Culturas imperiales. Experiencia y representación en América, Asia y África (review)

This book collects the papers presented at the international colloquium "Rethinking Imperialism" ("Repensando el imperialismo"), held at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires in August 2000. As usually happens with multi-authored books, this is a very interesting but uneven collection of articles by a select cast of researchers in their respected fields, not just in terms of quality but in its organizing principles. Interdisciplinary by definition, the collection includes articles by a sociologist (Renato Ortiz), a geographer (James Ryan), three cultural critics (Walter Mignolo, Ileana Rodríguez and Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones), and seven historians who specialize in architecture (Zeynep Çelik), the arts (Andrea Giunta), imperialism (John MacKenzie), Mexico (Gilbert Joseph), Argentina (Ricardo Salvatore), ideas (Oscar Terán), and the Dominican Republic (Lauren Derby). This explains why the book ultimately displays such a strong historical perspective. Among the 12 articles, there are two theoretically oriented (by Ortiz and Mignolo), and three of a more panoramic nature (by Joseph, Salvatore, and Terán), while the rest is devoted to specific case studies (Rodríguez, Çelik, Quiñones, Giunta, McKenzie, Ryan, and Derby). Besides the two theoretical articles, seven deal with Latin America and only three with Africa and Asia in a significant way. Despite the intrinsic quality of the articles, written by recognized scholars in their respective fields, I feel there is an apparent unbalance in the overall planning and organization of the book either in terms of disciplinary approaches, geographic areas or historical periods. The book is almost entirely focused on Latin America but there is not a single article that deals with the colonial period, which reveals a perhaps unintended endorsement of the postcolonial notion of empire so ardently criticized by Latin American post-colonialists. I appreciate the intention to provide a larger and more comprehensive perspective on the global experiences of modern imperialism, but the inclusion of three articles on Africa and Asia fails to do so except in a perfunctory way.

However, despite those organization flaws, the book's explicit objective to "reestablish the study of imperialism in the agenda of local historians, cultural critics and social scientists," fulfills a necessity that goes well beyond strictly academic shortcomings. As Salvatore states in his introduction, "Imperialism is absent from the inquiries and preoccupations of Argentinean researchers during the 1980s and 1990s, as if Argentina, which obtained its political and administrative independence a long time ago, has freed herself of the anxieties and ambiguities of the postcolonial condition once its position in the neoliberal American System has been acknowledged. But this is not so and we need to realize it. A careful reading of the popular lexicon, commercial ads, marketing techniques, economic advising, or education policies makes immediately visible the unresolved tension of the Argentinean postcolonial condition. There is an ambivalence regarding our identity and autonomy in all these areas that is directly related to the concept of coloniality" (32). This insistence on the historical continuity of imperial experience in contemporary "informal empire," so aptly captured by the concept of "coloniality" coined by Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano and widely used by Latin American postcolonial critics, is very laudable indeed. As laudable is to bring this debate to the Argentinean (and Latin American) academic milieu, sometimes crassly lured by theoretical novelties and global trappings. Unfortunately, this highly political historical mapping which links globalization to previous colonial and imperial regimes, loses part of its political and epistemological sharpness when trims down contemporary imperial experience to the anxieties and ambivalences that affect people's identity, or in other words, to imperialism's psycho-cultural effects. This exclusive focusing on the textual representation of imperial designs, or the cognitive devices of symbolic domination, so widespread in cultural and postcolonial studies, prioritizes the discursive realm (in Foucaultian terms) over historical social materiality, and as a result the last one is subsumed to the cultural and taken for granted as a...