Critica impura: estudios de cultura y literatura latinoamericana (review)

Modernity's obsession with purity is challenged in this volume starting with the title, "Impure Criticism." It is a collection of essays by an eminent Latin American critic that covers much ground: from colonial times to the present and from one end of the continent to the other. In the context of a "peripheric modernity" the author situates her work in a specific geographical area, where she explores the possible connections between cultural and literary studies, hermeneutics, historiography and politics. Although this sounds rather conventional, the volume is anything but. Moraña's wide thematic sampling is firmly grounded in the diverse and somewhat eclectic theoretical framework that emanated from various brands of cultural studies during the last decades, thus it is a worthy contribution to the on-going debate regarding the role of cultural studies versus—if such is a legitimate position—literary studies. Moraña's take on this conflict is a practical one. She refuses to see a clash. Rather, she believes in an integrative approach that makes use of both elements whereby close readings coupled with theoretical foundations result in an innovative evaluation of the literary and cultural production in Latin America. She succeeds in building an "archeology of knowledge" of sorts by distancing herself from the Eurocentric tradition of certain Latin American critics.

Crítica impura consists of three chapters and a section of "Notes." The first chapter deals with canonical works, both literary and critical, such as "Alboroto y Motín de los Indios de México" by Sigüenza y Góngora, or The Lettered City (1996) by the late critic, Angel Rama, of which Moraña offers alternative readings though a lens of postcolonial and other cultural theories. Chapter 2 is dedicated to the various on-going debates regarding cultural studies. In a roughly chronological manner, Moraña covers an ample range of topics from Colón's enterprise as interpreted four centuries later in the celebrations of the "discovery" in Chicago, to questions of national identity (specifically of the subaltern) and migration in the context of the global/local dichotomy. Her inquiry centers on the causes and effects of colonization and globalization, which she sees as a peculiar new form of cultural colonization. Her discussion of the migrant identity as a manifestation of the Derridian différance is both relevant and original. Moraña addressed these issues in her previous works, such as her edited volume (Nuevas Perspectivas desde/sobre América Latina [2000]) and in her contribution to The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader (2004).

Among the precursors of Latin American cultural studies Antonio Cornejo Polar is, indeed, one of the most frequently mentioned. His coining and development of the concept of "heterogeneity" developed in his later work, Escribir en el aire (1994) is praised by Moraña in Chapter 3 of this volume, dedicated entirely to Cornejo Polar's work. In the last section of the book, simply called "Notes," three shorter texts are included that discuss the work of three distinguished woman authors—novelist Diamela Eltit and critics Susana Roetker and Jean Franco—in whose work violence (of many different types) has been an underlying theme.

Crítica impura is a well-balanced, concise and dense volume of critical texts, which may also be read as Moraña's intellectual auto/bi(blio)graphy of sorts, a valuable addition to the growing corpus of Latin American cultural studies of which literary studies are an organic and necessary constituent.