Comparative Cultural Studies and Latin America

Anxieties of Impotence: Cubans in New York City

159 Anxieties of Impotence: Cubans in New York City Christina Marie Tourino Cuba becomes more difficult to map than to situate. It may stand, for example, for the gaps that currently exist geographically, politically, and culturally between Cubas and Cubans. —Ricardo Ortiz, “Reinaldo Arenas’ Last Writing” Industrialization, globalization, and U.S. economic and foreign policy have set unprecedented numbers of bodies in motion across national borders. Along with other dependent nations, tribes, and continents, Latin America has seen many of its citizens migrate, immigrate, and go into exile. As a result of such movements over the last century and a half, Latin Americans are dispersed in such a way that related but different cultural groups spring up in many parts of the world, many of them in the United States. These groups continue to evolve as increasingly complicated flows of subjects and their capital make ceaseless round trips in which “home” and “abroad” become harder and harder to name. For critics of Latin American literatures, this state of affairs irreversibly complicates comparative literature projects. Comparative literature as a discipline has changed dramatically from its earliest moments in the nineteenth century, when its project was to search for literary influences and universal themes in European literatures of the Middle Ages. In the early twentieth century, comparative literature began to be invested in the definition of national characteristics. Projects compared European literatures across national and linguistic boundaries in an attempt both to unearth universal themes and to register national and linguistic specificities (see Bassnett 24). More recently, in addition to Europe, the United States and its literature entered the purview of legitimate comparative study. The complete upheaval of literary study in the 1960s and 1970s has resulted in an interest in postcolonial literatures , which has, in turn, demanded models of comparative literature that work across national boundaries within the “Americas” hemispherically considered. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, groundbreaking projects in this newly develop- Christina Marie Tourino 160 ing comparative field of “inter-American literature” or the “literature of the Americas” compared texts across an Anglo/Latin divide (often including Canada as well). Studies comparing the works of William Faulkner with those of Gabriel García Márquez, or Henry James and Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis exemplified this approach (Fitz; Pérez-Firmat; Zamora; Saldívar; Chevigny; Laguardia). Such studies sometimes undertook comparisons of modernist Latin American texts with “ethnic” texts from the United States in order to locate ways in which both groups challenged U.S. political and cultural colonialism. Bilingual and bicultural critics have called into question the practice of pitting a text from “North America” against one from “Latin America” in ways that have continued usefully to pressure the field of comparative literature of the Americas according to the increasingly complicated inter-and intranational cultural migrations described above. In “We are Not the World,” George Yúdice warns that even the most well-intentioned attempts on the part of U.S. intellectuals to “include” the “diverse” cultural productions of Latin America are restricted by uneven networks of dissemination and reception. That is, U.S. enterprises and universities mediate the flow of Latin American cultural products into the U.S. in ways that have no counterpart in Latin America. As a result , Yúdice explains, elite Mexican writers such as Carlos Fuentes are recruited as “representative” of underrepresented “Mexico,” although Fuentes has very little to do with Mexico’s nonhegemonic groups, and cannot be considered analogous to ethnic writers in the U.S. (Yúdice, 203–204). Recent studies have been more sensitive to the complications involved in comparing nonhegemonic writings of the Americas, and have even broken out of binary comparisons altogether. Still, each of these approaches depends upon the coherence of “national” or “ethnic” groups as the basis for comparison. In this essay, I would like to take seriously the increasingly complicated inter- and intranational cultural migrations described above, and consider another model for comparative literature of the Americas that jettisons “different” national or ethnic categories as a prerequisite altogether. In his article “Latin, Latino, American,” Román de la Campa argues that “global pressures foreshadow a new cartography of the Americas” (376) in which the category “Latinos” blurs almost beyond recognition the North/South divide as it is construed by American studies and Latin American studies. “Latino,” according to de la Campa, does have a coherent referent, “an ontological plurality that comes from deriving an identity from more than one American imaginary, an aspect that...