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Introduction: Latin Americancultural and subaltern studiesKathryn Lehman aa University of Auckland , AustraliaPublished online: 05 Mar 2012.

To cite this article: Kathryn Lehman (1999) Introduction: Latin American cultural andsubaltern studies, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, 5:2, iii-x, DOI:10.1080/13260219.1999.10431793

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Introduction

Latin American Cultural and Subaltern Studies

Kathryn Lehman University of Auckland

It is often assumed that the spread of cultural ideas in the South is analogous to the circulation of capital. Ideas are thought to arrive from the metropolitan centres delayed, if at all. Indeed, culture here does have its own temporality, and when ideas are imported from metropolitan centres they do at times sweep in, accompanied unexpectedly by trends long out of fashion at their site of origin, thus offering the uncanny feel of the Macarena with vocals by Ricky Martin.

Temporality in Australasia parallels that of other postcolonial locations like Latin America, Africa and Asia. In contact with only some trends from Europe or the United States, we are aware of participating in the multiple histories of two dominant regions and innumerable peripheral areas which prod uce rereadings of our own histories and of those of the North. The two powerful northern regions, with very small populations, are the true minorities of the world, yet they attempt to establish the pace of the planet. Those at the periphery keep another set of rhythms, and it is far more difficult for us to stay attuned to others at the periphery than to those at the centre. In fact we often understand peripheral others through the discourse of the centre. This problem is compounded for academics who are committed to what used to be called, without apology, an 'ethics of liberation': an attempt to hear the subaltern in order to participate in transforming the system that produces elite and subaltern cultures.

Although it is usually assumed that the South is temporally behind the North, some 25 years after Henry Kissinger declared that 'History is never made in the South', Augusto Pinochet has lost immunity from prosecution for the human rights abuses committed during his regime, and it appears that the Argentine military is next in line. This precedent surely places the South and southern Europe-at least Spain, Chile and Argentina, mediated by Britain-at the forefront of history in the realm of international law. Furthermore, in retrospect it is clear that neoliberalism was imposed on Chile before it became the norm for other economies, even the dominant ones. Thus, history was in fact made in the South in 1973 as it was made in 1970 when the first socialist president was elected, and in Cuba in 1959, as

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well as in Mexico in 1910. An additional dimension emerged from the South in 1883 when New Zealand women were the first in the world to win suffrage. A century later Rigoberta Menchu has articulated the experiences of indigenous peoples and initiated a new way of understanding the relation between oral and written history. The Nobel Prize awarded to Menchu in 1992 recognised the the growing strength of indigenous organisations at the international level, increased awareness among indigenous nations of the possibilities of cross-cultural analyses of their histories, and contributed to the passage of new laws on indigenous rights which have begun to reverse the legacies of colonialism. Universities in many countries have formalised international research on indigenous peoples; for example, the work of Paolo Freire has been instrumental in the formation of theorisations by Maori scholars at the International Research Institute for Maori and Indigenous Education in AotearoalNew Zealand. For his part, Nelson Mandela continues to redefine the contours of liberation in South Africa in a way which has rewritten another colonialist legacy. Just as the South sets its own pace in the cultural sphere rather than following the North, so capital does not follow a linear trajectory from the metropolitan centres to the periphery but is more often taken from the South to enrich the North. In spite of this continuous movement, the complexities of culture present a challenge to the linear interpretation of history and identity, now perhaps more clearly than ever before.

In analysing Latin American cultural studies one might trace the history of the field by describing the location in which cultural studies was institutionalised, the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Well-known theorists such as Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, Stuart Hall, and James Clifford defined the role of popular culture and culture industries in working class formations, theorised the notion of hegemony and its relation to the elite sectors and the state, redefined the role of ethnography, anthropology, and the academy in the production of knowledge, and analysed the relations between culture, the people and the 'national'. Broadening the list of theorists, but naming only a few of those who define how the field of cultural studies evolved, are the French thinkers such as Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and Michel de Certeau, who have highlighted the role of narrative and metanarrative in modernity and postmodernity. described the institutionalisation of power through discourse, and formalised the study of the semiotics of everyday life. The work of the Frankfurt School has influenced most cultural studies work although most of the Institute's members would not have considered themselves to belong to cultural studies per se. In particularly the work of Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno offered a revised Marxian approach to culture, mass culture, and fascism in redefining the role of ideology informed by psychoanalytic theories of desire. Both Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser have provided analyses of ideology which

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Introduction

underpin most current understandings of cultural studies, and Fredric Jameson has expanded these analyses in his studies of literature, art and architecture. Finally, one could not understand the field today without the writings of Antonio Gramsci, whose definition of hegemony, particularly in the last decade, has been pivotal to an understanding of how the elite sectors work to establish broad consent. The Argentinian Ernesto Leclau has offered readings of Gramscian hegemony as they relate to current socialist strategies.

Moving south we might also mention the way in which cultural studies became connected with the work of postcolonial and subaltern theorists in Australia such as Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. Meaghan Morris linked feminism with these analyses. The resident subaltern studies historian Ranajit Guha also reminds us of the prominence of Indian subaltern studies in cultural studies theorisations, and Gayatri Spivak, who has worked in India, France and the Unites States, has linked these studies with a strong grounding in feminism. It should also be noted that postcolonial studies entered the literary field following the 1978 publication of Edward Said's influential Orientalism which was broadened in his 1993 Culture and Imperialism.

Latin America has had its own history of cultural studies in which scholars such as Jose Carlos Mariategui, Fernando Ortiz, Angel Rama, Roberto Fernandez Retamar, and Antonio Cornejo Polar theorised the role of literature and popular culture as they related to the development and consolidation of the nation-state and the highly contested categories of indigenismo and mestizaje. While some have picked up on Ortiz's introduction of the notion of transculturaci6n as a way of understanding cultural formations, all of these thinkers analysed hegemony as a project of the elite sectors, and they considered the role of culture industries in social class formations. In addition, they all shared a belief in and commitment to the responsibility and centrality of the intellectual in the social field.

In recent years a new generation of theorists of Latin American culture in Britain, the United States and Latin America have revitalised the debates on cultural studies and found space for an intercontinental dialogue in journals such as such as La Revista de Crltica Cultural, the Revista crltica Literaria Latinoamericana, the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, the Revista Iberoamericana, and several others. Writers such as John Beverley, Walter Mignolo, Nestor Garcia Canclini, George Yudice, Neil Larson, Raul Bueno, Nelly Richard, Beatriz Sarlo, Alberto Moreiras, Roberto Schwartz, Sara Castro-Klaren, Rolena Adorno, Jose Rabasa, julio Ramos, Ileana Rodriguez, Gloria Andalzua and Mabel Morana have drawn on work in cultural, postcolonial and subaltern studies in order to open new directions for the analysis of the role of culture in the academic field. The relatively recent prominence of women in these circles reinforces the importance that the newer approaches have had in feminist thought.

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The goal of this special issue is to offer a glimpse of the varied approaches currently operating in a field loosely known as cultural studies. Understanding cultural history from the South is the concern of each of the authors contributing to this Special Issue. John Beverley has played a prominent role in theorising cultural practices in both Spain and Latin America, and his work has prompted a rereading of the main writers on Latin American identity. Maintaining the centrality of social class in his analysis, Beverley is perhaps best known for his work on the role of testimonial in Latin American revolutionary societies, and he has reshaped the way in which literature is understood to participate in the formation of elite and subaltern cultures. In his contribution to this volume, he offers an update on the subject of cultural studies through his analysis of the subaltern as it relates to the people and the 'national'. He stresses the importance of migration and popular culture in understanding the subaltern through Cornejo Polar's reaffirmation of the role of negation as a strategic means by which the subaltern articulate the unequal locations from which they speak, an approach which could offer a model for a new discourse of the people and the 'national'.

In her interview with Diamela Eltit, Walescka Pino-Ojeda asks the author to describe the function of testimonial today, in view of Eltit's past work as a letrada who offered a representation of a speaking position of the lumpen. In her response, Eltit articulates a role for the writer which escapes categorisations imposed from the academy and the market-including feminism-and she defends a politics of creativity. In this sense, Eltit has contributed to the debate over the current role of intellectuals in a context in which their authority, like that of the academy itself, has been decentred.

Walter Mignolo has been a major figure in theorising the cultures of scholarship produced globally as they are understood in the United States and Latin America, while he has participated in shaping the cultures of scholarship in both of the regions and has facilitated dialogue among them. In his article, he reconsiders 'Chakravorty's dilemma', namely, how non­Western historians deal with disciplines such as historiography. which have created subaltern cultures of scholarship. In reviewing the production of knowledge and the coloniality of power, he looks at disciplines (and trans­or interdisciplinary studies) and languages of scholarship, in order to propose that the colonial difference be understood as the epistemic horizon which enables us to comprehend the double historicity of colonised societies. One of his most important observations is that cultures of scholarship in English differ greatly from those in Spanish because of the languages used; he thereby implicitly recognises the separate histories of the relatively privileged English-speaking South (Australia and AotearoalNew Zealand), and the Spanish-speaking South. These observations regarding languages of scholarship represent a challenge to the postcolonial project that overlooks historical and cultural particularities of postcolonial societies.

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The role of culture in the development of civil society is considered in Kate Nicholl's comparative study of societies currently in transition from authoritarian to liberal democratic regimes. Highlighting the conflict between the real experiences of mass society under globalisation and the ideology behind the promotion of economic liberalisation which promises democratic pluralism, she attempts to determine the extent to which hegemony has been achieved for the neoliberal project. In order to reach her conclusion, she contrasts the notion of self-restraint on the part of the liberal elites who realised that they must make material concessions to popular sectors in order to gain legitimacy. In contrast, the neo-liberallack of restraint and unwillingness to make any concessions will result in making it more difficult to manufacture the consent necessary to legitimise neoliberalism in the long run. This will increase the likelihood that counterhegemonic forces disrupt the model.

As a response to discourses of globalisation, Ricardo Kaliman proposes a 'non-global(ised)' framework for the study of cultural regions. In order to counter the global and area studies approaches to the analysis of culture which homogenise the particularities of peoples and regions-in this case the massive and heterogenous region called Latin America-Kaliman stresses the importance of the close reading of cultural practices of regions, informed by an awareness of the ways in which all academic study IS

effectively regionalised. This definition of region implies a specific temporal understanding of a cultural group as it is associated with geography over time: the identity that cultures form through their contact with geographic sites which give meaning through language. Such an approach works against area studies by legitimising local and oral histories in relation to theoretical models unrelated to empirical evidence. Yet the regional approach that Kaliman proposes is not riddled with relativistic heterogeneity as one might expect. In fact the opposite is the case; the region as he proposes it has many properties of internal homogeneity.

Piers Armstrong offers a model of this approach as he considers the implications of a local notion of ethics in his critical analysis of the theoretical contradictions between afrocentric subaltern communitarian discourses and concrete compromises with the status quo in Brazil. Wending his way carefully through the complicated minefield of race relations, Armstrong demonstrates the importance of oral histories, particularly music, in the negotiation of identity. Analysing the way in which carnaval has been interpreted as an 'aesthetic escape hatch', Armstrong sees baianidade as a much more complicated process in which afrocentric discourses do advocate an ideological agenda encompassing moral dignity for blacks, yet offer little evidence of a relation between this stance and advocacy of social change. For her part, Corynne McSherry offers a study which focuses on a regional practice in order to locate the wider implications for indigenous peoples. Her analysis of the role of

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indigenous radio in Mexico counters some of the claims of public sphere theorists. She uses interviews with those who have participated in the state-sponsored indigenous radio program to posit that this example from Mexico requires a rethinking of the critical parameters set for the analysis of the public sphere.

As has been the case in AotearoalNew Zealand, recent immigration to Australia has provoked heated and unresolved debate over national identity, epitomised in the recent vote against republicanism. Located in the Asia Pacific and performing the role of economic mediators among European, Asian, and some Latin American societies for APEC, both countries have witnessed radical changes in their own socio-cultural landscapes which tend toward destabilisation of the Euro-American patterns set by colonialism and its legacies. As these pluralistic cultural trends have occurred in the context of neoliberal restructuring, which has bankrupted national industries and ravaged the education, health, welfare and retirement systems, the elite sectors have turned to a discourse of nation and family in order to legitimate their project. This, in turn, has fuelled a reactionary chauvinism and defence of European, largely English culture.

Benjamin Genocchio highlights the tension between the English- and Spanish-speaking South in his study of Juan Davila's controversial art practice, which focuses on the ambiguities raised by the commodification and commercialisation of Latin American art. A Chilean who has resided in Australia for many years, Davila caricatures Latin American icons such as Frida Kahlo and Simon Bolivar, and his appropriation and quotation of stereotypically exotic imagery have led some critics to charge that he is one of those artists who 'are quite willing to be "othered" for the West'. Genocchio counters this interpretation by offering a reading of Davila's work as 'parodic doubling' which is capable of promoting the radical destabilisation of fixed oppositions and discriminatory cultural signs across national and international discourses. Such de stabilisation works at several levels, and Genocchio looks specifically at Davila's mimicry of fixed images evoking nation, gender and race, the latter in the colonial portraiture of Bungaree.

In offering the readers of the JILAS- Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies a series of articles on Latin American cultural studies, the editors should also acknowledge the 'geo-cultural locations' of the contributors. Three of them present university affiliation from the United States (Mignolo, Beverley, McSherry), three currently work in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, respectively (Armstrong, KaIiman, Eltit), one in Australia (Genocchio), and two in AotearoalNew Zealand (Pino-Ojeda and Nicholls). Nevertheless such affiliations do not suffice to describe their approach, background, academic formation, or identities. We leave it to the

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readers to discover the many ways in which their cultural backgrounds and cultures of scholarship suggest a crossing of borders and inspiration from both northern and southern locations motivated by a commitment to a specific way of reading history from the South.

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Tomas Zanotti

Maya-K'ichee' vestido para el 'Baile de La Conquista' con su familia n.d.

Colecci6n Fototeca Guatemala Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamerica (CIRMA)

Antigua, Guatemala

(with kind permission)

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