Latinamericanism after 9/11

4. Between Ariel and Caliban: The Politics of Location ofLatinamericanism and the Question of Solidarity

chapter four Between Ariel and Caliban: The Politics of Location of Latinamericanism and the Question of Solidarity In a wonderful essay called “Académicos y gringos malos” on five autobiographical or semi-autobiographical novels by Latin American writers that center on their experiences in U.S. universities, Fernando Reati and Gilberto Gómez Ocampo register the articulation of what they coincide with me in calling a “neo-Arielist” position: that is, a reassertion of the authority of literature, literary criticism, and literary intellectuals as the bearers of Latin America’s cultural memory and possibility against institutions and forms of thought and experience identified with the United States—in this case departments of Spanish or writing programs at mainly Midwestern universities.They see that position as entailing a kind of premature foreclosure—an “imperialismo al revés” in the phrase of one of the novelists—based on an anxiety about loss of identity: En todos los [cinco] casos, el choque inicial con la cultura norteamericana afirma de modo casi instantáneo la identidad latinoamericana de los protagonistas, y salir—huir—de Estados Unidos para retornar a América Latina se impone como condición para ganar una perspectiva crítica que les permita producir una imagen opuesta a los clichés yestereotipos contra cuales reaccionan. No es de sorprender entonces que varias novelas coincidan en finales que enfatizan un sentido de cierre más que de apertura hacia lo nuevo aprendido.1 [In each of the [five] cases, the initial clash with North American culture affirms almost instantaneously the Latin American identityof the protago- between ariel and caliban 61 nists, and leaving—fleeing—the United States to return to Latin America imposes itself as the condition for gaining a critical perspective that permits them to produce an image opposed to the clichés and stereotypes against which they are reacting. It is no surprise then that several of these novels have endings that emphasize a sense of closure more than of opening toward the newly learned.] I want to use Reati’s and Goméz Ocampo’s remarks to try to map the “politics of location” of Latinamericanism and my own place as an academic and a “gringo bueno” in them. I rely here, as elsewhere in this book, on Nelly Richard’s distinction of critical theory written “desde/ sobre Latinoamérica,” from orabout Latin America.2 I will start by noting what seems at first sight a paradoxical coincidence between the terms of David Stoll’s much publicized attack on Rigoberta Menchú and various critiques by Latin American literary intellectuals of the pertinence of what might be called in a kind of shorthand “studies” (cultural, postcolonial , subaltern, ethnic, queer, latino, africana, et cetera) to the field, or endeavor, of Latin America’s knowledge about itself. To connect this chapter with the previous one, I should note that these critiques are also sometimes directed against the convergence of Latinamericanism and deconstruction proposed by Moreiras and the New Latin Americanism, to the extent that deconstruction is seen as a discourse “about” rather than “from” Latin America. But at other times, as in the case of Richard herself, they represent a specifically Latin American articulation of deconstruction concerned to dismantle the assumptions of a European or U.S.-based academic Latinamericanism. Stoll’s argument was not only or perhaps even mainly with Menchú, or about whether several key details of her narrative were factually true, but rather was directed against what he perceived as the hegemony of the discourses of postmodernism and multiculturalism in the North American academy, which, in his view, consciouslyor unconsciouslycolluded to perpetuate international support forarmed struggle in Guatemala by promoting I, Rigoberta Menchú and making Menchú into an icon of political correctness. The connection between multiculturalism and postmodernism that troubled Stoll is predicated on the fact that multiculturalism carries with it what, in a well-known essay, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor called a “presumption of equal worth.”3 That presumption implies a demand for epistemological relativism that coincides with 62 chapter four the postmodernist critique of the Enlightenment paradigm of modernity —what Habermas would call communicative rationality. If there is no one universal standard for truth, then claims about truth are contextual: they have to do with how people construct different understandings of the world and historical memory from the same set of facts in situations of gender, ethnic, and class inequality, exploitation, and repression. The...