Building Nineteenth-Century Latin America: Re-Rooted Cultures, Identities, and Nations (review)

Recent years have seen the publication of several excellent collections of essays devoted to nineteenth-century Latin American cultural studies. Works such as Beyond Imagined Communities: Reading and Writing the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, edited by Sara Castro-Klarén and John Charles Chasteen, and special numbers of journals such as Revista Iberoamericana’s issue on cultural change and periodical reading in nineteenth-century Latin America (January–March 2006), to adduce but two examples, have amplified our understanding of the complex ways in which hegemonic and nonhegemonic discourses functioned in the nineteenth century and how the divisions between elite and popular cultures were constructed and deconstructed. This collective scholarly labor has also done much to counteract and supplement the persuasive and powerful, but often totalizing, interpretations proposed by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities and Doris Sommer in Foundational Fictions. Acree and González Espitia’s anthology may now be added to the extant corpus of such volumes. Building Nineteenth-Century Latin America unites essays by historians and literary and cultural critics, all of whom examine different discursive phenomena from within rather than from without. The works have in common their desire to offer insight into movements, groups, and sociocultural manifestations that to date have not been studied from a cultural studies perspective. Thus Patricia Lapolla Swier’s essay on José Martí finds space next to González Espitia’s piece analyzing representations of syphilis in both “high” culture (poetry, fiction) and “low” culture (magazine advertisements). Indeed, the chapters here also share the refusal to privilege one form of discourse over another. It is welcome to find a collection offering essays that vary widely in terms of content, but that also maintain a similar theoretical approach.

The volume is organized into three thematic units: print culture and the power of images; parties and performances; and, finally, a section on “ideologies, revelations, and hidden nations.” Framing the collection in this way casts the first two sections as focused on easily identifiable phenomena, while the third is positioned as a discussion of ideologies, as if the first two were free of ideology. Still, the commonality of the critical perspectives among almost all the essays gives Building Nineteenth-Century Latin America a coherence that compensates for the rather forced aspect of the book’s tripartite division.

Hugo Achugar’s insightful “Foundational Images of the Nation in Latin America,” translated deftly by Acree, opens the book. Achugar argues that images were as central to the nation-building project as Sommer’s foundational fictions, and analyzes a “high culture” painting—Juan Manuel Blanes’s El juramento de los Treinta y Tres Orientales (1877)—as well as images that literally circulated on money and postage. He stresses the nonhegemonic nature of money and postage; private banks and postal systems held sway for much of the century, minting their own money and printing their own stamps. For Achugar this means that non-state powers participated in creating national imaginaries and foundational discourses. This essay is followed by Acree’s own “Words, Wars and Public Celebrations: The Emergence of Rioplatense Print Culture,” which asserts that print culture was crucial in the revolutionary period to royalists and pro-independence partisans alike. Acree acknowledges that it is difficult to assert that urban revolutionary-period newspapers would have reached a rural or illiterate audience, a fact that seems especially pointed after Achugar’s careful dissection of visual culture’s extended reach in the previous essay. This exemplifies how the essays in Building Nineteenth-Century Latin America enter into dialogue with one another. Indeed, much of Acree’s essay traces the interplay between print and visual cultures. For example, printed matter was publicly displayed and read aloud during festivals, while journals made written descriptions of those festivals available to those who did not attend the celebrations...