Leyendo la globalización desde la mitad del mundo: Identidad y resistencias en el Ecuador (review)

This sweeping essay by Michael Handelsman, Professor of Hispanic American Literature and Director of Latin American Studies at the University of Tennessee, is both ambitious and audacious. It is ambitious because it aims at no less a target than explaining the effect of globalization on culture. It is audacious in arguing that Ecuador can serve as a model for all of Latin America, indeed, almost as a universal model, not only in understanding the forces at work as ideas, images, capital, and people move more rapidly and in greater volume around the world. Handelsman argues that Ecuador crystallizes the central problem and opportunity of globalization's unintended product, plurinationality: Ecuadorians, like many other Latin Americans and others around the world, increasingly must negotiate complex combinations of ethnicities that do not fit neatly into any single narrative of national origin or essential identity. Their flexibility in doing so shows the creative potential of cultural mixing.

Handelsman moves easily among such diverse genres as literature, light fiction, literary criticism, stage plays, as well as analyzing such social phenomena as international migration and the deterritorialization of the nation-state. He argues compellingly for understanding indigenist movements as a humanistic alternative to the neoliberal tenets of globalization. The "Washington Consensus" model promoted by the U.S. government and, under its influence, by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, emphasizes the free flow of capital and goods and the valorization of human activity in monetary terms. In contrast, indigenism in Ecuador offers not a return to some mythical premodern ideal, but an alternative form of social organization that places human needs and culture, rather than financial values, at the center of society. Moreover, indigenist movements in Ecuador represent not only social movements, but are in the forefront of an epistemological struggle in favor of interculturalism—an appropriate example to turn to well beyond the Andes, given the historic circumstance of Latin American societies and their multiple origins. Afroecuadorians, Handelsman writes, may from time to time have engaged in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "strategic essentialism," but generally have a more fluid conceptualization of identity that suits the needs of the present time.

Handelsman defends a decidedly democratic approach to literature, one that acknowledges that even "light" fiction can bring enlightenment. "Mientras que reconozco que lo light se ha convertido en el lenguaje oficial de [la] tiranía [del consumo y el mercado]," he writes, "me resisto a descartar por completo su potencial como fuente de luz" (p. 141). Handelsman draws on a wide range of authors to show profitably how the problem of identity is partly a problem of literary expression. His analysis of contemporary political theater as a representative space for resistance to the homogenization of culture is especially strong. Also useful is the reminder that the media in the internet age are not only, if still principally, top-down sources for the delivery of corporate cultural products. They also provide space, both in Ecuador and the rest of Latin America, for contesting projects, political organizing, and community networking, while the products of the mass media can and have been reappropriated by Ecuadorian writers who draw new meanings from familiar branded names.

The book ends with a sensible critique of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire (2000). Handelsman shows how unsatisfying, for people whose lives consist of daily toil in arduous circumstances constructed by the choices of ruling elites, is the notion that the nation-state has withered away and yielded to an amorphous, free-floating network of power. The arguments in this fascinating book should help bring us back down to an Earth still crisscrossed with robust national boundaries and exploitative economic structures.