Latin Americanism (review)

Román de la Campa. Latin Americanism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 223 pp.

In this engaging volume, Román de la Campa, professor of Latin American and comparative literature at SUNY–Stony Brook, develops a critical overview of the state of Latin American(ist) literary and cultural criticism today. Underlying de la Campa's vigorous essays is his assessment that the analysis of transculturation “will entail an introduction of its central historical dimensions couched in an argument in favor of its strategic potential for contemporary cultural reception and for an understanding of Latin American modernity that is often flattened or erased by postmodern metanarrative critiques” (65). By the latter, de la Campa is referring, mostly and generally, to metropolitan deconstructionist and postcolonial criticism.

The opening chapter, “Latin Americanism and the Turns beyond Modernity,” asks a very precise question to which the book will often return: “How, in short, have the poststructuralist allegories of reading been deployed in the study of Latin American literature?” (17). Here the works of Roberto González Echavarría, Carlos Alonso, Djelal Kadir, Santiago Colás, and Alberto Moreiras are briefly discussed. Although he recognizes their many and important contributions to the field, de la Campa criticizes all of these works for their attempt to reduce the history of Latin American modernity to an ahistorical master-code in which the “literary as the matrix of all writing and hence all historical articulation” reigns supreme and unchallenged. He also suggests that cultural, postcolonial, transcultural, and feminist studies, though not without their own limitations, hold greater promise for the field.

Chapter 2, “Postmodernism and Revolution: Borges, Che, and Other Slippages,” is an interesting yet inconclusive reading of literary texts on Latin American revolutions to which I will return. Using contemporary analysis of Borges as the epitome of Latin American deconstruction at work, de la Campa attempts to reverse their textualizing thrust by bringing revolutionary politics to textuality in a series of readings of works by Eduardo Galeano, Julio Cortázar, and Joan Didion, among others.

Chapter 3, “Of Borders, Artists, and Transculturation: Toward a Politics of Transmodern Performances,” explores “performative approaches to hibridity” (x) by contrasting the limitations of metropolitan and Latin American theories (the former represented by Judith Butler and Homi Bhabha, the latter by Fernando Ortiz, Angel Rama, and Néstor García Canclini). The concept of transmodernity (“an uncertain in between modern and postmodern that also carries colonial traces” [64]) is briefly deployed to suggest that its historical complexity is “flattened when traditional First World metanarrative critiques [such as deconstruction] approach Latin America” (64).

Chapter 4, “Mimicry and the Uncanny in Caribbean Discourse,” perhaps the strongest one in the book, analyzes Antonio Benítez Rojo's theoretical work The Repeating Island and Edouard Glissant's Caribbean Discourse. De la Campa claims that Benítez Rojo's volume is limited by its poststructural insistence on reducing history to a series of tropes “against which close readings of a few chosen texts stand for all of history as a distant text” (97–100). In contrast, Edouard Glissant's book is praised for its much more careful attention to the Caribbean's historical specificity manifested in such notions as “opacity,” “otherness,” and “diversion,” and in topics such as orality and memory, which, in their connection with living communities and bodies, overcome the literary limitations of the deconstructionist conception of writing.

Chapter 5, “The Lettered City: Power and Writing in Latin America,” reads Rama's work as containing “an early, but distinct and important, reading of the difficulties inherent in poststructural theorizing” (125). De la Campa claims that La ciudad letrada, although based on the Foucauldian notion of discourse, is able to escape the textualizing distortions to which this notion has lent itself. This occurs in Rama's book mainly through his attention to “transcultural orality” as a way of rethinking dominant cultural hierarchies and categories.

Chapter 6, “Globalization, Neoliberalism, and Cultural Studies,” closes the book by alluding to what Martín Hopenhayn has called...