The Other Side of the Popular: Neoliberalism and Subalternity in Latin America (review)

Discontent with neoliberalism is unremarkable among liberal scholars of Latin America today. What Gareth Williams tries to do in this cultural studies volume is reject the very framework of liberal opposition to neoliberalism. He implores us to think outside the box of imprudent pluralisms and bland democratization discourses by taking us through a series of arguments and literary commentaries regarding the notion and place of the popular in the Latin American contemporary imaginary.

Early on the categories of nationalism and transnationalism are compared and judged, with the latter clearly gaining Williams's vote for what is most characteristic of the current state of affairs in the Americas. The state and nation are deemed rather passé and consequently one question addressed is how to account for the pesky and pedestrian resilience of nationalist ideas and programs. Or maybe it is just a matter of cultural affairs in what we used to call countries—places like Mexico, Peru, El Salvador, Argentina, and Chile—locations that serve as vehicles in the author's expedition into the present and future of social and state formations. These national and transnational journeys correspond, by happy coincidence, with those from modernity to postmodernity. And so we are off on a helter-skelter review of literature, film, and popular culture that have caught the author's recent attention.

If you are lagging a bit on what Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz said about transculturation and Argentine-Mexican philosopher-anthropologist Néstor García Canclini has written about cultural hybridity, Williams will bring you au courant with a dizzying array of conceptual acrobatics and examples from political science, literary criticism, anthropology, philosophy, and cultural studies throughout the Americas. There is talk of talk of writing about consumers of citizenship in Mexico City, and Salvadoran immigrants in MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, and pishtacos in the Peruvian highlands, all in order to trace, among other things, "the underlying problems of intellectual practice after the hegemonic crisis of national fictive ethnicity in Latin America" (p. 92).

For example, Williams finds much of value in Néstor García Canclini's influential ideas regarding popular classes and popular cultures (many of which originated with French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu); of greater importance, he also goes on to make the often avoided understanding that García Canclini is still operating within the circumscribed parameters of capitalist, market-based social criticism. In other words, for Williams, the liberal critique of neoliberalism is not just ill-conceived because it is boring and bland; old liberalism, too, remains flawed because it is so limited in what it considers socially possible.

Yet indicative of the book's select audience and turgid tone is the fact that the author seems to assume you already know about the waves of Salvadorans who arrived in Los Angeles beginning in the early 1980s, that you are already conversant in the ramifications of Bourdieu's influence on García Canclini's oeuvre, and that the pishtaco is already part of your vocabulary (if it is not, you might consult Mary Weismantel's recent volume on these white embodiments of mythical suckers-of-Indian-women's blood).

Word play about people trumps the formalities of people in this book, and although it has some lovely insights and repeated shows of conceptual wizardry—especially when provoking us to think of the "perhaps" of utopian wannabe realities—in the end, unless you go in for this sort of thing, I would skip lightly over some exaggerated passages and instead try to learn from Williams's insistence that we not settle for becoming merely more global liberals.

The book can be entertaining and provocative in accenting fragments of novels and health statistics and gee-whiz apostatizing, but at least this anthropologist got lost repeatedly in deciphering...