Taking Their Word: Literature and the Signs of Central America

Notes

Introduction 1. The actual translation of patria to English is “fatherland.” This implies a masculine-gendered notion, whereas patria implies a feminine one. La patria is a notion that has ideologically conceived of Spain as the “mother country” and the Hispanic American nations (those whose residents speak Spanish, as opposed to any other language), like all former colonies of Spain, as her “children.” Therefore, I will keep the term motherland here, as opposed to the more correct reference in English, fatherland. 2. The guerrilla period extended from 1959, the year Castro first came to power in Cuba, to 1990, the year in which the Sandinistas were defeated electorally and the Soviet Union came to an end. Some scholars place its beginnings in Central America on 13 November 1960, the date of an attempted coup d’état that first launched guerrillas in the country, and its end in the signing of the Guatemalan peace treaty on 28 December 1996. 3. Highbrow literature would be what we know as the accepted canon of Latin American novels, poetry, essays, and theatrical production, codified in the 1960s by professors such as Enrique Anderson Imbert and Emir Ramírez Monegal,at Harvard and Yale, respectively. 4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has called for a radical renovation of comparative literature and states, regarding cultural studies: “Can the ‘native informant’ ever become the subject of a ‘cultural study’ that does not resemble metropolitanbased work? If one asks this question, one sees that the destabilization offered by a merely metropolitan Cultural Studies must exclude much for its own convenience, for the cultural claims of the metropolitan migrant.” See Death of a Discipline, 10. 5. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 16. 6. I use cosmopolitan centers with hesitation. I prefer not to use center by itself because of the risk of repeating the center-periphery binary opposition with all it 227 Notes entails. Nevertheless, I acknowledge that cosmopolitan center raises difficult conceptual issues as well. Its unspecified indeterminacy can be erratic, or simply reduced by others to the old center-periphery binary. Nevertheless, I coincide with Walter Mignolo’s stance on cosmopolitanism. I see it within the scope of the modern or colonial world, where cosmopolitan centers act as the constitutive side of marginality . For Mignolo’s reference, see “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis.” 7. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 19. 8. Ibid., 23. 9. Florencia Mallon argues that the word interdisciplinary has been badly misunderstood . What most academics do in our time is transdisciplinary work. The latter implies working on the same subject, but from separate scholarly approaches that never intersect. Mallon likes to illustrate this with the metaphor of a sandbox. All children are playing in the sandbox, but all are playing separately, each with his or her own toy. Truly interdisciplinary play would imply not only that all children were in the sandbox, but that they were all playing together, sharing their toys. See “Interdisciplinarity as Border Crossing.” 10. Followers of cultural studies, especially those working in newly created programs such as women’s studies, queer studies, and so on, might be surprised to know that as late as 2005, most Spanish departments in the United States still reacted negatively against cultural studies. They claimed that the theory of cultural studies was a passing fad and ignored the theoretical body of work produced by it. 11. See Sommer, Foundational Fictions. 12. In Flores’s next book he theorizes this concept regarding cultural remittances from the United States back to Puerto Rico. 13. It is odd to write this because, as a Central American subject, I cannot fully place myself in the position of a U.S. subject even if I am writing in English, in the United States, and for a primarily U.S. academic audience. 14. Spivak has mentioned this as a crucial element for Derrida and also for herself . The latest reference regarding this matter, which is worked into various texts, appears on p. 30 of Death of a Discipline. 15. This term is used by Spivak. 16. Benítez Rojo, The Repeating Island, 1. 17. Schele and Freidel, A Forest of Kings, 38. 18. This might be an initial attempt to theorize Central America as a region, something yet to be done despite the political rhetoric lasting nearly two centuries. In reality, very few regional discourses have emerged from within Latin America itself, as Arturo Escobar has pointed out (personal communication, 23 July 2005). When identity has been problematized...