Brennan

[This is a response to Timothy Brennan's keynote presentation, "The Problem of Unevenness: Peripheral Aesthetics and Imperial Form," presented at the "Negative Cosmopolitanisms: Abjection, Power, and Biopolitics" conference, Edmonton, Alberta, October 2012.]

“Peripheral Modernism. A Response to Tim Brennan”

Tim Brennan provides us with a provocative, forthright, and challenging presentation. Indeed, though one hesitates to call it “ironic,” given the rather critical things that Brennan himself has to say about irony (which he claims “is based on the subject setting itself up as supreme”), it is notable that a paper that opens by excoriating a “combat mode” of theory is itself strikingly combative. Brennan takes shots at entire swathes of the contemporary Humanities: at the “graduate students and young professors” who mistake theory for combat, but also at those who prefer a “radical indecisionism” that is either complementary to or indistinguishable from (or perhaps merely “athwart”) the pseudo-radicalism of their colleagues. He goes on to argue that “a kind of neo-Socratic position [...] is everywhere around us today in the academy,” a stance that is in fact not a stance but is rather designed only to “establish [the speaker’s] superiority over the supposedly rough, impetuous, and naïve adherents to actual positions.”

Everywhere Brennan sees what he terms “louche” theorizing: “an intentionally cloudy, squint-eyed perspective [...] secretive writing, words intended for initiates and hidden from the vulgar public.” No names are provided, but apparently Cornell’s School of Criticism and Theory is a hotbed for this stuff: a mere “simulacrum of revolution”; “a romance with death”; Humanists who are “against humans”; “conservatives of modernist literary cast.” It’s worth unpacking this last very condensed series of epithets: it’s not enough to say that they (we?) are (secretly, unbeknownst even to ourselves) conservatives; we are also unoriginally “cast” from a single mold whose deformity can be traced back to the pernicious influence of both modernism and literature. By contrast, then, Brennan offers us idiosyncrasy and originality (“it has not generally been recognized [...] it has gone completely unremarked”) that is saved from quirkiness or the pernicious conformity of mere novelty by its steadfast refusal of both modernism and the literary “double-entendre.” Brennan calls on distinguished forbears--the Marxist intellectuals of the interwar period, above all--in order to break free from the “irony” that, he alleges, “inhibit[s] our ability to make sense of the imperialist common sense of the present.” He proposes instead an anti-imperialist common sense that has no truck with the “effeteness of literary modernism.” In brief, I don’t think that an “anti-imperialist” common sense is much improvement on an imperialist one; and I’m suspicious of all homilies, and suggest that you should be, too. But back to Brennan’s project: naturally enough, cosmopolitanism is out (being merely the “literary ethos” appropriate to “the imperial aspects of globalization”). Again, however, it is surely ironic that he marshals in support of this anti-cosmopolitan, anti-literary, anti-elitism a “who’s who” of third-world literary intellectuals, practically all of whom are male, middle-class, and ethnically privileged, from Chinua Achebe to César Vallejo, Alejo Carpentier to Mo Yan.

Read more... (pdf file)

sombrero

Watching this footage (which I've just come across) gives me goosebumps.

It comes from a pro-Sandinista solidarity concert held in Nicaragua in 1983, billed as a "concierto por la paz centroamericana." The soundtrack was released as "April in Managua." I used to own the cassette version, which I was given in Honduras sometime around 1988. I practically wore it out listening to it.

Wikipedia tells me that Alí Primera, the singer here, died a couple of years later, at the age of 42, which only adds further poignancy to this video.

LASA

Alberto Moreiras has written a very nice article on the recent LASA Congress. It mainly comprises a series of reflections on the function played by the Congress itself and the trajectory of Latin American cultural studies over the past decade (a true "Latinamericanism since 9/11"). It then ends with some reflections on the discussions in San Francisco, via a rather promising account of posthegemony:

La posthegemonía es una modalidad de práctica teórica en la que caben innumerables tipos de análisis y tomas de postura, pues no es ni normativa ni prescriptiva: es sólo, y por lo pronto, el lugar de un posible encuentro capaz de generar pensamiento nuevo.

[. . .]

El término incluye de antemano su posibilidad crítica y resulta tan apropiado para pensar problemáticas estatales, es decir, en el registro del estado mismo y de la política de estado, como intra- o extraestatales (microfísicas comunitarias, regionales, ciudadanas o rurales, o bien macrofísicas de la globalización y su impacto), de marea rosada o neoliberales, populistas o no. Y en la medida no menor es que su productividad crítica está lejos de reducirse al pensamiento de lo político: constituiría también una herramienta fundamental para pensar la cultura, y con ella todas las modalidades de presentación de lo visible (estéticas, poéticas) al margen de postulados meramente identitarios. Tiene la capacidad de intervenir en cuanto crítica del conocimiento porque es antes que nada crítica de la ideología, y tiene la capacidad de proponer rearticulaciones políticas e intelectuales de todo tipo.

Alberto Moreiras, "¿Puedo madrugarme a un narco? Posiciones críticas en la Asociación de Estudios Latinoamericanos". FronteraD (June 27, 2012).

Prospero

“Prospero’s Book: On John Beverley's Latinamericanism After 9/11”

Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails.
-- The Tempest, Act 5, Epilogue

John Beverley presents himself as the grand old man of Latin American cultural studies. And not without reason. He was there at the outset in the early 1990s, and has figured in almost all of the significant discussions and debates--about testimonio, subalternity, representation, the politics of location--that have marked the field’s trajectory since. He has been equally instrumental in building the infrastructure of the field. At Pittsburgh, he helped organize the various conferences that brought together significant players associated with cultural studies in Latin America. And he has directed the dissertations of numerous graduate students who have gone on to become important voices themselves. Throughout, Beverley has often shown remarkable generosity of spirit: though his own intellectual and political positions have been clear and often trenchant, he has seldom found the need to impose them on others. He has always welcomed dialogue and disagreement. If there are no “Beverleyites,” that is to his credit: he has never forced anyone into his own mold. But as time passes, he increasingly feels that he is part of a generation that is the last of its kind: the last that can remember the heady days of armed struggle and revolutionary enthusiasm; the last, he suggests, with a personal link to a politics that was truly a matter of life and death. As such, Beverley is perhaps understandably concerned for the future of the field once that link is finally broken. Even among his peers, too many have given up the fight, have turned instead to reactionary neoconservatism; meanwhile, the young are too easily tempted by ultraleftism or other “infantile” disorders. In Latinamericanism After 9/11, then, we can imagine him as a “venerable old teacher,” who with “a firm voice--a masterful voice capable of seizing an idea and implanting it deep within the listener’s mind”--sits us down to listen to him.

Read more... (on academia.edu)

Borgesian

My aim was to write a post a week this semester about Borges, much as I did a few years ago for José María Arguedas. I'm behind, but hoping to catch up. Here is what I have written to date:

• Borges (preview / "Borges y yo")
• fervor (Fervor de Buenos Aires)
• criollismo (Inquisiciones)
• scenes (Historia universal de la infamia)
• monsters (Ficciones)

Also:

• chance ("The Widow Ching--Pirate," "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," "The South," and "The Library of Babel")

Related:

• hatchet (Williamson, Borges: A Life)
• interactivity (Access 2011 keynote address)

hatchet

Edwin Williamson's Borges: A Life is the standard biography in English. But it is, sadly, not a good book.

Williamson is frankly obsessed with Borges's sexual history. The irony is that there really isn't that much to be obsessed about: Borges had a whole series of crushes on various women, but so far as one can tell they were very seldom consummated; he didn't marry until he was almost 68; and both Borges himself and the women with which he was in one way or another involved were almost all very discreet and have left little in the way of written record of their relationships.

Inevitably, then, Williamson is reduced to conjecture. There is much talk about what "must have" or "may have" been the case: "the truth may have been that he needed to feel close to the woman he loved" in order to write his longest fiction, The Congress (279); "he may have blamed Perón for coming between him and" a woman he asked to marry but who refused (332); the violence of his reaction upon hearing that another former crush was to marry someone else "must surely have been due to the symbolic significance of the occasion" (358); the woman who would become his second wife "must have been a soothing presence" from the time he first met her (370). And so on and so forth.

More seriously still, and in lieu of any other evidence, Williamson turns to Borges's writing and reads it often as though it were almost directly confessional and autobiographical. So, for instance, almost any number of the earlier fictions are read as barely-disguised accounts of a putative love triangle between Borges and fellow writers Norah Lange and Oliverio Girondo. So Williamson has much to say about the "autobiographical subtext" of the novel outlined in "El Acercamiento a Almotásim," which "can be discerned without difficulty" and features "a woman--Norah Lange--[who] seemed to represent a higher truth" (180). Likewise, in "Hombres de las orillas," the protagonist's "mysterious passivity suggests that Borges himself was at a loss to explain why Norah Lange had left him for his rival" (172). Moreover, most of Borge's contributions to the newspaper Crítica are "a cryptic record of his feelings and attitudes to Norah Lange" (195). Meanwhile in "The Aleph" Williamson once again zooms in on an "autobiographical subtext" which, apparently, "alludes to his thwarted love for Norah Lange" (202). And reading the books described in "Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain" we are told that "as with everything Borges wrote, there was an autobiographical subtext [. . .], a grieving heart beating in the depths of the narrative, as it were" (215).

Admittedly, the biographer's bias may well be to read the work in biographical terms. But the problem is that, here, such reductive interpretations edge out any other possible reading. Williamson has little if any concern for the aesthetic dimensions to Borges's poetry or prose. Indeed, he evinces scarcely any interest in literature at all. Everything has always to shed light on the life. And yet, especially in the case of Borges, it should surely be the writing that counts. For, however you look at it, the life is frankly not that interesting. This was a man of habit and routine: he lived with his mother until her death at the age of ninety-nine, and with their maid for another nine years thereafter; for decades he dined two or three times a week with his friends Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo; though he travelled both when young and when old, for the middle 35 years of his life from 1924 to 1961 he never once left the River Plate. If his romantic life was, as it seems, characterized by a series of fantasies and self-delusions, then it is precisely the creative power of fantasy that is of interest, not the banal details of who didn't do what with whom.

Again and again, Williamson comes out with the notion that Borges was looking for a "new Beatrice" to enable a "Dantean vision" of literature as a "project of salvation through writing" (243). There may be many ways to read Borges, but this is surely among the least interesting, and least productive.

Or perhaps it is the second-least interesting and productive. For Williamson's other major idée fixe is even more ponderous. This is the theory that Borges's life and art were guided by the struggle between the "sword of honor" bequeathed him by his mother, with her anxiety about her criollo heritage and breeding, and what is either the "dagger of desire" (359) or the "dagger of rebellion" (463) inherited from his father, who was not particularly rebellious but who did once try to encourage his son's sexual initiation (via what seems to have been a rather traumatic encounter with a Geneva prostitute). Borges struggles between the choice either to live up to his somewhat invented patrician upbringing, an image carefully nurtured by the woman that Williamson simply calls "Mother," or to risk Mother's wrath with any number of possible personal or political betrayals of family and class. This is the "deep-seated conflict between sword and dagger" (144) that structures Williamson's biography.

In practice, the endless invocation of the "sword of honor" or the purported conflict between sword and dagger is a heavy-handed refrain, a blunt dichotomy that on the one hand steadily unravels (is it a dagger of desire or of rebellion, or is perhaps the opposing term to honor in fact "the solipsism fostered by his father's library" [435]) and, on the other, has to be endlessly restated precisely to ward of the threat of the unraveling. Frankly, by the end I was thoroughly sick both of "Borges's Dantean dream" (429) and of "the ancestor's sword of honor" (44), "the ancestral sword, associated with Mother" (145), "the oppressive authority of the ancestral sword of honor" (211), "the sword of honor his mother held dear" (286), "Mother's ancestral sword of honor" (318) and all the other slight repetitions of the same simplistic basic concept.

Ultimately, the most disappointing aspect of Williamson's book is the way in which it takes one of the most sophisticated and subtle writers of the twentieth century, a man whose writing is always alive to complication, ambiguity, allusion, uncertainty, and undecidability, and writes a Life that not only shows precious little curiosity about that writing (or about literature in general), but also precious little understanding of it. This is a book that might was well have been written with a sword or a dagger. It's a hatchet job, not in the sense that Williamson denigrates his subject (au contraire, he is if anything far too forgiving, not least about Borges's anti-democratic impulses and his many political mis-steps of the 1970s and 1980s), but because it is as crude as anything written with a hatchet has to be. And that, in the end, is the worst denigration one can offer to a writer as careful, as precise, as subtle, and as sophisticated as Borges.

postcoloniality

If there is a guiding principle to Latin American postcoloniality, it is surely that which is encapsulated in Juan Bautista Alberdi's famous phrase, "Gobernar es Poblar": "To Govern is to Populate." As the Argentine jurist put it in Bases y puntos de partida para la organización política de la República Argentina, a book which outlines the structure of a future constitution of the country, the point of this maxim is to ensure that the constitution is not empty: "What name would you give a country, or what name would it deserve, if it comprised two-hundred thousand leagues of territory and eight-hundred thousand inhabitants? A desert. And what name would you give to the Constitution of such a country? The Constitution of a desert. Well, that country is the Argentine Republic, and whatever its Constitution may be, for years it will be nothing more than the Constitution of a desert" (525-526) Hence the exhortation to immigration, and not just any immigration, as Alberdi was at pains to explain even years later: "To populate is to enrich when you people the country with folk who know what they are doing when it comes to industry and who are accustomed to work that is productive and enriching. To populate is to civilize when you people the country with civilized folk, that is, with settlers from civilized Europe. That is why I have said in the Constitution that the government should encourage European immigration. But to populate is not to civilize, indeed instead it leads to brutishness, when one peoples the country with Chinese or Indians from Asia, or with blacks from Africa" ("Gobernar es Poblar" 271). Population has a qualitative aspect, as well as a quantitative one. It matters who or what constitutes the population, who or what gives flesh or life to the constitution.

In the first place, Alberdi's remarks indicate clearly that at least from the standpoint of those who charged themselves with envisaging the constitution of the new Republics that resulted from independence from Spain, Latin American postcoloniality involved less the region's decolonization than its recolonization. Argentina, Alberdi tells us, has still yet to be properly colonized; it needs to be colonized again, but now on the North American model, rather than along Spanish lines. Settler colonialism was to replace administrative hierarchy, wiping out the rigid division between a ruling caste on the one hand, whose roots were not truly in the country, and a vulgar mass on the other hand, who lacked all social or political responsibility. For in the second place, it is clear also that the act of population, for Alberdi, also implied the process of forming a people. "Gobernar es poblar" could equally be translated as meaning "To govern is to construct a people." Only the presence of a people would ensure that the new republic's constituted power was more than mere facade, deserted and empty.

And so the history of Latin American populism begins: as the injunction to construct a people that would give life to the otherwise hollow institutions of the new Republic. The people are never separate from constituted power; indeed, it is the architects of the constitution who dream them up and call them forth to take their (supposedly) rightful place. The problem, of course, is that the region is hardly in fact unpopulated. Nobody believes for instance that Argentina is truly a desert, truly devoid of population: Domingo Sarmiento would provide, in Facundo, what is in some surprising ways a remarkably sensitive anthropological account of at least some of the human settlement that already occupied the Argentine pampa, the uncivilized and (quite literally) unsettling gaucho who were an obstacle to true settlement, proper settler colonialism. The fiction of a terra nullius is always self-consciously just that: a fiction. And elsewhere in Latin America (Mexico, Peru, and so on), the notion that the territory was mere "desert" was always much more untenable still. The problem was that the population was not yet a people, no more than Asian or African immigrants could ever (in Alberdi and others' eyes) constitute a people and redeem the deserted constitution. The pre-existing population of Latin America were, rather, variously an unformed mass, barbarous hordes, or recalcitrant and atavistic Indians whose principle of (dis)organization did not fit easily with the political organization imagined for the postcolonial settlement. So the history of Latin American populism is not merely that of calling forth a people to flesh out the constitution: in recolonizing the territory, claiming it back in the name of the new Republics, the framers of political order would also have to deal with the multitude that always already precedes them.

The basic trope of populist rhetoric invokes what is apparently a primordial social division. Indeed, as Yves Mény and Yves Surel indicate, we can define populism precisely by its rhetorical maneuvers: first, it demarcates a fundamental cleavage between "the top and the bottom, the rich and the poor, the rulers and the ruled," in short, between "the good, wide, and simple people" and "the corrupt, incompetent, and interlocking elites"; second, "elites are accused of abusing their position of power instead of acting in conformity with the interests of the people as a whole"; and third, populism then insists that "the primacy of the people has to be restored." Direct democracy is encouraged: "The ideal populist political system comes close, at least on paper, to a 'pure' democratic regime where the people are given the first and final word" (Mény and Surel, 12, 13). So populism combines: a framework of an overriding distinction between people and elite; an analysis that presents this distinction as antagonism rather than mere difference; and a gesture of solidarity with the people, against the elite. And yet we will never fully understand the populist impulse if, like so many and not least Ernesto Laclau in his celebrated analysis, we are content simply to trace its rhetorical gestures, its apparent antagonisms and solidarities. For populism is, in the end, the attempt to construct political unity by positing the people as the basis of political legitimacy, and therefore by displacing or conjuring away a pre-existing multitude. The populist sleight of hand consists in recasting the multitude as people while at the same time presenting itself as somehow anti-institutional and progressive; in short by appropriating and converting constituent into constituted power.

And this, ultimately, is the history of Latin American postcoloniality, which is therefore fundamentally structured by populism even in those periods or places where populist movements are in abeyance, seem not to have the upper hand, or even appear to be definitively absent. From the nineteenth century to the present, with rare exceptions (and the neoliberal period of the 1980s and 1990s may arguably be one of those), governance in Latin America has involved the projection of unity in the face of the legacy of a Spanish colonial regime that had always been content (not least in its division between creole and Indian republics) to live with difference and duality if not multiplicity. Latin American postcoloniality has been an attempt to undo the basic structures of Spanish imperialism while preserving its constituent institutions (as well, of course, as its class and racial privileges) by recasting them along North American lines as somehow by (if not for) the people. To this end, it has projected a whole series of spurious hegemonies of integration, mestizaje, development, and so on, of which classical populism has merely been the most successful (perhaps because it was its purest incarnation) if only at the same time its most miserable failure. For the rock on which this project has founded has been the continual insistence of the multitude, the fact that the dream of a wholesale neocolonial resettlement could only ever be wishful thinking. The multitude has ensured that constituted power in postcolonial times has remained unsettled, hollow and deserted.


works cited

Alberdi, Juan Bautista. Bases y puntos de partida para la organización política de la República Argentina. Obras completas. Vol. 3. Buenos Aires: La Tribuna Nacional, 1886. 371-558.
-----. "Gobernar es Poblar." Escritos póstumos de J. B. Alberdi. Vol. 8: América. Buenos Aires: Cruz Hermanos, 1899. 266-276.
Mény, Yves, and Yves Surel. "The Constitutive Ambiguity of Populism." Democracies and the Populist Challenge. Ed. Yves Mény and Yves Surel. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. 1-21.

Chile II

My previous post on Chile was also propagated (as all this blog's posts are) on Facebook, where my good friend Loreto Navarete commented at length. With her permission. I'm reproducing her comment here (it's actually too long for the comment box on the post itself), and below I'll include my reply. Note, however, that she commented on a previous version of the post, which I've since revised in the light of some of her comments (and since have revised to clarify still further after somewhat similar comment on the blog itself).

Querido Jon, aunque en tu primer párrafo lanzas una clave de interpretaciñon plausible, el análisis sigue sobre la base de inexactitudes.

Para quienes sí vivimos el terremoto (todos quienes vivimos desde la región de Coquimbo hasta la región de la Araucanía (más de 1200 kilómetros desde norte a sur, en donde se concentra el 80% de la población de Chile) estaba claro que estábamos ante una catástrofe de proporciones.

A las 4.00 am aproximadamente ya se estaba evaluando la situación desde la oficina de emergencias, con la presidenta Bachelet a la cabeza. En efecto, ella jamás dijo que no se necesitaba ayuda internacional, lo que dijo es que había que dimensionar la situación para poder clarificar qué tipo de ayuda internacional se requería. A las horas se solicitó la ayuda internacional en hospitales de campaña, teléfonos satelitales, puentes mecano, equipos electrógenos, purificadores de agua y sistemas autónomos para diálisis, entre otras cosas. Ésa es una primera precisión.

La segunda, éste es el terremoto más grande y devastador en 50 años. No sólo afectó Concepción, sino también Santiago, Valparaíso y Viña del Mar, Rancagua, San Fernando, Talca, Curicó, Constitución, Talcahuano, Santa Cruz, y decenas de poblados costeros en donde, posterior al sismo, el tsunami terminó de arrasarlo todo. Ésa es una segunda precisión. No es un terremoto acotado a un territorio, como fue el de 1985, el de 1939, el de 1906 o incluso el de 1960. Éste es un terremoto que ha afectado seis regiones del país, dejando hasta ahora 2 millones de damnificados. Sólo en Santiago los daños estructurales en los edificios tanto patrimoniales, como públicos y residenciales (antiguos y nuevos) tendrán un costo de miles de millones.

En ese contexto, en menos de 2 minutos, el país vio como la única carretera que nos conecta con el sur quedó cortada impidiendo por horas, la llegada de ayuda; cómo el sistema de distribución de energía también colapsaba dejando sin electricidad, agua y comunicaciones a cientos de miles de personas. En ese contexto, y particularmente en la ciudad de Concepción, la posibilidad de saqueos era absolutamente real. Y no es primera vez que pasa en la historia de nuestros terremotos.

El terremoto, estamos de acuerdo, nos permitió ver lo que había detrás del decorado (y que no había que ser experto para verlo): las profundas desigualdades que existen en Chile, el miedo -también profundo- al otro que ya había planteado Lechner hace más de una década, y la fragilidad institucional e ineficiencia en la gestión que plantea la centralización política y administrativa.

En fin, da para largo, lo que quizás quiero decir con todo esto es que lo que ha ocurrido en Chile es un cataclismo -nada menos- y que aunque las imágenes de los saqueos y de los militares en las calles son seguramente muy provocadoras para analizarlas, no hay que olvidar que es cómo los medios han construido el relato de estos días, y esos medios -no podemos abstraernos de ello- están jugando un rol en un contexto político específico.

Un abrazo, Lore

In response, I wrote:

Lore, gracias por este comentario. Creo que estamos de acuerdo en casi todo: claro que sí fue (y es) un catástrofe, con consecuencias graves.

Mi única observación fue sobre la diferencia entre las expectactivas y representaciones de los desastres en Chile y Haiti, y así de las distintas imágenes sobre los dos países. Y claro que estoy hablando mayormente de los medios extranjeros. Pero en todos lados está la comparación. Aquí, por ejemplo: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8543324.stm.

Bueno, sobre el papel de los medios en Chile mismo (y he estado leyendo también lo que dices en Twitter, sobre los rumores y el intento de fomentar pánico), bueno eso es otro asunto , aúnque quizás relacionado en tanto que esté reapareciendo una práctica de seguridad basada en un discurso de miedo hacia los pobres. Habrá en algún momento mucho para decir sobre eso, sin duda, pero claro que no fue mi intención en mi breve entrada.

Mientras tanto, gracias por la precisión sobre la actitud de Bachelet sobre la ayuda internacional. Otra vez, quizá sea esto simplemente una instancia más de como se ha escrito sobre el desastre en los medios, y revisaré lo que he puesto en el blog al respecto. Pero sí hubo mucho reportaje sobre esto, también. Vease por ejemplo http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Americas/2010/0301/Chile-earthquake-President-Bachelet-opens-up-to-foreign-aid.

Mientras tanto, sobre todo me alegra oir de tí. Estoy pensando en tí y en mis otros amigos chilenos. Un fuerte abrazo.

Let me just end by saying that my point is not to give credence to the way in which the disaster in Chile (or in Haiti) has been reported; rather, quite the opposite. And I am sure that there is much to be said about the ways in which it has been covered in Chile itself, but I have been reading the international rather than the national press, which is (again) precisely where such comparisons between Chile and Haiti have been most prevalent.

Chile

I have nothing very much against looting, particularly in the aftermath of a natural disaster of the scale witnessed a day or so ago in Chile. At a basic level, one does what one can to survive. More interestingly, it could also be seen as the inversion of Naomi Klein's "shock doctrine" thesis: taking advantage of a shock to the physical and material infrastructure in order to re-imagine social relations, now no longer in capital's favor but in the multitude's. As Rebecca Solnit argues:

The aftermath of disaster is often peculiarly hopeful, and in the rupture of the ordinary, real change often emerges. But this means that disaster threatens not only bodies, buildings, and property but also the status quo.

Part of this peculiar hopefulness arises, as Solnit also argues, from a realization of "the fragility of existing structures of authority." If this recognition leads to looting (no doubt itself the wrong word), then so be it.

And in some sense then it is no wonder that in the aftermath of disaster sovereign power is also so anxious to re-establish its authority, in large part for instance by stigmatizing the affected populations. And no doubt the more anxious that power is, the more it resorts to such tactics, even therefore at the cost of revealing the extent of its own fear and ineptitude.


Some of that ineptitude, the way in which disasters wrong-foot constituted power, can be seen in an examination of how the disasters in Haiti and Chile reveal such different expectations and representations of the two countries and their populations.

Note that I am here mostly talking about how the international media have covered these two tragedies, which appeared at first sight to offer an object lesson in the distinction between progress and poverty, civilization and barbarism. But in the end there is almost a certain wry amusement to be gained in seeing how wrong these representations have proved to be.

Haiti was of course treated as first and foremost a security problem, for which a military response was in order: Port au Prince and its slums had to be stabilized and secured before aid could be distributed; no doubt hundreds more lives were lost in the delays caused what what was fundamentally a racist fear and stigmatization of the threat of black violence. (Again, Rebecca Solnit is excellent on this.)

Chile, on the other hand, is one of the whitest of Latin American countries, and it regularly prides itself on being the most civilized and economically advanced; sometimes the Chileans think of themselves as the English of South America, and not just because they, too, don't know how to dance. The "Chilean model" is touted far and wide as the height of democratic order, economic efficiency, political transparency, and so on.

In line with the expectations that such images raise, initial reports on the earthquake that struck near Concepción emphasized how prepared the country was, how much better was its infrastructure and capacity to respond, how much more quickly it would bounce back. Its market-driven economic growth would barely wobble; after all the country is an "A plus student when it comes to economics". President Bachelet was even said to have initially declared that they needed no foreign aid on the basis precisely, Chilean commentator Patrico Navia was reported as saying, "that Chile is not Haiti. It is like Japan, or the US."

Indeed, comparisons with Haiti were overt and ubiquitous. The New York Times actively encourages teachers to draw quite literal lessons from pairing the two together.

The implication was clear: Chile, white and prosperous, could comfortably survive an earthquake that was many hundreds of times more powerful than the little tremor that touched that backward (and black) Caribbean island.

Ah. But now it turns out that, when push comes to shove, those white people are just a rabble of thieving ne'er-do-wells. Time to send in the tanks.

blasé

Catalina de Erauso's Lieutenant Nun is a quite extraordinary little book. It is, as the subtitle indicates, the "Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World." Or as Catalina herself summarizes her own story, when she ultimately reveals her identity to the Bishop of Huamanga sometime around 1619:

The truth is this: that I am a woman, that I was born in such and such a place, the daughter of this man and this woman, that at a certain age I as placed in a certain convent with a certain aunt, that I was raised there and took the veil and became a novice, and that when I was about to profess my final vows, I left the convent for such and such a reason, went to such and such a place, undressed myself and dressed myself up again, cut my hair traveled here and there, embarked, disembarked, hustled, killed, maimed, wreaked havoc, and roamed about, until coming to a stop in this very instant, at the feet of Your Eminence. (64)

This sentence also gives a sense of the tone of the book: breezy, even when recounting killings, maimings, and the wreaking of havoc. Details are distributed around the text in what appears to be a fairly arbitrary manner: we are often told how many monasteries a given city contains, and how many leagues it is from the next city; we may or may not, however, learn the precise reasons for a killing or a maiming or what exactly provokes our heroine to pack up her bags once again and move on in her adventures.

Catalina skips over some episodes and lingers over others for no obvious reason; she hardly seems to care about a reader's desire to know more about the "this, that, and the other thing" (47) that she so casually invokes. She certainly has no desire to court the crowds that gather around her once her story becomes public. However extraordinary her tale is, she wants to treat it as absolutely matter-of-fact.

Yet it is extraordinary, not least because Erauso is indeed both lieutenant and nun in roughly equal measure. It is not that she transforms from one to the other, rather that she is constantly switching between the two.

On one level, for instance, the narrative is remarkably unified as it tells the tale of Catalina's spiritual progress. She begins as a novice, sent to a Basque convent at the age of four, and she ends up in Rome where she meets the Pope (Urban VIII) and chats to cardinals. En route, moreover, she is in and out of convents and churches. Indeed, at just about every opportunity we find her running back to the church.

But on another level, that of Catalina the picaresque rogue and ne'er-do-well, the narrative is equally unified. For she turns to the church for protection so frequently simply because she is endlessly getting into trouble of one sort or another. More than once she is condemned to death, for instance, for some murder or another. Sometimes she is guilty, sometimes not; it matters little. Either way, through some trick (or the help of a passing fellow Basque) she makes her way to the local cathedral and holes up there for a while until she can sneak away once more and resume her wayward rough-and-tumble life.

Hence there is a little coda to the story. In the book's final and shortest chapter, after Catalina's meeting with the church hierarchy in Rome and after a nice little joke which feels like the punchline to the book as one long shaggy-dog story, she leaves Rome for Naples. And here, down by the docks, still dressed as a man but known to be a woman, she is dressed by a couple of prostitutes who are chatting up their potential tricks. "Señora Catalina," they shout out, apparently flirtatiously, "where are you going, all by your lonesome?" (80)

Responding to this combination of provocation and invitation from the prostitutes, this woman who has long lived as a man replies as... well, either as lieutenant or as nun, or perhaps as both. "My dear harlots," she says, "I have come to deliver one hundred to your pretty little necks, and a hundred gashes with this blade to the fool who would defend your honor." Michele Stepto argues that this is a "parody of masculinist culture," which is surely right. It is also a threat to re-impose normative morality upon a pair of wayward women. And it is a curiously ambivalent response ("my dear harlots") to an entreaty which itself is ambivalently coded as either heterosexual or homosexual (indeed, no doubt both). To the painted ladies of Naples, this Basque cross-dresser throws back a performance that they are unsure how to read or answer.

No wonder that, in what is the book's rather abrupt final sentence, we are told that "the women fell dead silent, and then they hurried off" (80). A similar silence is perhaps also our best response to this narrative that demands to be read but whose author is strangely blasé about her (or his?) readers.

perverts

Freya Schiwy's Indianizing Film is an important and ambitious book. Its subject is indigenous media, by which Schiwy means specifically the video and DVD programming made (mostly) by and (mostly) for indigenous groups, above all in Bolivia and Ecuador, but also to some extent Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico.

This programming is sometimes broadcast on television, but more often is screened directly in villages and other indigenous communities, usually in the presence of a facilitator from the organization that has produced the material. If necessary, the facilitator will bring the TV or projector and screen, and even a generator so that the presentation can be staged even in the most remote areas. The show may well be accompanied by commentary, translation, or interpretation, and be designed to foster debate and discussion at the end of the screening. What is shown is usually (at least in the Bolivian case) a package that may include short documentaries or docudramas, news briefs, video letters or memories, and dramas. The shorter pieces tend to be no more than ten minutes long; the dramas may run for half an hour or more.

Though her focus is on the Andes and the Amazon, or rather more particularly on the Bolivian case that straddles high and lowland, Schiwy is clearly thoroughly familiar with indigenous media production from across Latin America, and also with the comparable material from New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. This book takes its place alongside Eric Michaels's Bad Aboriginal Art as an indispensable reference point for any consideration of indigenous media.

The topic is important because it revises our understanding of what it means to make politically committed or radical art. Schiwy compares at some length the new indigenous media with the Marxist experimental film of the 1960s and 70s (again, above all in Bolivia). She notes that though the new media is less formally adventurous, it has perhaps greater impact than the rather highbrow cinematic efforts it effectively replaces. At the same time, there are important continuities between the two movements, and it's significant that one of the leading lights on the Bolivian scene is the son of renowned sixties director, Jorge Sanjinés.

Perhaps more importantly still, Schiwy's examination of indigenous media cautions us against seeing the indigenous as simply the relics of the past, or even as some kind of romantic essence that persists beyond and despite time and history. It reminds us that there is no necessary contradiction between indigeneity and modernity or technology. Indeed, ironically some of the most persistent and romantic images of Native Americans are in fact the result of indigenous people's interaction and adaptation of European technologies: the Plains Indians' mastery of horsemanship, for instance, could only come about once the horse had first been introduced to North America. Moreover, Schiwy suggests that indigenous media reveal the possibility of alternative modernities that would enable what she variously describes as "decolonizing the soul" (28) and (more often) a decolonization of knowledge.

Here, however, I start to take issue with Schiwy's approach. Her stress on what towards the end of the book she terms the "politics of knowledge" (212) or "knowledge politics" (213), which she throughout signals in terms of "epistemic privilege" (139ff) and "epistemological hierarchies" (13), is unhelpful. For a start, it is a strange reduction of indigenous politics--and indeed, politics as such--to issues of epistemology. Yet, as the UN Report Schiwy cites in her Afterword reveals, "the major points of contention" in recent indigenous mobilization have been "sovereignty (and the implications this may have for the coherence of nation-states) and, perhaps most important, the control over natural resources on indigenous lands" (217-18). Trying to force such struggles into the framework of knowledge politics, or for instance to talk of "epistemological and economic border[s]" as though they were one and the same (210), is strangely depoliticizing.

Further, what is meant by "knowledge" in these instances is quite undertheorized and too often (despite Schiwy's occasional protestations) devolves into mere representation. So in practice the video programming is treated as a conduit of pre-existing native knowledges which are otherwise in danger of disappearance. Indeed, it seems that very often this is also the explicit theme of the programming itself, which is dedicated either to preserving and disseminating the memory of traditional beliefs and practices, or (in the dramatic pieces) to warning of the dangers of letting them be forgotten. Schiwy's analysis loses sight of the productive aspects of the technology, the ways in which it produces new forms and modes of subjectivity and indigeneity rather than merely preserving the old. She invokes the networks that such technology traces yet subsumes them under the strange notion, simultaneously totalizing and essentializing, of a "pan-indigenous social ethos" (84).

The problem is the theoretical tools with which Schiwy is working, which are not up to the task she sets them. The reduction of politics to an undertheorized version of epistemology, and the romantic conception of subaltern otherness, is the hallmark of Schiwy's reliance on the work of Walter Mignolo. Indianizing Film tries, often heroically, to put some of Mignolo's slogans to good use. We read of the "coloniality of power," the "colonial difference" and "border gnosis," but they remain as unenlightening here as they are in their original context. I will give a prize to anyone who can even parse the phrase "coloniality of power," let alone explain what it is intended to mean. What, for instance, is intended by the claim that "the coloniality of power constructs the idea of modernity as a projection of European economy and epistemology" (40)? Schiwy tries to do justice to such concepts, but in the end they fail her.

In short, Schiwy's material is much more interesting that the theoretical slogans that have been imposed upon it. I would have liked to have heard, by contrast, more about the reception of this programming, the ways in which local facilitators interact both with the programming and with audiences in the debates that follow. For a project that is, we are repeatedly told, collective and communal, we hear overwhelmingly from the film-makers and activists, who travel to and fro between one film festival or another, and far less from the communities themselves. Schiwy consistently questions, often with good reason, traditional anthropological approaches to indigeneity, but a little anthropology here might have gone a long way. It would have meant she could have dispensed with the North American champions of indigeneity such as Mignolo, as well perhaps as their Latin American spokespeople.

Indigenous media are clearly a fascinating and important interface between indigeneity and technology, in which both elements are transformed by the encounter. Unfortunately, the guiding metaphor of Schiwy's book suggests that only technology is affected as the video-makers "integrat[e] what is foreign into traditional cultural and economic forms" (13). This notion of indianization as simple integration or appropriation is but the reverse of the traditional notion of assimilation, the idea that one culture can be unproblematically folded into another.

Yet as Schiwy's own analyses indicate, everything about both the technological processes at work here (the creation of new networks, the filmic montage that allows new connections and so new conceptions of indigeneity) and even the content of the videos themselves goes against this idea. One film, Angels of the Earth, for instance, is described as "a story of shifting ethnic identification" (43) that is also surely an intervention into the "unsteady category" that is indigenous identity (44). If this is indianization, the technology is not the passive object of indigenous uses and desires, but an active agent that is to redesign and retool those desires. The notion that film is more about teaching us how to desire than about informing us what to think is familiar from film theory and is, for instance, the entire thesis of Slavoj Zizek's A Pervert's Guide to the Cinema. In this sense, the indigenous are perverts, too, and there is no harm saying so.

Freya kindly agreed to respond to this review of her book, here.

underside

The Guianas don't fit well within our conception of Latin America. For instance, at the last Latin American Studies Association congress (in Rio de Janeiro earlier this summer), there wasn't a single paper on this part of the world among 1,270 panels. Guyana, Suriname, and Guyane are a geographical oddity: in South America but not of it.

In fact, it's surprisingly difficult even to travel to the Guianas from elsewhere in Latin America: there are no road links between Guyana and its neighbor Venezuela, for instance, while from Brazil the only overland links are to Guyana connecting with the difficult road from Lethem, and to Guyane via a boat across the Oyapock river to the rather lonely outpost of Saint-Georges de l'Oyapock. Meanwhile, air services are limited to a fairly intermittent schedule by small plane between the northern Brazilian cities of Boa Vista and Belém to Georgetown and Paramaribo. The Guianas are much better connected to North America and Europe (with direct flights for instance to Toronto and Amsterdam), and to the Caribbean via Trinidad and Tobago.

Guyana, or its populated coastal strip at least, is Caribbean in culture and outlook even though in fact it borders the Atlantic Ocean directly. Guyane has probably a fair amount in common with other French overseas departments such as Martinique and Réunion. Suriname, however, appears to be a case apart.

Compared to Guyana, the first thing to strike you is how orderly and even tidy Suriname is. In part, this is a consequence of the fact that the population is much smaller (less than half a million compared to Guyana's 750,000) and that more than half live in the capital, Paramaribo. Here, there is not the same profusion of people strung out along the coastal road. But even in Paramaribo itself, especially the historic core near the Suriname river, there is a marked absence of litter along the narrow streets that are flanked by often impressively-restored colonial-era wooden buildings. It's all very... well, Dutch. There are even blond-haired youths dashing around on bicycles (though to be fair these seem to be tourists).


On the riverfront there is a delightful open-air food market with stalls selling creole and Javanese dishes, music playing, and people hanging out, drinking beer, taking a stroll, or (while I was there at least, during the Confederations Cup) watching football on television. Nearby are some fairly fancy bars and restaurants, as well as all the major public buildings: the national palace, the Treasury and other ministries, and the impressively huge wooden Cathedral.

Not far away, also by the river, is Fort Zeelandia, well preserved and immaculately restored with permanent and temporary exhibitions devoted to the former colony's history. Everything's beautifully and professionally arrayed. By contrast, in Georgetown, Guyana, when I went looking for the former fort nobody knew where it was and I found myself straying through a decidedly ramshackle area full of weeds and rusted old vehicles.


Yet there's a darker underside to Suriname, too, for all its polished and cultivated sheen. For Fort Zeelandia was, not all that long ago, the site of the so-called "December murders" in which on December 8, 1982, fifteen opponents of the military government then in power were killed in circumstances that have still to be fully clarified. Suriname is not so far distant from the rest of Latin America in that in the 1980s it, like much of the rest of the continent, was also subject to a succession of coups and military leaders. And though these regimes were not particularly bloody, the transition from dictatorship was messy to say the least, with a rebellion by former maroons from the interior and east of the country, and a short but fairly brutal civil war.

As so often, a country that is apparently set apart from the region in fact has more in common with the rest of Latin America than its inhabitants (and its tourist office) might want to acknowledge. There are few, if any, real exceptions in the history of the Americas.

Link: OAS Report on the Human Rights Situation in Suriname (1983), including discussion of the "December murders."

found

Boa Vista is not far from the site of Arthur Conan Doyle's "Lost World," and at times it feels that way. The capital of Roraima State in Brazil's far north, near the border with Venezuela and Guayana, is a tropical backwater.

Down by the Rio Branco, the river on whose banks the city sits, there is a small complex of restaurants, bars, and cafes, but even on Saturday night half of them were closed and the other half were almost empty. Two solo guitarists, singing Brazilian popular hits, competed for what little attention that there was. A few couples lounged around, either at the outside tables or on the benches of the park alongside. A small child running around provided what little life that there was.

Earlier in the day there had been some kind of festivities on the other side of town, part the "Festa Junina," celebrated throughout Brazil in honor of the Summer Solstice and the Saints Anthony and John. Stalls and playgrounds had been set out, and loud music blared. But by five o'clock things had already wound down, tables were being cleared and chairs stacked.

The architecture, and the history that that architecture reflects, probably doesn't help. Boa Vista is quite clearly a planned town, with wide avenues radiating from a large (but quite unfrequented) central park. From above, or rather from Google Maps, it looks rather like the "arched window" from Play School.

Though there are a few older buildings down by the waterfront, mostly (with the exception of a beautiful church, painted in strident yellow) in a state of some disrepair, the town is now characterized by broad expanses dotted with the occasional modernist monument. The cathedral, for instance, is composed of sweeping concrete curves. A stadium further out shows similar attempts to make an architectural statement. The tallest structure in town (and no doubt the only one from which a "good view" can be found) is a concrete tube whose purpose is not immediately evident. Overall, it's as though Boa Vista had been envisaged as some kind of mini-Brasilia, a means to impose order on an otherwise dauntingly vast landscape of forest and plains.

But Boa Vista's history goes back further than Brasilia's. The small cluster of older buildings has been supplemented by a concrete, three-dimensional mural commemorating the pioneers and their "courage and hope" that founded the city back in the early to mid nineteenth century. It depicts a mounted settler who is leaping out of a canoe, his arm thrusting forwards, only to land on the shoulder of an oversized, naked indigenous youth.


For this is also the territory of Macunaíma, and so in some ways of some of Brazil's founding mythology. Macunaíma, here represented as the first inhabitant of the Rio Branco, is the eponymous subject of Mário de Andrade's 1928 novel, which traces the young man's journey from the jungle to Rio and São Paulo and back again, in the process uniting ancient and modern, indigenous and white, interior and coast in the image of a single if diverse national culture.

In such narratives (and there are many other similar ones--the successful film Central Station comes to mind, for instance) backwaters such as Boa Vista are recreated less as the site of a lost world than as the place where Brazil finally finds itself.

Perhaps no more. When I asked at my hotel's reception how to get to the town center, I was directed neither to the historic nor to the modern centers, but to what turned out to be a huge supermarket some blocks from either. Are Brazilians, too, now lost in the supermarket?

merchants

Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Haiti: State Against Nation. The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism is a comprehensive account of Haiti from independence in 1804 to the downfall of Jean-Claude ("Baby Doc") Duvalier in 1986. Precisely the fact that Trouillot feels the need to go back to the early nineteenth century in order to explain Duvalierism demonstrates how deep-rooted he feels the problems that plague the country to be. And though the book concludes with the end of the Duvaliers, it hardly evidences much optimism for what would follow. As Trouillot confesses, "If wishes alone sufficed, I would have ended on a more cheerful note" (228). He is as scathing about intellectuals and others who opposed Duvalierism as he is of the sycophants who enabled it to survive so long: "For if the Duvalierists are understandably among the villains of the story, there is nevertheless no clear champion of the popular cause" (228).

One wonders what Trouillot made of the rise of Aristide and Lavalas. Unfortunately, as far as I can see he has published nothing on the topic--and my understanding is that sadly he has been quite seriously ill for some time, so is unlikely to write anything on Haiti again in the near future. He argues here, however, that "any solution to the Haitian crisis must face the peasant question" and "it must find its roots in the resources of that peasantry" (229). Perhaps, for Trouillot, Lavalas may have offered the possibility of some kind of "solution" to the deeply-entrenched crisis that he analyzes as having afflicted the country almost from the moment of its birth.

It's important to note, however, that the role that Trouillot argues for the Haitian peasantry is quite different from that taken by peasants in just about any other Latin American country. Indeed, though it is to be welcomed that Haiti is now (finally) being studied as part of Latin America, and not utterly ignored as has been the predominant tradition, Trouillot's book does also demonstrate the significant ways in which Haiti's history and social and political structure have long been very different from the Latin American mainland, or indeed the rest of the Caribbean. Above all, it seems clear that social struggles in Haiti have not primarily revolved around the ownership of land.

Whereas in most of Latin America throughout the nineteenth century and up until fairly recently, the prime source of social conflict has been the disparity between large (often absentee) landholders and subsistence farmers, this does not appear to have been the case in Haiti. Here, in Trouillot's account, the Revolution decisively destroyed the power of the landlords. Against even the desires of the so-called leaders of the Revolution, who "all agreed on the need to maintain largescale export-oriented plantations," the former slaves utterly refused such an arrangement: "they knew that the plantation system was close to slavery and they rejected it" (49). Hence very early on land was redistributed to the peasants, although this did not of course necessarily mean an end to economic or social inequity: the elites "surrendered land in order to win control of the state" (48). In so far as landlords became rulers, however, they did so as "often nothing but rulers" (76).

What resulted, then, was what Trouillot terms a "republic for the merchants" in which the state gained a high degree of autonomy (and hence separation from civil society), its relations with the peasantry mediated through the merchant class, and its exploitation exercised through taxes, particularly export taxes levied at the custom houses. "It is thus fair to say," Trouillot concludes, "that the landlords have remained, since the 1840s, in the shadow of the alliance of rulers and merchants, never again becoming an autonomous social force" (78).

In a subsequent post I will look at the conclusions that Trouillot draws from this anomalous social structure, which enables the face-off between state and nation that he sees coming to a head under the Duvaliers. I will also examine how this relates to the concept of hegemony that Trouillot employs, and particularly to Laclau (who provides the book with one of its blurbs, but I will argue singularly inappropriately).

teta

Congratulations to Claudia Llosa and, by extension, to Peru for the success of La teta asustada, which just won the Berlin Film Festival's Golden Bear for best picture.


A couple of notes...

First, the English title Milk of Sorrow is not even close to the Spanish original. I would have translated it as "The Nervous Tit." I haven't seen the film myself yet, but I would hope that the resonance with "nervous tic" might prove appropriate. Of course, some could think that the film was a psychological portrait of a common garden bird.

Second, this here blog has tried to provide a guide to Peruvian cinema. I'd like to think that this collection of reviews is the most comprehensive to be found online in English. It even features an essay on the topic, complete with a fairly detailed account of Llosa's previous movie, Madeinusa.

Finally, for offline resources on Peruvian film, you'll have to wait for Jeffery Middents's forthcoming book. Middents himself is, naturally enough, rather cock-a-hoop at Llosa's recent success.

inequality

The following is a draft of something scheduled to appear in an upcoming number of the LASA Forum...

The central concern of literature is not so much inequality, but difference. And so it should be. Literature enables an exploration of otherness, variety, and singularity. It does so by allowing readers to feel or sense other worlds, different from their own, thereby relativizing their own experience, such that they recognize that they, too, are different. Hence literature differs from film, at least as described by the Frankfurt School theorist Siegfried Kracauer: film often encourages its spectators to see themselves as the same, as part of a mass; but literature tends to emphasize either individualism or a much more diffuse sense of commonality. Film constructs a mass audience of equals; literature posits a common readership characterized by diversity. Even critic Benedict Anderson’s famous argument about the role of the novel and novel-reading in the construction of nationalist sentiment stresses the range of sensastions to which, for instance, picaresque narratives expose their readers: a “tour d’horison,” in the case of José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi’s El periquillo sarniento, of “hospitals, prisons, remote villages, monasteries, Indians, Negros,” whose exemplary differences combine to constitute the collectivity that will be called Mexico. In short, literature is more about imagination than calculation, experience than measurement, affect than effect.

Read more... (.pdf document)

agency

In class yesterday, Salvador and Sophie came up with a couple of very good points in our discussion of William Rowe and Vivian Schelling's Memory and Modernity. Indeed, their criticisms apply to a greater or lesser extent to much discussion of Latin American popular culture, or even popular culture in general.

Salvador's argument, if I have understood it right (and you both should feel free to correct me) was that Rowe and Schelling downplay the effect of sheer domination. The indigenous peoples of the Americas didn't just one day decide that they would take on certain elements of Catholicism, for instance: they were forced to do so. If they didn't then they would (in Salvador's words) get "their asses kicked."

Meanwhile Sophie's point was that in stressing the positive, creative, and resistant characteristics of popular culture, Rowe and Schelling downplay the continued injustices and inequalities that still plague so much of Latin America. Moreover, the implication is that there is little or nothing that can or should be done about the situation of the poor or downtrodden; there is no reason for anyone else to bother about it, let alone intervene in some way.

Again, I think that these are important arguments. But let me argue Rowe and Schelling's case for a moment...

First, I suggested that they were saying something like "Yes, but..." Yes, the indigenous peoples of Latin America (and by extension all other subaltern and subordinated groups) have historically been the victims of great violence and exploitation, but even so they have managed, against the odds, to continue to resist in often surprising and unexpected ways.

Rowe and Schelling do, after all, acknowledge from the start that "The Conquest had catastrophic consequences for the Andean and Mesoamerican civilizations." And yet, they continue, "despite this, neither the colonial nor the republican regime has been able to expunge the memory of an Andean, Aztec and Mayan civilization" (49). Indeed, the very notion of resistance implies that there is something to resist. If we see the indigenous (again, or other subalterns) as simply victims, then in some ways we also are ignoring their agency, we also are downplaying their inventive and creative capacities. Precisely the interest of popular culture, for Rowe and Schelling, is that it is here that we can see the evidence of this resistance and creativity; here we can appreciate what those in power have always either ignored or feared, which is that despite it all the subaltern continues to make its presence felt.

Second, I think that Rowe and Schelling would respond in similar ways to Sophie's argument. If we are only ever thinking about what "we" in the privileged and powerful First World should or can be doing for those in the Third World, then we too are denying those people's agency. This is not an argument that nothing can or should be done. But in order best to understand the situation, and so the pitfalls as well as the virtues of any action, we also need to be aware of the kinds of struggles that such people are already engaging in, without or without "us." I think that's part of what Rowe and Schelling term "subaltern classes ma[king] themselves visible, demanding social recognition" (132). That's not to say that everything's AOK, not by a long shot, but to take account of existing expressions of agency and subjectivity. Again, the argument is that such expressions are perhaps best seen in popular culture, which is why Rowe and Schelling want to distinguish popular culture from what they call the "culture industry" or from official, state-sanctioned instances of culture.

Finally, I think that these issues are also relevant to discussion of this letter written by a UBC student on the university's Terry blog. The letter writer clearly has her heart in the right place. (And incidentally, I don't agree with the tone of the disparaging comments that she's received.) But she, too, is worried that she is being self-indulgent. I would go further: we learn from an investigation of Latin American popular culture that the relationship between First World and Third World, or between North and South, is more complicated than a simple dichotomy of victimizer (however unthinking) and victim. There are more complex negotiations and exchanges at work. If we don't recognize this, then we inevitably end up being patronizing.

neo

William Rowe and Vivian Schelling's Memory and Modernity is a hugely ambitious undertaking. Off the top of my head, I can't think of anyone else who has tried to replicate it: they aim to provide a guide to Latin American popular culture that covers both the gamut of theoretical positions (from within Latin American Studies and outside) as well as detailing, often in quite some detail and historical or sociological depth, an extraordinary range of popular cultural practices. Just in chapter two, "The Faces of Popular Culture," they move almost seamlessly from Peru to Mexico to Brazil to Argentina, and from Andean oral narratives of Inkarrí to Mexican artesanía to Candomblé to telenovelas to football. It's astonishingly erudite and impressive, while also remarkably readable; their accounts of critics from Adorno to Taussig to Martín Barbero to Arguedas are deft and decisive. They give a real sense of the texture and complexity both of Latin American popular culture and of the debates that it has provoked.

This book should have the status of a classic of Latin American cultural studies, and it's a crying shame that Verso seem to have allowed it, along with the other surveys in its Latin American series such as Gerry Martin's Journeys through the Labyrinth, to go out of print.

Of course, Rowe and Schelling's approach also has its pitfalls. Especially when it comes to their accounts of critics and theorists, there can be no space for detailed textual analysis, and so their brief judgments are also potential hostages to fortune. Is it really true, for instance, that Michael Taussig's project can be reduced to "finding in pre-capitalist cultures a source of resistance to capitalism" (73)? Likewise, their analyses of specific cultural histories, though they often extend over several pages, are also dependent on ex cathedra pronouncements rather than sustained argumentation. Their tone tends towards encyclopedic synthesis that threatens to overwhelm their own critical and conceptual narrative.

This narrative is driven by a conception of the popular as counter-culture: "The term popular culture, according to common usage in Latin America, evokes the possibilities of alternaties to currently dominant cultural practices. [. . .] To be of use, the term 'popular' must be distinguished from the products of the culture industry and the mass media" (97). And yet in practice they are forced to recognize that difficulties of trying to cordon of the popular as a space for political resistance and creativity. At the same time as they argue for a definition of the popular "in terms of the possibility of a counter-hegemony," they also have to recognize the intimate coexistence of popular practices with the mass media: "popular cannot mean purity nor the culture industry its loss" (113). Yet it seems to be precisely in the name of at least a vestigial version of such purity that at times they put the popular in scare quotes, so as to indicate practices that are popular but not really they way they would have them be so. For instance, in their discussion of the samba, which "becomes a 'popular' and profitable form of entertainment transmitted together with commercial advertisements by radio" and which "was transformed into a 'popular' massified genre and an exportable symbol of national identity" (135).

So Rowe and Schelling want both to champion and to distance themselves from the popular, to separate out their own neo-populism from historical and state-supported populisms of Vargas, Perón, or the PRI. In short, they want to differentiate their counter-hegemony from hegemony per se. But it is precisely this gesture that they share with historical populism, which always wants to portray itself as embattled and oppositional, even from a position of state power.

fmln '09

Click here for all your Salvadoran election news. In short, the FMLN have won a plurality in the Legislative Assembly, but not an absolute majority, and indeed have not done as well as predicted. They also lost the mayoralty of San Salvador.

And see here for a helpful analysis of why the Salvadorans will be going to the polls again in a few weeks' time. (Via.)

declassification

A brief note. In Chile in December, thanks to Rodrigo Naranjo, I came across the work of the Laboratory of Declassification. Rodrigo also introduced me to Jorge Pávez, who kindly gave me a copy of his book, Cartas mapuche: Siglo XIX, which is in large part an outgrowth of this declassification project. The book is to be formally launched on Thursday; on the off-chance I have any readers in Chile, I urge you to attend.

Jorge has written a very interesting introduction to the volume, which I hope to comment upon at some point. And Rodrigo was quite insistent that Posthegemony was merely a new Latin American cartography (to return to such topological metaphors) or, I suppose, a restratification. I'm not convinced about that, or that in fact declassification doesn't inadvertently fall into a similar trap: isn't every declassification also necessarily a reclassification, too?

However, and again in light of the fact that subaltern studies qua subaltern studies never in the end produced very much in the way of redescriptions, let alone historical redescriptions, of Latin America, perhaps declassification is the true inheritor of the subalternist project?

Link: The Laboratory also has a blog which, although it has not been updated for some time, has some interesting texts, including by people such as Federico Galende.