Contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies (review)

In their Introduction to this collection, Hart and Young start by questioning the general term "cultural studies" and how it specifically applies to Latin America, since the field originated in the English-speaking world. This line of enquiry continues by wondering whether there is a "home-grown Latin American cultural critique," or if such cultural critiques are merely an extension of a colonial discourse produced outside of Latin America. These questions are not new, as academics and many Latin American writers have been posing them all along: How do we talk about our own specificity and just what is Latin American Cultural Studies? The volume offers a survey of the various trends and provides many examples of the writings and research practices within the field of "Latin American Cultural Studies" by presenting a bouquet of good essays that deal with an array of themes.

The volume consists of 24 chapters written by internationally recognized scholars in the field, organized into five distinct sections. The first four chapters of Part I ("Latin America and Cultural Studies") consider the nature of cultural studies as a critical practice and review some of the controversies surrounding the use of the term to examine the production of culture in Latin America. Part II ("Cultural Icons") has four chapters devoted to analyses of the ways in which certain narratives and important historical and cultural figures have been iconicized as images that define national and statehood identity. Part III ("Culture as Spectacle/Commodity") includes six chapters that focus on the notion of culture as spectacle, particularly with regard to popular culture, including football, music, telenovelas, television programs and films. Part IV ("Culture, Hegemony and Opposition") also has six chapters, some of which also examine film and cartoons as expressions of popular culture. This section poses questions of hierarchy and hegemony in various forms of cultural expression and practice in relation to official and non-official cultures, social inclusion and exclusion, and to issues of race, ethnicity and gender. Part V ("Cultural practices") includes four chapters that deal with everyday practices; some, like food and capoeira, are sometimes considered to be most idiosyncratically Latin American, according to the editors.

The volume presents a rainbow of issues and themes hard to organize under the same umbrella, just as the label "cultural studies" tries to do. And in a way, the collection seems to be all over the place and arbitrarily connected. For example, films are discussed in different chapters, in three different sections: in Part III, John King offers a socio-cultural approach to the history of filmmaking in Latin American, focusing on the three countries that were able to develop a significant film industry (Mexico, Brazil and Argentina), whereas Geoffrey Kantaris, in the same section, writes about five films in which the representation of the socially disavowed and street violence, produced from the intersection of local and global crises, is made visible through cinema. In another section, Robert Stam offers a recounting of racial representations in Brazilian cinema. Yet in the last section of the book, Stephen Hart examines the political impact and the representation of the subaltern in Jorge's Sanjinés two most famous films, The Blood of the Condor (1969) and In Order to Receive the Bird Song (1995). The same kind of collage happens with literature, where there are different texts and theories discussed in different parts of the book and in many chapters.

Although the essays are sometimes hard to connect to each other, the underlying idea is that all of them fall within "cultural studies," a broad term that covers a wide gamut of theories about Latin American culture: from ideas of national identity and national icons, to differing cultural practices that also define culture and identity, as in the case of football, soap operas and boleros. The individual essays are well written and complex. The volume provides a tour of where and what the discipline is, along the...