Transnational Crossings and the Development of Latin American Cultural Studies

TRANSNATIONAL CROSSINGS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES MARC ZIMMERMAN University ofIllinois at Chicago Introduction on a Semi-Personal Note In the 1970s, in a visit to the Rómulo Gallegos Center in Caracas, I had the opportunity to talk to various important researchers (Venezuelans and Southern Cone political exiles) about the current state and future of Latin American literary studies. Ofcourse we were all sure that literary studies had to be informed by and related to a broader field ofsocial experience. But what, I asked, would be the immediate field of relationship? Surely not economics or class struggle, except ifeconomics and class determinations were seen not as a real but ideological or, as we would say today, discursive, field. Because I argued that, literature, if anything, was tied to linguistic and rhetorical practices that were part of lived culture, that literature should then be seen in function of the cultural field which mediated between given works and literary systems and the larger generalized field ofsocial being. In fact, I suggested, ifyou really wanted to study literature or any cultural phenomenon correctly you had to have some theoretical frame for viewing the cultural system as a whole. And having such a theory would mean giving up residual elitisms with respect to popular culture and everyday life. Now, several decades later, after countless revolutions in critical practice and theory, but also after the collapse ofthe meta-theory we thought could firmly ground our efforts, it seems we and many like us are doing what we then proposed. We are studying literary works in cultural context; and many of us have leaped from literature to an effort to map the cultural field itself in Latin American and broader contexts. Many of us have left literature behind and have even had the hubris to challenge anthropologists and sociologists in their supposed know-how with respect to cultural and broader systems; some of us have turned "against literature" in our search for revolutionary or subaltern oppositionality in the age of globalization. And yet some of us are turned off the by cultural, subaltern and globalization studies hegemons, their politics ofcitation, their grant-grabbing and© 2000-2001 NUEVO TEXTO CRITICO Vol. XIII-XIV No. 25/28 268______________________________________________MARC ZIMMERMAN Conference hopping and hogging, their virtually ubiquitous appearance in every major publication and discussion in BuenosAires, London, Calcutta or Belaggio— all the careerist maneuvers we see among those who show offtheir superior analytical skills, who parade their virtuoso command ofthe latest critical discourses, and yet still claim quite "post-marxistly" to speak for "the people"—or against the discursive limits which prevent their articulation. And ofcourse this is not to say that hegemons ofthe counter-hegemonic discourse are not "hegemonic" for good reasons, or that those who resent or envy them wouldn't be guilty ofsimilarpeccadilloes if not worse—if they had a chance. And what are we to make of these words—and their author? All this said, what are we to make ofour evolving field? Where have we been and where are we going? What follows is my take on some ofthe issues involved. And why not start with such ubiquitous concerns as the fear of Euro-centrism and the search for "nuestra América." 1. Name-dropping as Cultural Practice Many Latin American Studies specialists worry much today about the imposition ofEuropeanizing and occidental models with respect to our field. Some ofus call it globalization; a persistent minority still prefers the term cultural imperialism . But I concur with Ernesto Dussell and others who argue that the so-called third world is implicit in European modernism's development, and that third world elements are always restructuring modernism, including radical, oppositional critique Band even modernism's transnationalized and globalized monster-offspring. All this might be cause for celebration; but postcolonial and subaltern deconstructions suggest that even a thousand Latin Americans producing general theory might not make that theory any less Euro-centric or colonial. Such questions and ironies mark this paper. At issue is the evolution of the literary/cultural left and its identification with counter-hegemonic forms ofMarxism in the 1960s to cultural studies and now, in our globalized present, to a possible...