concerns central to Latin American intellectuals were sidelined by traditional U.S. journals. To counter this tendency, the Southern California progressive Latin Americanists, many of them educated at the prestigious but rather conservative Stanford University, launched initiatives such as Union of Radical Latin Americanists (URLA), the Los Angeles Group for Latin American Solidarity (LAGLAS), Non-Intervention in Chile (NICH), and the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA). In 1974 they converged in a new academic journal, Latin American Perspectives (LAP). During its founding meeting in Laguna Beach, LAP was conceived to be on the cutting edge of studies on capitalism, socialism, and imperialism and in tune with popular struggles and debates within the Latin American left. The founders’ intention was to unite intellectuals North and South and be open to new thinking and debates. They adopted a participatory editorial culture accompanied by a critique of both mainstream positivism and the orthodox Marxist politicization of social research while seeking theoretical innovations and concrete analyses of capitalism. During four decades, debates appeared in the journal’s pages, initially with pioneering issues on dependency, Cuban socialism, gender, democratic class struggle, and imperialism. Later, when

Ensaios latino-americanos: "caráter nacional" e construção de estereótipos

O artigo se refere à questão do "caráter nacional" amplamente discutida por intelectuais latino-americanos entre as décadas de 1930-50. Procuro analisar ensaios produzidos por autores que, nesse período, demonstraram grande interesse pelo tema. Busco identificar em suas obras aspectos que contribuíram para a formação de mitos e tipos nacionais estereotipados. Essas obras tiveram grande repercussão nacional e continental na época em que foram publicados e até hoje os traços do caráter nacional apresentados nos ensaios que analiso continuam sendo mencionados como se tivessem base científica. Tento mostrar os preconceitos resultantes dessas caracterizações, que continuam vivas nos imaginários sociais, servindo de justificativa para formas diversas de intolerância.

ALFONSO REYES EN SUR AMÉRICA DIPLOMACIA Y CAMPO INTELECTUAL EN AMÉRICA LATINA, 1927-1939

Este trabajo analiza la evolución del campo intelectual latinoamericano entre 1927 y 1939, a partir del accionar diplomático e intelectual del mexicano Alfonso Reyes, uno de los más importantes intelectuales hispanoamericanos del siglo XX. La metodología que se utiliza tiene en cuenta algunos de los aspectos señalados por Pierre Bourdieu y otros investigadores como centrales en la conformación de un campo intelectual. El trabajo parte de la tesis según la cual en América Latina se puede hablar de un campo intelectual a partir de la transición del siglo XIX al XX, pero especialmente se estudian y evalúan algunas situaciones y circunstancias de carácter intelectual y diplomático que permitieron a Reyes dinamizar la cultura continental durante el período en estudio.

Songs and Intellectuals:

Songs and Intellectuals:

The “New Mestiza,” the Old Mestizos: Contrasting Discourses on Mestizaje*

This article analyzes varying, inconsistent, representations of “mestizaje” (generally construed as racial or cultural mixing in the Americas) deriving from different historical settings and ideological frameworks. It particularly focuses on what I here term “old mestizaje,” summarized in the writings of Latin American intellectuals of the first quarter of the twentieth century, such as Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos (The Cosmic Race); and “new mestizaje,” articulated in the works of such contemporary thinkers as Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa (Borderlands/La Frontera: The NewMestiza). The center piece of the article is the contradictions and fractures between old and new discourses in terms of their underlying views of race, identity, and “destiny.” It examines the links of old mestizaje with essentialist, Social Darwinist, concepts, and the foundations of new mestizaje on a critical cultural studies paradigm. I propose that various aspects of old mestizaje infused hegemonic racial ideologies throughout Latin America and engendered a form of “color blindness” that obscured pervasive racial inequalities in the region.

Thinking with the Inquisition: Heretical Science and Popular Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century Mexico

Digo, que entre los libros de mi uso matematico, filologos, humanistas y otros diferentes, hay algunos que necesitan de alguna expurgacion asi en elogios de herejes, como en errores que incidentemente traen y no de proposito controvertidos ni asumptados ... --Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora In his influential genealogy of the Latin American intellectual, La ciudad letrada [The Lettered City] (1984), Angel Rama interprets the relationship between colonial erudite and popular culture as an antagonistic competition between two linguistic registers. One of these registers that of public pomp and ostentation and was strongly impregnated by peninsular courtly norms [fue la publica y de aparato, que resulto fuertemente impregnada por la norma cortesana procedente de la peninsula], while the other popular and everyday, used by Hispano and Lusophone speakers in their private lives and in their social relations within the same lower class [fue la popular y cotidiana utilizada por los hispano y lusohablantes en su vida privada y en sus relaciones sociales dentro del mismo estrato bajo] (Rama 43-44). (1) In Rama's analysis, writing and orality are coextensive with social categories: encircling the colonial writerly city [ciudad escriturarial was the real city [ciudad real] composed of urban and rural subjects, collectively associated with the plebe or vulgo. To illustrate the attitude of the colonial elite toward the urban lower class, Rama cites a passage from the Mexican Creole scholar Siguenza y Gongora's 1692 letter to his friend the Admiral Pez, at the time a resident in the Spanish court in Madrid. In his letter Siguenza describes the massive riot that occurred in Mexico City the same year, blaming the disturbances on the resentment and ingratitude of the urban plebe. As Rama notes, Siguenza describes Mexico City's plebeian subjects in a cascade of racial epithets after declaring that they were extremely plebeian plebeians that they can only be known as the most wretched [plebe tan en extremo plebe, que solo ella lo puede ser de la que se reputare por la mas infame] (Siguenza y Gongora, Seis obras 113; Rama 46). Yet although he is correct in assigning language a central place in the articulation of the social relationships among colonial subjects, Rama's absolute division between high and low societies obfuscates the extensive areas of their mutual interaction as well as the particular ways in which the writings of colonial letrados invested social categories with meaning. The works of Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora are a case in point. While Siguenza's 1692 letter to which Rama refers clearly reflects elite anxieties about social and ethnic mixture, as he says the condemnable folly with which we live amid so many plebeians at the same time that we consider ourselves to be formidable [culpabilisimo descuidado con que vivimos entre tanta plebe al mismo tiempo que presumimos de formidables] (Siguenza y Gongora, Seis obras 119-20), the Creole scholar's invocation of terms such as plebe and vulgo is also part of his larger project to imagine a local public sphere. Without contradicting the political and theological models that underpinned Spanish absolutism and orthodox Catholicism, Siguenza's works anticipate a public arena in which what Rama calls the letrado would communicate directly with local citizens. This imagined public was the recipient of his most impassioned projects. In what some scholars have interpreted as an anticipation of Enlightenment values, Siguenza was one of the earliest examples of Creole antiquarianism and scientific modernity in a colonial context dominated by elite displays of loyalty to peninsular administration and scholastic orthodoxy in the Church and University. (2) Yet it is not often noted that both history and science were integral to Siguenza's vision of a Mexican patria, an expansive local homeland that demanded a concept of both patrimony (material documents of a local tradition) and citizenship (the interpellated subject of the love of patria), and thus are only fully explicable in reference to the political context in which they appeared. …