The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader (review)

With an impressive 804 pages, The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader not only contains a rich variety of texts and bibliography, it also signals the volume's ambitious design. This Reader intends to capture a diversity of intellectual projects and multiple trajectories dealing with Latin American "culture" in the last half of the twentieth century. The editors have divided the corpus into four parts: "Forerunners" includes Marxist cultural historians such as Antonio Candido; "Foundations" profiles the work of Jean Franco and Jesus Martin-Barbero. "Practices" includes the work of the Brazilian Renato Ortiz, the American ethno-historian Irene Silverblatt and the intellectual historian José Rabasa. "Positions and Polemics" focuses on the North-South polemic and it includes John Beverley, Hugo Achugar, Antonio Cornejo Polar and George Yúdice, among others. It is clear from the "Introduction" to the Reader, written by Abril Trigo, as well as in the subsequent introductions to each part, that the editors of this Reader went to great pains in arriving at their selection of essays. Taking into account the history and theory of the different approaches examined, the editors map out the development of each with regard to the study of Latin American "culture" as an event that is always lettered and always urban. It is clear that the term "culture" here is less inflected by the century of anthropology's work in Latin America than by the power of Cultural Studies as developed in Birmingham first and the United States later. This relationship with Cultural Studies in the North American academy is not temporary or trivial. In fact, in various and repeated forms, the North-South dynamic sets the pace of the Reader. This relationship is sometimes directly addressed by the editors, but most often it is glossed over, thus setting up a confusing frame of reference for the reader who must navigate between a set of texts written in Latin America about its cultures by Latin American intellectuals working within powerful local traditions and cultural critics writing within the United States academy.

Perhaps the best place to find the key themes and tensions regarding this relationship with Cultural Studies is the last section dedicated to "Polemics," although the articles included in "Practices" also demonstrate this asymmetric relationship with Cultural Studies in English. In this regard, it is important not to forget that this Reader appears after the publication of Critica cultural y teoria literaria latinoamericanas, a special issue of the Revista Iberoamericana (July-December 1996). This volume, edited by Mabel Moraña, examined most of the topics taken up in the Reader. What is more, this Reader includes many articles written by the same critics. It is important to know that both volumes are projects undertaken in North American universities. As far as I know, no such compendium has yet been published in Latin America, a fact that is in itself revealing as it addresses directly the core preoccupations of cultural studies: the mutual effects of power and culture. This asymmetry brings into focus the play of power relations implicit in the production, consumption and circulation of knowledge, the positioning of national and international subjects, and the cultural dynamics of globalization.

The editor's desire to rescue a refined and brilliant meditation on cultural formations in Latin America, and their ability in persuading a university press like Duke to undertake a potentially risky enterprise of publishing a book almost 900 pages long, is certainly commendable. One cannot but hope that the book will be read and taken into consideration by its intended audience: English speaking academics (1). With such a readership in mind, the volume aspires to present a comprehensive and well-documented vision of the study of Latin America's cultures in the last five or six decades. Nevertheless, the fact remains that, with certain marked exceptions—Antonio Cándido, Darcy Ribeiro, and Eduardo Archetti—almost all the authors whose work is included, either work...