Cultures of the City: Mediating Identities in Urban Latin/o America

Afterword: The Dialectics of Identity in the Latin/o American Global City

199 T he chapters in this volume address, directly or indirectly, the problematic configuration (adulteration, negotiation, reinvention) of social subjectivities in contemporary Latin/o American urban milieus. They explore conflictive spaces, ravaged by neoliberal policies and plundered by transnational capital, contested by emergent social actors and imploded by new cultural practices, where most of the population lives ensnared in a global imaginary that condenses the cosmopolitan fantasies of universal happiness, unbridled individual freedom, and multicultural harmony in an ultratechnological world without borders, powers, or inequalities. In other words, these chapters, which focus on a wide array of topics, subjects, and social practices, portray vividly the exacerbation of the dialectics of identity formation between memory and performance , the imaginary and the imagination, subjectivity and citizenship, the world of affects and the realm of praxis. Or, as Gisela Cánepa sustains in regard to the reenactment of Andean festivals in Lima, they display a manifold geopoetics and geopolitics of identity intimately linked to a new kind of performative citizenship in such a way that economic, social, and political rights are obtained through the public performance of cultural difference. ConsuMing CitiZenshiP Today, under the terms imposed by globalization, this dialectic is tensed to its very limits in Latin/o American cities, where 80 percent of the population live, and this is the ultimate reason for the widespread feeling of psychological anxiety and social instability so candidly captured by Geoffrey Kantaris’s snapshots afterword TheDialecticsofIdentityintheLatin/oAmericanGlobalCity abril trigo T young and holmes text-5.indd 199 11/1/10 10:08 AM 200 — abRil tRig0 of personal and collective shipwrecks in Buenos Aires, shipwrecks that can no longer be explained as a byproduct of the postmodern shift. Globalization is in fact a misnomer for a new regime of capital accumulation that combines the exploitation of alienated work and alienating consumption with the industrial production of material goods and the cultural consumption of symbolic goods; a regime in which economy, politics, society, and culture are integrated into a totality that blurs the difference between the material and the symbolic, the base and the superstructure, the real and the ideological—insofar as ideology is embedded in the commodity-sign form that permeates and regulates the system. Consumption, and particularly the consumption of symbolic goods and cultural services, has become the engine of the economy as well as its main indicator. Consequently, consumption has acquired a primordial political and cultural function, because we do not consume objects but messages, symbols, meanings, which tell us how much we are worth and who we are, as Rodolfo Torres and Juan Buriel so clearly demonstrate in their analysis of the symbolic economy of multiculturalism by which the global elites of Los Angeles commodify the culinary practices of a migrant community as ethnic nouvelle cuisine . Consumption, and particularly cultural consumption, works through the production and reproduction, creation, incitation, and manipulation of desires, by constantly pushing the threshold of pleasure, stirring additional consumption , and reinforcing consumerism as a “natural” way of life. Cultural consumption is the core of a politico-libidinal economy in which commodities are produced primarily as signs and signs are produced as commodities: a system in which everything that can be exchanged (objects, services, bodies, sex, information , pleasures) has a symbolic value and consequently can always be translated into the ultimate sign, money. This is the case of the city of Lima, whose cultural and economic development, according to Cánepa, is framed by globalization , insofar as the whole city is transformed into a scenographic, exotic, and touristic object of consumption. In the same way that Lima has become a brand name in the tourist global marketplace, the poverty of the Brazilian Northeast is aestheticized in global Brazilian cinema through a stylish “cosmetics of hunger ” (a reversal of Glauber Rocha’s “aesthetics of hunger”), as Angela Prysthon so aptly proves in her chapter. Undoubtedly, the conflation of the culture of consumerism with the consumption of culture consummates in Latin/o American cities the more insidious , surreptitious, and overwhelming cultural symptom of globalization, exacerbated by the most perverse form of global exploitation: the asynchrony between expectations and possibilities suffered by the locally excluded, condemned to a systematic unevenness between the slow or even regressive pace of young and holmes text-5.indd 200 11/1/10 10:08 AM afteRWoRd — 201 socioeconomic integration and their accelerated ideological integration to the global market of desires and symbolic consumption. This...