The "New Latin Americanism," or the End of Regionalist Thinking?

The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies By Alberto Moreiras. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001.

The Ends of Literature: The Latin American "Boom" in the Neoliberal Marketplace By Brett Levinson. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001.

The Other Side of the Popular: Neoliberalism and Subalternity in Latin America, by Gareth Williams. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002.

Any thinking of emancipation must always be a thinking without cartography.

—Federico Galende

At a moment in which latin american studies is experiencing a renaissance that has recently been proclaimed as the "new Latin Americanism,"¹ the new books by Alberto Moreiras, Brett Levinson, and Gareth Williams stand out as unique interventions. It could be argued that the sustained theoretical and self-reflective analysis they offer is genuinely new to the interdisciplinary tradition of Latin Americanism. However, to the extent that these authors question the epistemological premises of Latin Americanism, especially as it has been practiced in the United States in the past 15 years, what they demonstrate is not a new kind of Latin Americanism, but rather the need for a kind of thinking that is no longer based on regionalism or cartography. All three authors stress the importance of rejecting Latin Americanist identity thinking, both in its national-regionalist forms and as a multiculturalist study-of-the-other. While their books consider diverse themes and problems, I will explore them in terms of key concerns that they share, including translation as a model for understanding the other, subalternity and the limits of hegemony, and the political potential of the literary.

The three books begin with the problem of endings: Moreiras's and Levinson's books bear evidence of this in their titles ("Exhaustion," "Ends"), and the first section of Williams's book is called "Closure." This sense of an ending relates to the exhaustion of some of the primary paradigms around which the object "Latin America" was traditionally organized. Levinson's book focuses on the end of literature's efficacy as a hegemonic apparatus, and its coincidence with the end of state sovereignty in the era of late global capitalism. Williams adds to this list the end of the figure of the people as a reliable trope for emancipatory politics. In addition to engaging with the above themes, Moreiras interrogates the largely empiricist assumptions underlying Latin Americanism, or the study of Latin America as an object.

With literature, the nation, and "the people" having lost their privileged status, Latin Americanism has recently been forced to search for other ways to define its singularity. The result has been an almost universal emphasis on Latin American difference: the realities of Latin America are asserted to be infinitely heterogeneous and fundamentally different from other parts of the world. In addition to declaring it unique with respect to other regional realities, Latin American experience is also opposed to the supposedly universalizing claims of literature and, more recently, critical theory. Latin American studies developed as a form of pointing to the heterogeneous real by insisting on popular forms of expression, lived experience, and the diversity and immediacy of voice. Walter Mignolo's assertion that Latin America or "the Third World is not only an area to be studied but a place (or places) from which to speak" can be seen as exemplary of this approach (quoted in Moreiras, 134).

Moreiras notes that the recent interest in heterogeneity has indirectly reopened the question of "radical alterity" (131). Radical alterity is difference that cannot be subsumed into hegemonic constructions of identity and that cannot be known per se. It goes beyond what can be understood and communicated, and thereby includes what a diversity based on identity excludes, manifesting as its ultimate consequence a conception of total emancipation, rather than one that would be based on the legitimation of a self, which always implies the...