Latin American Literary Studies Research Articles

Cultural Capital: Reflections from a Latin Americanist

John Guillory's Cultural Capital (1993) is a peculiar and instructive reading for a scholar of Mexican and Latin American literature in the US academy. A fellow Bourdieusian, I have always admired Guillory's account of power and economic differentials in the material work of literature in education. The book continues to be bold and timely thanks to its way of raising the question of the literary canon in academia critically but without conceding to the pieties of neoliberal multiculturalism. Guillory's work establishes a framework to address the canon as a matter of capital and power rather than of representation. In this, Cultural Capital predicted the limits and aporias of how the academic humanities in the United States, and cultural institutions and universities at large, have thoroughly normalized a neoliberal idea of cultural justice. Our cultural debates continue to render accurate his critique of both “the right-wing design of purging noncanonical works from the curriculum” (Guillory 1993: 46) and left multiculturalism's inclination “to cede to the right the definition of cultural capital” (47). This is why university discourse today can square the inclusion of diverse voices with the preservation of vertical and hierarchical structures of prestige, reconciling the space for critical dissent that scholars correctly claim and defend with an increasingly unequal division of labor and status. If anything, neoliberalism's transformation of multiculturalism into an institutionalized and often toothless discourse of diversity and inclusion is a direct consequence of believing that representation within unchallenged structures of cultural power is preferable to the democratization of knowledge. This is foreseen in Cultural Capital: “In the present regime of capital distribution, the school will remain both the agency for the reproduction of unequal social relations and a necessary site for the critique of that system” (55).Guillory corrects the belated and equivocal reception of Bourdieu's work in the Anglosphere, challenging the mistaken view that his sociology of literature does not allow for aesthetic judgment as such. Bourdieu is concerned with the disavowal not so much of aesthetics writ large but rather of the structures of distinction that deploy taste and its performance (what he calls habitus) as a mechanism of reproduction of power. This is why Bourdieu (2000: 73–77) spends a significant amount of time criticizing not only the correlation between aesthetic value and educational attainment but also the patronizing ways in which elites define the category of popular culture. Yet, as Tony Bennett (2005: 142) discusses, Bourdieu's critique of cultural institutions sought to “make it possible to recognize the universal value that inhered in particular works as a result of their emergence from historical processes of a particular kind.” This is particularly the case in the last pages of The Rules of Art, where Bourdieu (1996: 348) calls artists to embrace this idea and join a “collective fight” against corporativism and the exclusion of intellectuals from public debates under neoliberalism “by involving themselves in their own times, to assert the values associated with their autonomy.” Guillory (1993: 340) lucidly identifies the same difference between institutional critique and relativism asserted by Bourdieu, arguing that the critique of aesthetic judgment misunderstands the questions of power related to the canon: “Insofar as the debate on the canon has tended to discredit aesthetic judgment, or to express a certain embarrassment with its metaphysical pretensions and its political biases, it has quite missed the point. The point is not to make judgment disappear but to reform the conditions of its practice.”I particularly appreciate this insight because Bourdieu is far more influential and extensively engaged in Latin America than he is in the United States. I belong to a cohort of scholars who have worked in Bourdieusian studies of the literary fields of the region and are often frustrated by the simplistic ways in which concepts of cultural capital and autonomy are rendered in Anglophone scholarship.1 As Mabel Moraña (2014: 19–20) notes, in Latin America Bourdieu's work served, above all, to tend to the important redefinitions of the intellectual in the heart of dominant culture, to rethink the long trajectory that begins with the colonial letrado and leads to the public intellectual of the twentieth century, moving through republican and liberating messianism, the figure of the organic intellectual, all the way to the modalities of technocratic-intellectual consultancy and even alternative forms of intellectual work registered in originary non-Western cultures in Latin America.2Coming from this intellectual tradition, I believe Guillory's main contribution is to show that one can square Bourdieu's critique of the practices of distinction that foreground literary reading and criticism in a class-structured society with the material possibility of an aestheticism rooted in the democratization and redistribution of cultural capital. Just as Bourdieu argued that “we must . . . work to universalize in reality the conditions of access to what the present offers us that is most universal” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1982: 84–85), Guillory (1993: 340) closes the book by arguing that “socializing the means of production and consumption would be the condition of an aestheticism unbound, not its overcoming.”Yet Cultural Capital, in its targeting of the material conditions of Guillory's own field at the time of its writing, misses significant debates regarding the question of literature and cultural capital in the US academy. I work in a field that represents the second language and the largest demographic minority in the US, as well as the literature of twenty countries of the hemisphere. But we are seldom named, much less engaged, in the books about “literary criticism” or the “literary field” in the United States. You could be challenged to find any book speaking of those matters that is not squarely about English departments, with courtesy cameos by scholars of French, German, and comparative literature, particularly insofar as these departments were essential to the theoretical turn in the discipline that has now been appropriated in English programs (Saussy 2006: 4). Because of that, as a Latin Americanist, the only possible approach I have to Cultural Capital is to provincialize it: to understand it as a book that only partially concerns my tradition. Latin American literature, its criticism, and its teaching represents the majority of the hemisphere and has deep roots and a substantive footprint in the United States. Spanish departments and programs constitute the second largest field of literary studies in the United States after English. We are attentive to the work and contributions from our English department colleagues and neighbors regardless of their lack of reciprocity. And yet writing on “literary studies” often fails to even acknowledge our existence.From my field, a significant chunk of Cultural Capital reads as the chronicle of a distant land. My estrangement derives in part from the fact that the New Critics, central to the narrative of this book, are generally irrelevant to Latin Americans, who were far more involved with structuralism, German philology, and Marxism than with the provincial kingdom of close reading. A careful approach to Cultural Capital cannot disavow any perception that, in its account, literary criticism and education in the United States belongs to the field of English literary studies. It is remarkable that a book committed to Bourdieusian reflexivity, with an open critique of the notion that Western culture is a lineage to US exceptionalism (Guillory 1993: 38–42), does not engage the simple fact that English departments are the dominant but not the only field of literary and cultural criticism in the university. Or, for that matter, the fact that Anglocentrism is a form of cultural capital bound to both an isolationist and xenophobic idea of the national school (as English-only policies have demonstrated in states like Arizona) and the marginalization of literary studies outside English (and maybe French and German) programs.3 Some of the book's critical investments make it feel both anachronistic and deeply regional. As someone who has never found Paul de Man particularly interesting or fruitful, the painstaking discussion of his role in the institutionalization of theory reeks of outdatedness. The rise of theoretical approaches tied to race and gender, as well as the discussions related to questions of the Anthropocene, have gradually pushed deconstruction away from its role as a barometer of the question of theory. To be fair to Guillory, this is a factor of his project. A presentist book always runs the risk of missing the forest for the trees. It is clear to me that in 1993 the book represented a powerful critique of the state of his discipline at the time. Cultural Capital's true legacy, the reason why we are gathered to discuss it, is not its concrete content but the timeliness and relevance of its structure, its questions, and its critique.I came to reread the book now many years after I found it during the research of my undergraduate thesis (and first book) on Harold Bloom and the canon (Sánchez Prado 2002). Bloom triggered a whole debate on canonicity that my younger self sought to record in that book and that I have recently revisited in a different piece (Sánchez Prado 2021). I found myself recognizing that the value that we found in Bloom's narrow orthodoxy to speak about Latin America's right to universality has become exhausted, and that we need to envision forms of literary criticism that aspire to a cosmopolitanism closer to the aspirations of Latin American humanists than to the parochial Anglocentric claims of a Yale professor. In rereading Guillory once again in the wake of reading Bloom, I began to harbor the fantasy of a hypothetical version of Cultural Capital that truly engaged the questions that Guillory's English-centric account sidesteps. As far as my own subfield goes, such a book would deal with matters such as the complexities of writing and teaching in Spanish versus English (a matter that not only affects universities but also K–12 education), the North–South differential in the cultural capital of literary disciplines, the dominant role of Spanish vis-á-vis Indigenous languages, Portuguese or Spanglish, the tensions between Iberian, Latin American, and US Latinx literatures, the cosmopolitanism of peripheral scholars, and the provincialism of metropolitan academics. I do not intend to take Guillory to task for not embarking on such a wide-ranging project. His book continues to be an impressive feat of cultural sociology and criticism. Rather, my wish for such a book recognizes the fact that his conceptual and methodological contributions can continue to engage complex matters of the multifield study of literature in the United States when it is freed from the axiomatic and unreflexive conflation of English with the larger field of literary studies. The highest praise I have for Guillory is my renewed belief that every field and subfield of the literary humanities should have its Cultural Capital.In this spirit, a discussion of Cultural Capital coming from a Latin Americanist should balance two questions. First, given the role of Bourdieu as an influence and interlocutor of the field of Latin American literary and cultural studies, the enduring power of Guillory's reading of the concept of “cultural capital” can be deployed as a compass to engage the present and future of literary subfields like mine. Second, there is a valuable lesson in creating a chronology of Latin Americanist debates on the canon and the idea of literary language that runs parallel to various moments in Cultural Capital. These debates can complement and further illuminate Guillory's understanding of common questions that account for the baroque and transcultural tradition at the core of Latin American literary criticism. I will dedicate the rest of this essay to rehearsing the second option, bringing to the fore a debate on the concept of literary language in Latin America that may speak back to Cultural Capital.The question of the canon in Latin American literary studies has a double dimension: the criteria of representation for the continent's culture, and the historical struggle of a cosmopolitan (semi)peripheral region to assert its universal cultural citizenship. In the early years of the twentieth century, the very idea of Latin America as a site of production for literature was very much in question in both Spain and the United States. It was only in the late nineteenth century, as Alejandro Mejías-López (2009: 4) discusses, that “modernismo created a continental Spanish American literature, actively engaged the international cultural and political arena, and became the only postcolonial literature to wrest cultural authority from its former European metropolis.” Furthermore, “Spanish American modernismo radically altered Spain's literary field, transformed and modernized literary expression in Spanish, and stripped Spain of linguistic authority, the very core of its (imperial) identity” (4). In other words, Latin America in the late nineteenth century was able to take control of the literary field in Spanish and counter the notion, sustained by critics on both sides of the Atlantic, of Spain's linguistic supremacy over its former colonies. The cultural capital and perceived inherent superiority of Spain's literary language have been challenged ever since by Latin American writers committed to both the universalism and the specificity of our continental culture.In this period, then, we see the confluence of three phenomena that would set up the discussion of the idea of the literary in the twentieth century. First, intellectuals like José Enrique Rodó begin positing the idea of a “Latin race [that] is defined as the result of a cultural tradition, an accumulation of historical achievements” (Mejías-López 2009: 147). Second, as Julio Ramos (2001: 42) discusses extensively in his classic work Divergent Modernities, the literary field in Latin America develops in this period both a defense of tradition and a critique of modernity—both cultural features also advanced by literary work—and the creation of literary autonomy vis-á-vis the overarching cultura letrada that had defined the region since the colonial period. Finally, as Mariano Siskind (2014: 103–82) studies, the turn of the century brings the rise of “Latin American world literary discourses” enacted by cosmopolitan inclinations that nevertheless continued to have a significant stake in the differentiated cultural identity of the region. As the formation of pedagogical imaginaries and canons, to use Guillory's terms, emerged with the massification of public and higher education from the Mexican Revolution onward, the balance between the differentiated characteristics of the region and the claim to universalist value and recognition became the fundamental terms defining the cultural capital of Latin American literature.As the academic study of literature rose in the United States, the struggle for recognition of Latin American literary production was tied to imperial ambition. It is quite instructive to think this history alongside the English-centric accounts by Guillory and other scholars. The first history of Latin American literature of the twentieth century was written in 1916 by a scholar from the United States, Alfred Coester. A “teacher-spy from Brooklyn,” as Fernando Degiovanni (2018: 50) describes him, Coester believed that “literary education should become part of the academic knowledge needed for the development of a rapidly growing national economy with limited opportunities for domestic reinvestment.” Coester ([1916] 1928: vii) departs by praising former US president William Howard Taft and the building of the Panama Canal and noting that “reading the books written by Spanish Americans” is a way to know the culture. Of course, this approach is closer to the courses on “civilization” that would fill university curricula in the twentieth century than to the praxis of distinction between “literary language” and “ordinary language” that Guillory (1993: 133) places at the center of conversations on the canon—which is why Coester ([1916] 1928: 17) felt obliged to ask, “But shall we call Spanish-American writings literature?” His answer was yes, but insofar as “literature is often meaningless without an understanding of contemporary politics” and “the language of Spanish America is not only permeated with terms and expressions taken from daily life.” Ultimately, Coester ([1916] 1928: viii–ix) concludes, “The originality of Spanish-American literature . . . lies chiefly in its subject-matter, in its pictures of natural scenery and social life.”The academic study of Latin American literature in the United States accrues cultural capital not in relation to the uniqueness and autonomy of literary language but rather through a discourse of specificity valued for its connection to ordinary speech and to the sociological understanding of a region necessary to form the emerging class of imperial administrators. As seen in John T. Reid's (1942) eulogy, Coester would have a long, rich career as a founder the Spanish department at Stanford University, a charter member of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish, and a longtime editor of the association's flagship journal Hispania. Coester's view of the teaching of Latin American literature as subservient to what would be called years later “area studies” is perhaps the reason the field is absent in the work of Guillory and other histories of literary study in the United States. Coester is altogether absent from Gerald Graff's ([1987] 2007) classic Professing Literature, where the conflation between literary study and English is a pure matter of fact. Nevertheless, Coester's The Literary History of Spanish America appears at the very end of what Graff ([1987] 2007: 118) terms “The Early Professional Era” (1875–1915) and the emergence of a tension, as the 1912 MLA presidential address put it, between the “breadth of culture” and “a more or less narrow professionalism.” By setting such a civilizational mission, Latin Americanists like Coester were in fact sidestepping this debate by professionalizing Latin American studies as a discipline of knowledge tied to the political role of the literary canon both within the region and in hemispheric affairs. It was bound, as Richard Cándida Smith (2017) has exhaustively shown, with the imagination of what he calls an “improvised continent” that exists in the long history of Pan-American engagement. The historical continuity is remarkable as one can see it move historically from the imperialist enthusiasm of people and Coester, through the Cold War and the Congress of Cultural Freedom (Cohn 2012), all the way to the present.Tellingly, the word Spanish is mentioned in Professing Literature three times and is completely absent from Cultural Capital, according to the Google Books search I conducted out of curiosity. The geopolitical nature of Latin American literary studies sets the stage of the general sidetracking of Hispanophone literature and criticism from the imaginaries of the literary canon and the discipline of literary study in the Anglosphere.4 As Mary Louise Pratt put it acidly in reference to Latin American literature's absence in postcolonial studies, “In less charitable moments, one suspects that the main barrier has been the need to learn so unprestigious a language as Spanish” (Robbins et al. 1994: 4). And yet Latin American literary studies persisted and thrived across the hemisphere. The conversation on exactly what constitutes literary language throughout the twentieth century shows how Guillory's method in Cultural Capital can help illuminate the field of Latin American literary studies, notwithstanding its blind spots. One of those blind spots is the question as to which languages are allowed to be literary in the first place.Guillory devotes one of the most luminous sections of Cultural Capital to the tracing of the question of literary language from Russian formalism to the book's present. His discussion departs from the debate between Russian formalists who sought to displace “the agency of change (genius, originality) to the ‘literary system,’ conceived as a specific and irreducible linguistic system with its own inherent laws of evolution” and the Bakhtinian circle that posed “the question of literary language as the question not of an essentially different kind of language (literariness) but of linguistic differentiation as a social fact” (Guillory 1993: 64). Following Bakhtin's remarks in “Discourse in the Novel,” Guillory observes that “‘literary language’ does indeed ride the crest of a historical wave, but not as the defamiliarized or the new. On the contrary, it forms at the interface between the language of preserved literary texts and the context-bound speech that continually escapes total regulation and hence changes” (67). This discussion leads Guillory to understand, alongside Bakhtin and sociolinguists like Charles Ferguson, the idea of literary language as a practice that has a distinct temporality: Literary language also changes, if at a slower pace than extraliterary language, or heteroglossia, and this is the crucial point. Canonical texts, institutionally preserved and disseminated, constitute the paradigmatic basis of literary language, the guarantor at the lower educational levels of simple grammatical speech, the exemplar, at higher levels, of more expansive as well as more elite standards of linguistic use (stylistic or rhetorical rather than simply grammatical norms), even the licensed abuses that are now virtually identified with the language of high canonical literature. Hence canonical texts cannot be reduced wholly to exemplars of the literary language or the grammatical speech abstracted from them, and that difference is as consequential as the perpetual difference of the heteroglossic. (68)This distinction of temporalities embedded in forms of criticism related to the linguistic turn (the Russian schools, for sure, but one can also add critics like Roman Jakobson, Roland Barthes, and Lucien Goldmann in successive years) leads Guillory to the possible theorization of “the history of social relations of writing” (70–71).It is worth remembering that the Russian scene after the revolution was the place in which literary theory as understood in the twentieth century finds its foundational space. Galin Tihanov (2019: 3–4) claims as much in defining literary theory as the contemplation of literary autonomy “not through the figure of the writer per se, but through language” and suggesting that “until the 1940s, when global awareness of Russian Formalism began to spread, literary theory remained almost exclusively a Russian and Eastern European invention.” I will sidestep the discussion of this controversial but very plausible claim. I bring Tihanov to the table in part because his work decenters the Anglocentric account, present in Guillory's (1993: 176) work, of “the emergence of theory in the 1960s,” related to a discourse based on the “suspension of the category of the literary,” which he particularly identifies with deconstruction. It would be interesting to pit Tihanov's account of theory with Guillory's, but this is not my primary objective here.More to my purposes, Tihanov (2019: 20) argues that the “intimate link between Romanticism and the inception of modern literary theory is once again suggestive of the dialectic between national and cosmopolitan tendencies in Eastern and Central Europe.” This is also the constitutive dynamic of the idea of literary language in Latin America and in many other parts of the world. What Anglocentrism misses is that the struggles to define literary language in the early part of the twentieth century on a more global scale were certainly related to the problem of the school and the canon but also to the extent to which a language of lesser cultural prestige in the international division of intellectual labor should balance the universal with the national. In Russian and Spanish, which Alexander Beecroft (2015: 267) usefully describes as “regional world languages,” there is a deeper identification between the language of aesthetics and the language of the polis, as well as a weightier tension between the local as specific and the cosmopolitan as universal.In the 1920s, the question of literary language was quite distinct in Latin America from Russian or English. One of the essential works of criticism from the period, Pedro Henríquez Ureña's 1928 Seis ensayos en busca de nuestra expresión, argued that independent nations need literature (and other arts) that embody their own particular expression. However, Henríquez Ureña ([1928] 2013: 146) notes, music and the visual arts could mix the various heritages of the region (European, African, Indigenous) in symbolic and material forms, but writers have a different problem: “We have not renounced writing in Spanish, and the problem of an original expression of our own begins there. Each language is a crystallization of modes of thinking and feeling, and everything written in it is bathed in the color of its crystal. Our expression will need redoubled vigor to impose its tones over the red and the golden yellow [the colors of Spain's flag].” This quest for a literary aesthetics that properly embodies Latin America while writing in a language not born out of it would emerge when “the spiritual axis of the Spanish world has passed to these shores of the Atlantic” (154).The distinction between the Latin American idea of “our expression” and the idea of Western Culture in US literature as discussed by Guillory (1993: 39) resides precisely in that the US canon is founded on “an image of the American nation as the telos of Western cultural evolution.” Latin Americans did not renounce their Western lineage but built their system on an idea of universal culture that was not as teleological. The two-volume textbook Lecturas clásicas para niños, created by the Mexican Department of Education (1924) in the wake of the revolution, offered an anthology that covered “Oriental” literature, the Greeks, and the Bible, as well as a selection of European and Latin American texts. These books have no claim whatsoever to presenting Latin American texts as the inheritors of the classics. They are classics of their own and part of a canon intended to elevate the quality of reading in schools. The point of including Latin American classics was not so much to create lineage but to equalize. Pre-Columbian stories are equal to Greek myths, and Simón Bolívar and Vicente Riva Palacio are as worth reading as Tolstoy or Goethe. While a modernizing impulse underlies this reading of the canon—the idea of a legible tradition to instill into the education of Latin Americans—the fundamental gesture is universalization. Much like Bourdieu rejects the distinction between the aesthetic and the popular as a reproduction of structures of power, Latin American critics and intellectuals began, from modernismo forward, to consider the difference between the European and the Latin American tradition as a reinforcement of Eurocentrism rather than as a factual aesthetic hierarchy.The lack of self-exceptionalism and the identification of literary language with the social history of the region also accounts for why Latin American literature struggles to be read as literature in the United States. Guillory (1993: 41) notes, “If works by Afro-American, Latin-American [by which Guillory appears to mean Latinxs in the United States, although it is equivocal] or postcolonial writers are read now in formal programs of university study, this fact may be the immediate result of a political project of inclusion, or the affirmation of cultural diversity.” Guillory continues in a way that carries a different meaning after reading Henríquez Ureña: “The current project of affirming cultures themselves through the legitimation of cultural works in university curricula is enabled by the very conflation between the senses of culture to which I have drawn attention” (41). Guillory correctly points out that Western culture leads to the formation of an American consciousness in the pedagogical model of the Great Books, while “the formal study of Latin-American novels in the university does not really transmit or reproduce Latino culture,” and “it follows that the relation of even Latino students to these artifacts will not be entirely unlike the relation of ‘American’ students to the works of ‘Western’ (American or European) culture” (41). There is a distinction into which culture or identity can be reproduced within the canon-making structures, and a culture that is defined as a minority or as located in a periphery inherently lacks, within the US system, the cultural capital to ensure its pedagogical effect in the core of the curriculum. The fact that Guillory appears unaware of, or unable to express, the difference between Latin American culture and what we now term Latinx culture from the United States—fields that are distinct from each other and located in different positions of the university structure—is to me evidence of the general invisibility of my field to someone that was writing the most authoritative history of the discipline at the time.Latin Americans can also be experts in US literature. No Latin American scholar would ignore the scholarship of those working on our literature in the United States or Europe. In fact, the work of European and US L

Imperial Educación: Race and Republican Motherhood in the Nineteenth-Century Americas by Thomas Genova

Reviewed by: Imperial Educación: Race and Republican Motherhood in the Nineteenth-Century Americas by Thomas Genova Felipe Martínez-Pinzón Keywords International Education, Nation Formation, Republicanism, Motherhood, Gender, Race, Thomas Genova, Felipe Martínez-Pinzón genova, thomas. Imperial Educación: Race and Republican Motherhood in the Nineteenth-Century Americas. U of Virginia P, 2021, 342 pp. Imperial Educación: Race and Republican Motherhood in the Nineteenth-Century Americas offers a refreshing approach to Latin American literary and cultural studies, specifically 19th-century studies, through rigorous transnational [End Page 323] archival work and a literary review of three national literatures placed in dialogue, friction and mutual influence: the United States, Cuba and Argentina. As part of a recent trend in hemispheric studies of our 19th-century literatures, alongside important names and titles in Hemispheric Studies such as Ronald Brigg's The Moral Electricity of Print: Transatlantic Education in Lima Women's Circuit, 1876–1910 (2017) and Rodrigo Lazo's Writing Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (2005), Thomas Genova offers a nuanced analysis of a critical trope—or at least one that reveals itself as critical thanks to his book—to the construction of the American republics as "Bourgeois Republics": the racialized figure of the republican mother as teacher, and the teacher as mother. Spanning the mid-19th century all the way to the postwar Spanish–Cuban–American war of 1898, Genova traces this trope in a fascinating array of canonical and noncanonical literary texts, as well as in legal writings, poetry, private correspondence, political essays, travelogues and memoirs. His book offers new readings of classics such as Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's Viajes: Europa, Africa, América (1849), Cirilo Villaverde's Cecilia Valdés (1882), and James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826), in dialogue with other, lesser known texts that reveal the outstanding level of hemispheric cultural porosity among foundational novels, travelogues and memoirs. In conversation with scholarship that reads nationalism and regionalism as a reaction and at the same time a product of imperialism, Genova invites us, among other original interventions, to read Eduarda Mansilla's Lucía Miranda as an old creole Hispanophile's reaction to the Americanization of the national-civilizatory discourse mobilized by Sarmiento's readings of Cooper. The book also offers nuanced readings of Mary Mann's recently recovered Juanita (1887) and Martín Morúa Delgado's (1891) Sofía as different, yet dialoguing, interventions about what model of cultural reproduction (or miscarriage) is better suited for racially diverse republics such as Cuba. Genova's central argument is that education—as a republican duty assigned to women—traversed the debates about how to civilize and incorporate into the fledgling republic a vastly diverse panorama of racialized peoples. The consequences of focusing on the crossings of education, gender and race with a hemispheric scope are manifold and inspiring. First, in line with other scholars, this crossing entails seeing Latin America as a "deeper South" that partakes of northern North American stereotypes of the US South. Secondly, and stemming from this, Genova invites us to see the cultural (and sometimes familial) [End Page 324] connections between, say, the Cuban plantation elite and the US southern gentry. Thirdly, the book places emphasis on novelists writing foundational fictions at the end of the 19th century not only as writers but as readers of this particular genre, and as such, conscious of the narrative opportunities and shortcomings of this pedagogical literary corpus. Thanks to it, Cirilo Villaverde is uncovered as a reader not only of the mid-19th-century Latin American and US canon (Marmol's Amalia, Blest Gana's Martín Rivas or even Delaney's Blake?), and Cuban (Morúa Delgado) and non-Cuban writers (Mary Mann) are seen as readers that rewrite Cecilia Valdés (for Morúa Delgado this has been the typical read), but in doing so, center other ways of conceiving of gender, race and education in the island's turn-of-the-century literature. Imperial Educación is divided into two parts composed of three chapters each. Chapters one, two and three dwell on Argentina–US relations after Rosa's exile, while chapters...

«Вольфрам» Сесара Вальехо: 90 лет спустя (Fernández, Carlos, and Gianuzzi, Valentino. Sobre “El Tungsteno” de César Vallejo. Manchester: Trafalgar Square, 2021. 170 p.)

The review focuses on the book On “El Tungsteno” by César Vallejo (Sobre “El Tungsteno” de César Vallejo) by Carlos Fernández and Valentino Gianuzzi, published in 2021 in honor of the 90th anniversary of the publication of the novel in Spain. César Vallejo at the turn of the 1920s–1930s collaborated with the USSR, and his novel El Tungsteno became one of the key texts of his creative biography, especially its Soviet page. The book reconstructs the history of the writer's work on the text, identifies possible sources of the novel’s idea, and studies the book's reception in Spain, Latin America and the USSR. The novel El Tungsteno is considered in the context of César Vallejo’s literary contacts with the Soviet Union, his activities in Spain, and interaction with publishers. The second part of the book contains reviews of the novel from Latin American, Spanish and Soviet periodicals, as well as prefaces to the Soviet and Ukrainian editions translated into Spanish. The book by C. Fernández and V. Gianuzzi makes a significant contribution to the study of the work of C. Vallejo, to the study of his Soviet literary connections, outlines further trajectories of development of César Vallejo studies and fills many gaps in Latin American literary studies in Latin America, Europe and Russia.

Casa en que nunca he sido extraña: Las poetas hispanoamericanas: identidades, feminismos, poéticas (Siglos XIX-XXI)

In this groundbreaking study, Milena Rodríguez Gutiérrez brings together twenty-three articles by distinguished scholars examining Latin American women's poetry. Exploring the works of celebrated poets, such as Gabriela Mistral and Alfonsina Storni, as well as obscure ones, Casa en que nunca he sido extraña offers readers a detailed look into some of Latin America's most influential female literary voices. The result of several years of collaboration among researchers at the University of Granada and other academic institutions, this study's aim is twofold. One the one hand, it seeks to introduce readers to some of Latin America's most significant female poets from the nineteenth century to today, on the other, to pay them homage. Despite several shortcomings, the volume's contribution to Latin American literary studies cannot be underestimated. First, despite the increased number of publications on Latin American women writers in the last two decades, most have centered on narrators. Second, for the most part, publications on Latin American women's poetry have consisted of either individual collections, or literary anthologies (e.g., Marjorie Agosín's These Are Not Sweet Girls; Milena Rodríguez Gutiérrez's Otra Cuba secreta: Antología de poetas cubanas del XIX y del XX; Loretta Collins Klobah and Maria Grau-Perejoan's The Sea Needs No Ornament / El mar no necesita ornamento: A Bilingual Anthology of Contemporary Caribbean Women Poets). That is, cross-generational and/or pan-national comparative critical analyses focusing strictly on Latin American women's poetry are virtually non-existent. Casa en que nunca he sido extraña is, therefore, indispensable as it is the first edited volume that brings together scholarly articles centering exclusively on Latin American women poets from across the Americas.The study opens with an introduction describing the history behind the publication, its theoretical framework and organization. Divided into three sections, “Identidades,” “Feminismos,” “Poéticas,” each encompassing research articles on poets from various periods and backgrounds. Additionally, the volume includes “Pequeñas memorias,” an unedited text by Fina García Marruz, with an analysis and comments from the late Cuban author's daughter, Josefina de Diego. Casa en que nunca he sido extraña closes with poems by six award-winning contemporary Latin American women.“Identidades” delves into national identity, gender, and associated concepts including independence, exile, migration, dictatorship, and the construction of feminine subjectivity within Latin American women's poetry. The section opens with Luisa Campuzano's exhaustive essay “Nación y representación en las poetas cubanas del XIX” which traces the poetry of Cuban women during the island's struggle for independence. As in other studies, e.g., Las muchachas de La Habana no tienen temor de Dios (2004), Campuzano examines various writers, in this case poets, who strove, in their works, to reimagine the nation, as well as the role of women in (re)imagined space(s). She analyzes poems by Beatriz de Justiz y Zayas and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, among others, to elucidate the ways Cuban women from the colonial period participated in national debates about identity through their poetry. This discerning essay serves as a reminder of the importance of continuing to unearth the literature of earlier women writers.Other significant essays in this section include Olga Muñóz Carrasco's “Encender el silencio: Poetas peruanas frente a la Guerra Civil Española,” which explores the overlooked and extraordinary role Peruvian women poets played in supporting the Spanish Republic despite the repression of the Benavides military dictatorship, and Naín Nómez's “Poesía de mujeres en Chile: Voces del simulacro entre la dictadura y la transición.” Nómez offers a detailed look at Chilean women's poetry from the early twentieth century through the Pinochet dictatorship and beyond, concluding with in-depth analyses of Elvira Hernández and Eugenia Brito's feminist, anti-patriarchal works.“Feminismos” encompasses essays that delve into the transgressive and subversive nature of Latin American women's poetry, in particular the ways in which various poets have defied the patriarchy from within marginal spaces. Beatriz Ferrús’ “Y ves palidecer tu luz hermosa . . . La poesía de Laura Méndez de Cuenca,” for instance, explores an important, albeit forgotten nineteenth-century Mexican poet. In her poetry, Méndez de Cuenca subverts the social conventions of the period, including gender roles, bourgeois morality, and the institution of marriage. A constant theme in her poems is motherhood. Yet, as Ferrús explains, unlike other representations of the period which centered on the social function of motherhood, in Méndez de Cuenca, maternity is tied to love, pleasure, and carnality.Finally, Poéticas incorporates analyses centering on language and structure in poetic works by such diverse writers as Juana de Ibarbourou and Piedad Bonnett, but as the editor emphasizes, “Identidades y Feminismos están también presentes, o se entrecruzan o interfieren . . . ” (xviii). One particularly riveting essay is Ottmar Ette's “Juana Borrero: Convivencia y transvivencia.” Referencing Barthes and Butler, Ette asserts that Borrero's desire for independence was not solely political, but rather gendered/corporeal. Through literary and artistic creations, this nineteenth-century Cuban modernist poet sought to subvert and breakout from the constrained, sexist colonial society in which she lived, or in Ette's words: “Su creatividad artística le permitía ampliar su propia vida, más allá de lo que hubiera sido posible en las situaciones concretas de su vida” (291).Clearly, the preparation of any edited volume requires the selection and rejection of certain texts. In this volume, poets from certain countries are over-represented (Cuba, Chile, and Argentina), while those from others (Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic) are absent. The volume fails to include articles on Afro-Latin American or indigenous women poets, as well, for instance Georgina Herrera, Mayra Santos Febres and Maya Cú, who similarly tackle issues of identity. Readers would no doubt welcome the publication of a second volume with scholarship on women poets from under-represented areas and groups in Latin America. Despite these omissions, however, Casa en que nunca he sido extraña is a vital and welcome contribution to the fields of Latin American Literature and Gender and Women's Studies.

The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America by Javier Uriarte

Reviewed by: The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America by Javier Uriarte Elizabeth Chant Uriarte, Javier. The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America. New York and London: Routledge, 2020. 306 pp. Javier Uriarte's The Desertmakers: Travel, War, and the State in Latin America represents an innovative contribution to the well-established field of nineteenth-century Latin American literary studies. Via an analysis of works by four authors—Sir Richard Francis Burton, William Henry Hudson, Francisco "Perito" Moreno, and Euclides da Cunha—and working across the national contexts of Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil, Uriarte brings these texts and milieus into an insightful dialogue that illuminates how the multifaceted notion of the desert was constructed and interpreted through travel writing in response to the conflicts that waged in each country during the post-independence period. Uriarte's Introduction underscores the importance of understanding the desert as a created space, highlighting the singular role of war in this process across these four nations. Notably, he observes that the trope of the desert as an "elemental void" (Uriarte Introduction) was maintained by both foreign travelers and Latin American politicians alike in the nineteenth century, thus rationalizing The Desertmakers' selection of texts from across languages and borders in order to properly examine the construction of said space. By focusing on travel narratives, The Desertmakers is able to emphasize the particularly unique approach to travel writing that the situation of war provides, especially the "violent spatial reconfigurations" that it imposes (Uriarte Introduction). As such, the three concerns of the book's subtitle, "travel, war, and the state", are shown to be interdependent in the fabrication and maintenance of the desert primarily as a psychological [End Page 303] milieu. Here, war is defined as "the necessary instrument of desertification", paving the way for state mapping and railways to "do the work of expansion" (Uriarte Introduction). Thus Uriarte elucidates the intertwining of the imagined desert with the tangible outputs of capital expansion and state consolidation in nineteenth-century Latin America, a concern of all four authors examined in this study, as they both abhor and encourage the incursions of capitalist modernity into the countryside. Chapter One examines British expeditioner Sir Richard Francis Burton's (1812-90) Letters from the Battle-Fields of Paraguay (1870). Focusing on one of this experienced traveler's less studied texts, Uriarte traces the image of the ruin in Burton's narrative, identifying it as one of the first accounts to feature a vision of South America as a ruin prior to an act of destruction, in this case the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-70). While Uriarte's reading of Burton's transformation from "witness" to "adventurer" in his later writings is shrewd, this chapter's insights into the construction and understanding of Paraguayan space are particularly discerning (Uriarte ch. 1). Uriarte notes how the territory is "blurry and appropriable" in the text and argues that "Paraguay is evidence of the perverse logic of the warlike gaze that can see only the desert that war itself has created" (Uriarte ch. 1), making reference to the apparatus that supported state incursions into the desert and thus worked to create new kinds of voids. The second chapter of The Desertmakers assesses the Anglo-Argentine naturalist William Henry Hudson's (1845-1922) The Purple Land (1885), a semiautobiographical novel featuring the violence and conflict that marred Uruguay in the 1860s and 70s as its backdrop. Uriarte centers his reading around the issue of Great Britain's informal empire in the region, charting how the fictional Anglo-Argentine narrator Richard Lamb's journey gradually yields a critique of imperial endeavors. The "positive valuation of nature" (Uriarte, ch. 3) that underpins Lamb's perspective and has informed much of the scholarship on Hudson's writing is therefore connected by Uriarte to Hudson's own observations of state oppression and violence. Further, Hudson's criticism of the British Empire is interpreted by Uriarte as a potential explanation for his absence from the English literary canon, especially since the desert encountered here is a marginal territory far from the British imperial center. Chapter Three reads Argentine naturalist and statesman Francisco "Perito...

У истоков российской латиноамериканистики. Лев Самойлович Осповат — к столетию рождения. Лев Осповат. Как вспомнилось (фрагменты)

The article is a tribute to the famous scholar Lev Samoilovich Ospovat, who together with his wife Vera N. Kuteishchikova, paved the way for the Latin American literary studies in the USSR. Lev Samoilovich started with his studies of Pablo Neruda’s life and work; he was the first to write and publish a book in Russian on the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda: A Survey of His Work (1960). A year later on the basis of this book, he defended his PhD dissertation. Subsequently, its author, critically reflecting on his experience, admitted that he often followed some officially imposed stereotypes in the interpretation of Neruda’s work and evolution. At the same time, even in this book one clearly sees an attempt to overcome the stereotypes, especially with regard to the attribution of Neruda's poetry to the method of socialist realism, and to understand the poetic world of the Chilean poet not only in connection with his political activities. L.S. Ospovat became widely known as the author of two books from the series “Life of Outstanding People” — Federico Garcia Lorca and Diego Rivera and a number of brilliant articles and prefaces. The result of Lev Ospovat’s Latin American studies was the book New Latin American Novel he co-authored with his wife; the book retains its value up to nowadays. At the end of his life Ospovat became interested in Pushkin studies and published several articles containing interesting discoveries in this area. The article is accompanied by fragments from Lev Ospovat’s memoirs that of L.S. Ospovat, which allows the reader to get an idea of the kind, highly intelligent, honest and very attractive person.

Proyecciones del archivo latinoamericano en la revista Anclajes

Throughout its issues, the journal Anclajes is presented as the ideal space for updating the agenda on Latin American literary studies and the archive. In its different facets, linked to the canon, tradition, the library, and characterized by its constitutive heterogeneity of materialities, technologies and supports, the Latin American archive has become a central problem and a critical perspective. This article traces its development throughout the history of the journal and analyzes the connection between the theoretical framework and the Latin American studies field.

Hacia un concepto de narratividad: cruces (posibles) entre su dimensión literaria, antropológica y cognitiva

This article suggests a conceptual reflection on narrativity and its role in different cultural spheres. Therefore, a dialogue between three traditions is proposed: literary, anthropological and cognitive, to bring some elements of the cognitive paradigm closer to the tradition of literary studies, literary theory and some authors that could be identified with philosophical anthropology. This approach pretends to critically examine some contemporary debates on narratives, post-classical narratology and bring these debates in the context of Latin American literary studies.

Presentación: Imaginarios, naciones y escritura de mujeres del siglo XIX en América Latina

En este número de la revista América sin Nombre, nos proponemos presentar algunos resultados de investigaciones en curso, sobre la participación de varias mujeres en la construcción de las naciones, tanto escritoras confirmadas como “simples” educadoras o salonnières. Desde artículos, cartas, obras literarias y ensayos, esas voces y esa visión femenina interrumpen el “monólogo masculino”, según la expresión de Mary Louise Pratt, dibujando el eje que vertebra los estudios presentados en estas páginas. Estos artículos fueron redactados después de varios encuentros de investigadores en 2017 y 2018: el primero se fraguó en el Centro de Estudios Literarios Iberoamericanos Mario Benedetti de la Universidad de Alicante, el segundo en la Universidad de Orléans, Francia. Las temáticas han sido así presentadas y discutidas,  precisadas por cada especialista y propuestas para este número de América sin nombre.

Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America by Victoria Saramago

Reviewed by: Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America by Victoria Saramago Charlotte Rogers Saramago, Victoria. Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America. Northwestern UP, 2021. 274 pp. Can literature literally shape the landscape? In Fictional Environments, Victoria Saramago explores this question and others in a thoroughly researched and elegantly written examination of canonical mid-twentieth-century Latin American [End Page 819] novels. The impressive breadth of this book, which analyzes João Guimarães Rosa's Grande sertão: Veredas, Alejo Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos, Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, Clarice Lispector's A cidade sitiada, and Mario Vargas Llosa's Amazonian fiction, is matched by the depth of its engagement with ecocritical theory and the extensive critical bibliographies on each of these well-studied authors. Saramago argues that the fictional texts in her corpus do not merely reflect each author's vision of the physical biome, but rather that they serve as "sites for the production of knowledge about, imaginations of, and interventions in Latin American environments" (5). In doing so, she stakes a significant claim for the ongoing importance of studying canonical novels through innovative theoretical and methodological lenses. Most importantly, by showing how literature informs ecological perceptions, Fictional Environments points out the agency, and therefore the urgency, of literary works on our rapidly changing planet. A major contribution to Latin American literary studies, this book is also essential reading for scholars of the broader field of environmental humanities interested in how literature configures physical spaces and collective imaginations. Fictional Environments proposes that these iconic novels published from the 1940s to the 1960s sparked ecological imaginaries, inspired the creation of conservation areas, and contributed to environmental policies even before the advent of organized environmentalist movements in Latin America. Deforestation, a hallmark of the ecological history of the South American continent that accelerated rapidly in the period she studies, forms the backdrop against which varying forms of extractivism, agricultural industrialization, and urbanization play out. The complex, mimetic relationship between the physical landscape and the fictional realm during times of ecological change lies at the heart of Fictional Environments. Saramago offers sure-footed explanations of the shifting role of mimesis in literary studies, including Auerbach's classic text and Timothy Morton's concept of ecomimesis. The author makes her own original contribution to this field in coining the term "reverse mimesis" to indicate how physical environments have been shaped to more closely resemble literary texts in national parks and conservation areas. At the same time, Saramago shows, referential reality becomes a painfully spectral presence in literary works as deforestation, urbanization, and industrialization make the contemporary landscape diverge sharply from its earlier fictional representations. Rather than organizing her study according to language, geography, or temporality, Saramago divides the book into three sections: "Conservation," "Development," and "The Rights of Nature, the Rights of Fiction." In each section, Saramago offers a bird's-eye view of the literary texts' reception history and socioecological context, and occasionally swoops down to perform close readings of key ecological entanglements in the works themselves. Special credit is due to the editors of the Flashpoints series at Northwestern University Press for retaining the original Spanish and Portuguese quotations in addition to English-language translations, which deepens the richness of Saramago's analysis. "Conservation" consists of two chapters examining how Grande sertão: Veredas and Los pasos perdidos distill environments in fiction and simultaneously shape preservation efforts. For example, the famous sertão is now the site of extensive soy, [End Page 820] corn, rice, and eucalyptus monoculture plantations, and the larger savannah biome known as the cerrado is predicted to disappear entirely by 2030. Saramago's argument for reverse mimesis is strongest in this first chapter, which shows how the Guimarães Rosa Tourist Circuit, the Manuelzão Project, and the Grande Sertão Veredas National Park each attempt to make their protected area imitate the sertão of the novel. This remarkable intervention "challenges the very notion of literary representation as a one-way process" (33). Los pasos perdidos, Saramago proposes, is one of several works (including Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World and Richard Schomburgk's Travels in...

La legitimación de los saberes científicos en el siglo XVII novohispano. Sobre la controversia astronómica entre Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora y Eusebio Kino

La controversia astronómica entre Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora y Eusebio Francisco Kino sobre el cometa observado desde el hemisferio norte en 1680 y 1681 fue leída por la crítica a través de categorías dicotómicas, silenciando el complejo mapa de actores involucrados en la producción, publicación y circulación de sus tratados científicos. En este artículo proponemos realizar un análisis que integre los campos de los estudios literarios latinoamericanos y de los Estudios de Ciencia, Tecnología y Sociedad con el objetivo de comparar las redes de mecenazgo e institucionales y las estrategias retóricas que a través del tiempo otorgaron legitimidad a las obras de los contendientes.

Art and Our Surrounds: Emergent and Residual Languages

This essay undertakes a review of recent books by T.J. Demos ( Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (2016) and Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (2017)) and Jens Andermann ( Tierras en trance: Arte y naturaleza después del paisaje (Lands Entranced: Art and Nature after Landscape, 2018)). Demos and Andermann participate in the paradigm shift taking place under the name of eco-criticism, forging connections between the debates around environmental crisis and the fields in which they have written and published previously - art criticism and visual culture and Latin American literary and cultural studies, respectively. Both authors take on the challenge of thinking through the perceptual and conceptual habits that have dominated a relationship to our environment under capitalist modernity (such as the concept of landscape) and how artistic practices might be said to rework those habits. While Demos maps recent efforts to engage ecological concerns and “decolonize nature” across the globe, Andermann looks back to the twentieth century Latin American archive, constructing a local genealogy that harbors an ecological and political thinking that anticipates what is now lived as global crisis; their projects intersect in contemporary Latin American activist art that has gained enough attention to figure as part of a global circuit. The review considers the overlapping points as well as the striking disjuncture in both projects in relation to the different knowledge formations, archives and languages from which each author speaks.

Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina by Adam Joseph Shellhorse

Reviewed by: Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina by Adam Joseph Shellhorse Kate Jenckes KEYWORDS Brazil, Argentina, Literature, Avant-Garde, Post-Structuralist Theory, Haroldo de Campos, Oswald de Andrade, Décio Pignatari, David Viñas, Clarice Lispector, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, John Beverley, Alberto Moreiras adam joseph shellhorse. Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina. U of Pittsburgh P, 2017, 264 pp. Adam Joseph Shellhorse’s Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina constitutes a bold and timely intervention in the field of Latin American literary and cultural studies. In fact, one of the book’s greatest strengths is its insistence on the importance of thinking about the nature and history of the academic field as an important component of intellectual inquiry, which has become increasingly uncommon given the dispersed, specialized, and generally conflict-avoidant nature of the field today. Shellhorse resuscitates, in a post-memory sort of way, some of the central arguments from the 1990s, when the field of Latin American literary and cultural studies was ablaze with contention concerning the nature and limits of aesthetic representation and its relationship to a thinking of the political. His title seems to echo that of one of the more polemical books of that era, John Beverley’s polemical Against Literature (1993), and indeed, Beverley is cited as an important influence. However, Shellhorse’s approach differs starkly from Beverley’s, and veers more toward the post-structurally informed work of Beverley’s sometimes rivals, Alberto Moreiras, Brett Levinson, Gareth Williams, and Jon Beasley-Murray, who are also cited as critical references for the project. Shellhorse takes as his starting point a concern shared by all of those just named, although it comes in the form of a quotation by Beverley: their work seeks “a way of thinking about literature that is extraliterary, or . . . ‘against literature’” (qtd. in Shellhorse 5). “Literature” here is understood variously as “an exalted form of individual expression and ‘high’ culture,” as a universalizing affirmation of regional identity, and as a regime of representation complicit with hegemonic structures of power (4). Rather than exiting or opposing literature as Beverley did, Shellhorse defines anti-literature from within the literary itself, rethinking writing as an unprogrammatic and multimedial assemblage of forces capable of disrupting hegemonic forms of discourse. His approach is informed by various strains of philosophy, [End Page 136] primarily Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theories of minor literature and immanence, affect, and corporeality, but also includes Jacques Rancie`re’s notion of a dissensual disruption of established distributions of sensibility, Jacques Derrida’s notion of textuality, and Alain Badiou’s understanding of the poetic event. Shellhorse’s exploration of anti-literary forces within literature leads him to consider the nature of modernism, the avant-garde, and the neo-Baroque in Latin America, and his approach to (anti)literature instills new life into this subject. He argues that the predominant mode of the avant-garde, which sought to break with the past only in order to found a new sense of identity that is both regionally specific and universally recognizable, is fundamentally “literary” in the traditional sense, even as it challenges established norms of literature. What he calls anti-literature, which could also be called anti-avant-garde or avant-garde, involves a radicalization of poetic language that resists any such hierarchy, identitarian discourse, or foundational aesthetic autonomy, affirming instead the potential for writing to reconfigure non-dominating relations with the fundamentally heterogeneous and dynamic elements of reality. Shellhorse stresses the political dimension of such an alternate mode of writing, which eschews political representation per se for an active attention to the limits, excesses, and exclusions of representation, including what he calls the feminine and the subaltern. The case studies of anti-literature are taken from the center and margins of the twentieth-century literary canon, constituting what could be called the prehistory of post-literature. They wind between the conventions of modernism, on the one hand, and the demands of political commitment, on the other, reflecting elements of both but determining relations to politics and aesthetics that are...

Maya Textures: Conceptualizing Contemporary Indigenous Poetics, Patterns, and Performances

Maya Textures: Conceptualizing Contemporary Indigenous Poetics, Patterns, and Performances Sophie Esch Paul M. Worley, and Rita M. Palacios. Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts’íib as Recorded Knowledge. Arizona UP, 2019. 232 pp. ISBN 978-0-8165-3427-2. Latin American literary studies have always been characterized by a certain unease when it comes to their main object of study: literature. From Ángel Rama’s La ciudad letrada to John Beverley’s Against Literature, Latin Americanists have been painfully aware that literature is a practice of power and close to power. Ever since writing in the Latin script was introduced and used by the European invaders to administrate, dominate, and represent the native population of the American continent, literature has been an instrument of power, a power generally held by white or mestizo elites. Recent decades, however, have led to an increased production by and visibility of non-white and non-mestizo voices. In this context appears Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts’íib as Recorded Knowledge by Paul Worley and Rita Palacios. Their book continues the pattern of critical skepticism towards literature, but by centering indigenous intellectual production. In the introduction, the authors expressly state that this is not a book on literature, literary criticism, or literary theory (3). In this case, the distance to the literary has to do with a desire to move beyond narrow European Alphabet-centric conceptions of literature or writing in order to better conceptualize contemporary indigenous cultural forms of expression. In their attempt to unwrite the idea of Maya literature, they employ the Maya concept of Ts’íib, a term for cultural creation and recording that encompasses textual writing, performances, and pattern-making and which is inherently dynamic, social, and interconnected in nature. Understanding Ts’íib as “a multimodal site of cultural production (textile, textual, architectural, divinatory, or agricultural” (19), throughout the book’s seven chapters, Worley and Palacios discuss different dimensions and examples of ts’íib. The works analyzed include a wide range of examples of contemporary indigenous art and writing in Maya or Spanish from Mexico and Guatemala and include artists/pattern-creators belonging to different Maya groups such as K’iche, Kaqchikel, Tsotsil, Tseltal, Yucatec, Jakaltek, and Tz’utujil. Chapter 1 relates ts’íib to other Maya concepts such as cha’anil, k’anel, and cholel and discusses it in relation to the colonial legacy of European-style writing. Chapter [End Page 165] 2 focuses in particular on textiles as object-texts in practices of Maya weavers in Chiapas. Chapter 3, on the other hand, explores the intersection between writing and weaving in the poetry of Calixta Gabriel Chiquín and Ruperta Bautista. Chapter 4 focuses on the meaning of traditional Maya dress (traje), gender, and identity politics in the works of poets Humberto Ak’abal and Rosa Chávez in Guatemala. Chapter 5 analyzes contemporary decolonial practices in relation to the colonial-era books of Chilam Balam. Chapter 6 posits the bilingual poetry of Waldemar Noh Tzec as an act of rebellion aimed at creating a new plurilingual imagined community. Chapter 7 then pays attention to Maya visual art and the tensions that arise from Western conceptions of art and craft. The University of Arizona Press is a premier publishing venue for indigenous studies, and increasingly so the subfield contemporary indigenous literatures, a position it further strengthens with the publication of Unwriting Maya Literature. There is much to be commended about the book. For one there is the spectacular cover featuring art created by Taller Leñateros (and designed by Leigh McDonald), which captures the book’s argument beautifully. Taller Leñateros, founded in 1975 by the Mexican American poet Ámbar Past in San Crístobal de las Casas, is a largely female Maya Tsotsil cooperative focused on the preservation and dissemination of Maya culture that produces books, prints, and papers using traditional Maya techniques and natural materials. Secondly, there is the fact that the authors dared to co-author a book, making the book a rare gem within humanistic scholarship in the US still too focused on the single-authored monograph. But thirdly and most importantly it needs to be commended for its invaluable contribution to indigenous, Maya, and Latin American...

Матриарха российской латиноамериканистики. К столетию рождения В.Н. Кутейщиковой

The paper is dedicated to the famous Russian Latin Americanist Vera Nikolaevna Kuteishchikova (1919–2012), who became the second Russian woman after A. Kollontai to be awarded with the Mexican Order of the Aztec Eagle for her merits in the study of Mexican literature. However, V. Kuteishchikova’s specialization was not limited to the Mexican literature; her academic interests included a wide range of issues. The paper demonstrates that she laid the foundations for the scientific study of Latin American literature in Russia and outlined the ways for further research in the field. Therefore, V. Kuteishchikova’s life and work are considered in an inseparable context with the development of Latin American literary studies in Russia. The list of the Russian editions and translations of Latin American writers and the number of critical works published before the 1960s clearly confirm the fact that until then Latin American literary studies did not exist as an independent branch of philological science in Russia, since Russian scholars had a very vague notion of the Latin American literature. The first research work in philology on the Latin American literature was the monograph by V.N. Kuteishchikova Latin American Novel in the XX century (1964). The paper pays special attention to this significant work. An analysis of this book proves that its author identified and revealed a number of essential topics and problems that would be center of Latin American studies in Russia. With an amazing sagacity V.N. Kuteishchikova mapped out a program for Latin American studies for half a century ahead. These ideas were developed in her work in 1970s, in particular, in New Latin American Novel (1976), co-written with her husband, L.S. Ospovat. The paper traces the participation of V.N. Kuteishchikova in the creation of the academic five-volume History of Latin American Literatures; analyzes her last book Moscow – Mexico – Moscow. A Lifelong Road (2000), gives a spiritual portrait of the Russian scholar.

The Turn to the Object: Recent Developments in the Field of Nineteenth-Century Latin American Cultural and Literary Studies

This essay provides an overview of the current state of nineteenth-century Latin American literary and cultural studies. It begins by reviewing some of the key critical interventions in the field, including Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, and argues that Sommer’s and Anderson’s postulations helped turn the critical gaze away from a vision of nineteenth-century Latin American literature as subsidiary to the subsequent, supposedly superior literary movements of the fin de siglo and the twentieth century. Critics of nineteenth-century Latin American literature have increasingly focused on previously less-studied texts, on those not typically considered literary, and on other cultural phenomena that can be both read as texts and alongside written texts, such as music and visual imagery. The essay also resists binarisms and implicit hierarchies and conceptualizes nineteenth-century Latin America in terms of Bourdieu’s field of cultural production, while taking into account Bottero and Crossley’s “concrete connections” among actors in that field. In that way, I conclude that the two chief critical tendencies today in nineteenth-century Latin American literary studies may be categorized as a focus on the circulation of ideas and on the circulation of objects.

Beyond Jameson: The Metapolitics of Allegory

What are the politics of allegory? For several decades, Latin American literary studies have been haunted by Fredric Jameson’s (in)famous claim that “all third world texts are […] national allegories,” accompanied, more recently, by a critical counter-tradition in Latin Americanism that rejected Jameson’s argument without pursuing alternative readings of allegory. What would happen if, after the death of allegorical reading in Latin American studies, we were to return to the question of allegory in the work of Paul de Man, who argued that allegory always allegorizes the impossibility of reading? This essay traces the politics, or metapolitics, of allegorical representation, and of allegorical readings, in Latin American studies and concludes with an analysis of César Aira’s El congreso de literatura as an example of the allegorization of the impossibility of a politics grounded in sovereign decisionism.

Hernán Vidal y el aporte de la crítica literaria latinoamericana al proyecto de construcción y defensa de los derechos humanos

La revisión de la obra crítica y teórica que realizara el investigador y ensayista chileno Hernán Vidal (1937-2015) desde la Universidad de Minnesota sirve de punto de apoyo para explorar un proceso de ida y vuelta. Por un lado, de construcción de una hermenéutica cultural y literaria de los derechos humanos, anclando la primera en los segundos, a fin de realizar una serie de aportes desde la perspectiva de los estudios literarios y culturales latinoamericanos de orientación sociohistórica al propio discurso de promoción y defensa de los derechos humanos en América Latina.

The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico by Kelly S. McDonough

Reviewed by: The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico by Kelly S. McDonough Daniel Nemser McDonough, Kelly S. The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2014. 280 pp. ISBN: 978-08-1653-421-0. If Ángel Rama's La ciudad letrada (1984) secured the place of the intellectual in the field of Latin American literary and cultural studies, until recently indigenous intellectuals have been largely overlooked. This is partly a consequence of the enduring conceptual association of indigeneity with orality and in opposition to the written word. Yet the proliferation of Nahuatl texts in colonial Mexico indicates that this assumption could not be further from the truth. This is the point of departure for Kelly S. McDonough's fascinating study, which traces the political and cultural significance of Nahua intellectualism from the colonial period to the present day. The Learned Ones is divided into five main chapters, chronologically organized and each focused on the life and work of a different figure. Chapter 1 considers the Jesuit Antonio del Rincón, one of the few non-European priests to be ordained in sixteenth-century New Spain. Comparing Rincón's Nahuatl grammar to others written [End Page 211] by Spanish friars, McDonough foregrounds this native speaker's unique contribution to a categorical description of the language and, consequently, to the colonial project of evangelization. His grammar was the first to include phonological aspects like contrastive vowel length which, though nearly imperceptible to non-native speakers, could radically alter the meaning of phrases – an indigenous man might be told, for example, "to cut off his hands and drink, as opposed to washing his hands and bowing his head" before sitting down to a meal (54). Another colonial writer, the Tlaxcalan noble Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza, is the focus of chapter 2. His annals history recorded important events in the polity, above all the activities of the indigenous municipal council. By the seventeenth century, when Zapata wrote, the political and economic privileges that had been awarded to Tlaxcala for its early alliance with Cortés were coming under increasing pressure. Zapata's manuscript captures this context of crisis and the authorities' ultimately unsuccessful struggles to defend these special rights through public spectacles emphasizing their pre-Hispanic noble lineage, loyalty to the crown, and true conversion to Christianity. In chapter 3, McDonough transitions to the period following political independence in the nineteenth century. As an attorney and administrator versed in both colonial and national law, Faustino Galicia Chimalpopoca worked to defend indigenous lands from expropriation at a time when colonial protections had been dismantled under the formal equality of "citizenship." He also collected, transcribed, and translated numerous Nahuatl texts from the colonial period, from ecclesiastical manuals to historical annals. Although his political affiliation with the Second Empire made him controversial, McDonough insists on the importance of these curatorial efforts, without which many Nahuatl sources available today would have been lost. Chapter 4 considers one of the few published female Nahua writers, Luz Jiménez. Most famous for her work as a model for Diego Rivera, Jiménez also collaborated with anthropologists like Fernando Horcasitas, narrating traditional Nahua folktales as well as her testimonio of growing up in Milpa Alta during the Mexican Revolution. Importantly, McDonough centers Jiménez as an active participant and knowledge producer in her own right, rather than a "ready-to-order source for extraction" (133). Finally, in chapter 5, McDonough turns to the playwright and artist Ildefonso Maya Hernández, with whom she conducted a series of interviews before his death in 2011. His play Ixtlamatinij ("the learned ones," from which McDonough draws her title) stages the intimate conflicts wrought by cultural assimilation as well as the multiple forms of discrimination that Nahuatl-speakers have continued to face into the twenty-first century. Breaking up these main chapters are short personal narratives written in Nahuatl by some of the indigenous scholars with whom McDonough collaborated, including Refugio Nava Nava, Victoriano de la Cruz Cruz, and Sabina Cruz de la Cruz. The inclusion of these pieces is one example of the "decolonizing methodologies" that are at the heart of the project. Another is...

Libre Acceso: Latin American Literature and Film through Disability Studies eds. by Susan Antebi and Beth E. Jörgensen

Reviewed by: Libre Acceso: Latin American Literature and Film through Disability Studies eds. by Susan Antebi and Beth E. Jörgensen Benjamin Fraser Antebi, Susan, and Beth E. Jörgensen, eds. Libre Acceso: Latin American Literature and Film through Disability Studies. Albany: SUNY P, 2016. Pp. 290. ISBN 978-1-43845-967-7. EDITORIAL POLICY: Hispania publishes reviews of selected books and electronic media in the following categories: Pan-Hispanic/Luso-Brazilian Literary and Cultural Studies; Linguistics, Language, and Media; and Fiction and Film. Publishers and authors should submit their materials for possible selection to the Book/Media Review Editor, Domnita Dumitrescu, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, California State University, Los Angeles, 5151 State University Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90032. Submitted materials will not be returned to publishers or authors, even if they are not selected for review. Members of the AATSP who wish to be considered as reviewers should upload their information at mc.manuscriptcentral.com/hispan and send their CV to the Book/Media Review Editor at ddumitrescu@aatsp.org. Hispania will not accept unsolicited reviews and does not publish journal numbers, book notices, or reviews of works more than two years old. Due to the number of works that correspond to Hispania’s broad scope, not all requests to review specific items can be granted. We especially encourage, however, requests to review film and other media resources. An invitation to review does not guarantee publication. All reviews are evaluated by anonymous readers and publication decisions are based upon their comments and the discretion of the editors. A volume quite aware of its unique positioning, Libre Acceso is a major contribution to the interdisciplinary field of Latin American disability studies. The importance of this positioning cannot be understated. The collection succeeds by staging an “encounter between two complex and vigorously debated disciplines: Latin American literary, film and cultural studies, and disability studies” (9). Wonderfully, it performs a “decolonization of disability studies” that is quite necessary (19) and opens “an interdisciplinary and transregional dialogue on disability studies” (20). The division of the edited volume into four sections suggests a thematic coherence that, in all honesty, is at odds with the true originality of the individual chapters, each of which might otherwise stand alone in any number of top-tier journal publications. But then again, if these essays were scattered throughout the disciplinary landscape of the wider field of Hispanic studies—where disability studies perspectives still do not receive the attention they deserve—readers would be unlikely to find them. Libre Acceso is a powerful call to Hispanist scholars to explore disability studies themes, but given its publication in English, it is simultaneously a call to disability studies scholars to see that the ‘global turn’ called for by the likes of Stuart Murray and Clare Barker—among others—is well underway. The contributions that bookend the volume illustrate its unique position at the intersection of two fields. The first chapter after the introduction, “Blind Spot: Notes on Reading Blindness” is written by Lina Meruane, an acclaimed Chilean novelist who here self-reflexively considers her own approach to writing. The epilogue titled “#YoSoy” is written by Robert McRuer, a renowned disability studies scholar rooted in an English department who here revisits the book’s contents in light of an expanding Latin American and ultimately global perspective on disability. The chapters in-between take on cultural production from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Peru, but do so dialoguing with what often seems to be required reading for disability studies scholars: not only McRuer, but also Michel Bérubé, David Bolt, Thomas Couser, Lennard Davis, Nirmala Erevelles, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Rod Michalko, David T. Mitchell, Michael Oliver, Jasbir Puar, Ato Quayson, Carrie Sandahl, Tom Shakespeare, [End Page 137] Tobin Siebers, Sharon L. Snyder, Tanya Titchkosky and more. The contributions deftly navigate this disciplinary combination in their own way, incorporating the work of well-known and lesser-known names (Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Elena Poniatowska, Gabriela Brimmer, Ekiwah Adler-Beléndez, Roberto Bolaño, João Guimarães Rosa, Reinaldo Arenas, Antonio José Ponte, Miriam Alves, Mario Bellatin and Carmen Boullosa), and also a selection of recent...