Reviewed by: A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Scenes from the Latin American Sixties John Beverley Keywords John Beverley, A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Scenes from the Latin American Sixties, Diana Sorensen, Latin America, the 1960s, Latin American Literature, Boom Narrative, Angel Rama, Postcolonialism, Feminism Sorensen, Diana. A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Scenes from the Latin American Sixties. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2007. 312 pp. It is good to have this new book by Diana Sorensen, one of the most distinguished figures in the field of Latin American literary criticism in the US academy. That is because it attempts a kind of vindication of the sixties at a moment when, with the dramatic re-emergence of the Latin American left (and the recent crisis of what has been for a generation a hegemonic neoliberalism), such a gesture is particularly timely. Sorenson’s verdict on the sixties is generous but not uncritical: Utopian and uncompromising, the era’s desire for a future to end all futures was caught in the double bind of apocalypse and invention. But its spectacular expectations have left the energy of excessive desire, libidinal creativity, and liberating energies. . . . [T]he decade’s ongoing momentum keeps it before us as nostalgia or—more auspiciously—as hope. (211) Thinking about the sixties in both Latin America and North America has been dominated for many years by what I would venture to call a paradigm of disillusion. According to this paradigm, the illusion of the revolutionary transformation of self and society that was the inspiration for the sixties was a kind of romantic adolescence. It was a generous and brave adolescence, but also one prone to egotism, excess, and moral and political miscalculation. By contrast, the middle age of [End Page 267] the generation of the sixties corresponds to a new reality principle: the collapse of communism and the rise of neoliberal economic models under US auspices in the eighties and nineties. A biographical narrative of personal maturation is mapped onto a narrative of transition between different historical eras, with a resulting sense of the inevitability of the present. The most influential expression of this paradigm was perhaps Jorge Castañeda’s 1993 book Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left after the Cold War, but its elements are present in dozens of memoirs, novels, testimonios, films, and histories from and about the sixties in Latin America. Sorensen offers a different, more sympathetic way of assessing both the achievements and the limitations of this decade. There are some problems with her approach I will take up subsequently, but this desire to move beyond the paradigm of disillusion in the representation of the sixties is the book’s chief virtue. A Turbulent Decade Remembered is in a way mistitled: it is not so much the decade of the Latin American sixties as such that is remembered, but the main cultural phenomenon associated with the period—Boom narrative. Chapter one deconstructs skillfully, in a psychoanalytically inflected mode, the aporias of militancy, utopia, and authority in Che Guevara’s testimonio-like Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria, ranging in the process from reflections on the Cuban revolution itself, to the relation of Casa de las Américas and the Boom, to Walter Salles’s 2004 film version of The Motorcycle Diaries. Chapter two takes up the question of the significance of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre in modern Mexican culture by considering the contrasting approaches to that event of Octavio Paz (in his postscript to El laberinto de la soledad, published in English as Critique of the Pyramid) and Elena Poniatowska (in La noche de Tlatelolco). Sorensen herself leans toward Poniatowska’s testimonial collage of popular voices as opposed to Paz’s “privileged gaze” (62). But, perhaps because of her own sympathy with psychoanalytic critique (a psychoanalytically inflected feminism could be said to be her own critical ideology), she does not register sufficiently, in my opinion, the Orientalist character of Paz’s critique of the massacre, which he famously saw as a compulsive repetition of what he called “la terrible dominación azteca.” I do not mean to oversimplify a complex debate, but this seems to me a classic case of what we called in the sixties “blaming the victim...
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May 31, 2011
Garrett K Chan 
Open Access
