Examinations of the Study of New Hispanic/Spanish American Culture and Literature

Pedro Henríquez Ureña divided Latin American literary studies into periods and systematized the inquiry on the literature of the continent. This became the foundation of the organized study of Latin American literature and culture. Most critics see cultural studies as the logical evolution of the Latin American essay tradition. They read Bello, Martí, González Prada, Rodó, Lugones, Quiroga, Mariátegui, Reyes, Paz, and Carpentier as necessary antecedents to the present in which the social sciences have displaced philological and textual analysis. New generations of thinkers and analysts undertook the study of the cultural and social reality as a whole instead of the essentialist study of literature as the soul of the nation. Following this approach, Cornejo Polar redefined Fernando Ortiz's concept of transculturation as an asymmetric, syncretic plane, with the synthesis in the place of hegemonic culture or García Canclini's (1990) concept of hybridity, which more optimistically links modernity to emancipation, expansion, renovation, and democratization. These concepts are key epistemological tools at a time in which the process of westernization of Latin American countries is being accelerated, and simultaneously the national importance of indigenous and subaltern groups is increasing. These developments are not incompatible, but they represent a challenge that nations must face. According to Mabel Moraña, the advantage of hybridity is that it replaces essentialist notions. There is a partial consensus that the most important tasks ahead of us are the strengthening of civil society and the creation of a Latin American common cultural market to reinforce the identity of the continent. In this context García Canclini defends modernism and modernity as Latin American.

It makes sense to start my commentary on these books with the The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader because it provides a collection of studies that run from 1970 to the present. The editors' purpose is to produce a canon now that a tradition of more than thirty years has been developed. They emphasize that this field is an autochthonous production and must be studied in its historical context. Cultural studies in Latin America reached their present form under the influence of the Birmingham School during the sixties. The creation of multidisciplinary centers of Latin American studies at U.S. universities also helped shape the field. There are topics that are common to many of the essays: the role of the nation-state and the identity problems that have arisen around it, the impact of dependency theory, the epistemological shift from close textual analysis to cultural studies, neo-colonialism, urbanization, secularism, the emerging role of the middle classes, the "lost decade," and neoliberalism. The editors have divided the book into four sections: Forerunners, Foundations, Practices, and Positions and Polemics.Antonio Cornejo Polar, Angel Rama, Carlos Monsiváis, Beatriz Sarlo, Néstor García Canclini, John Beverley, and Nelly Richard are among the contributors to this collection of thirty-six articles. In general, the historical and diachronic studies fare well while theoretical articles get mixed results in the four books covered by this essay. I comment here briefly on some of the lesser-known texts, such as the contribution by Jesús Martín-Barbero (1987), who sees the need to carry out a more sophisticated analysis of consumption because it is also the realm of desire, pleasure, and resistance. Furthermore, he advocates a progressive reading of the role of the family. His analysis of the melodrama as a Latin American genre is superb. Eduardo Archetti (in...