Latin American Identity in Online Cultural Production by Claire Taylor and Thea Pitman (review)

In their most recent book publication, Latin American Identity in Online Cultural Production, British scholars Claire Taylor (University of Liverpool) and Thea Pitman (University of Leeds) further extend their pioneering research on the practices and customs (usos y costumbres) of cyberspace and e-culture in Latin America, focusing this time on diverse cultural artifacts located on the Internet (hypermedia fictions, net.art, web-based performances, interactive blogs, films, and databases, to name only a few) that all demonstrate the intention to reflect upon, re-articulate, and re-elaborate Latin American cultural identity vis-à-vis the advance of neoliberalism, ergo the project of globalization.

Their ground-breaking publication on the theme, Latin American Cyberculture and Cyberliterature (Liverpool UP, 2007) constituted the first scholarly attempt in English to theoretically elucidate contemporary expressions of e-culture and e-literatures in cyberspace, produced across a Latin American continent now completely immersed in the globalization venture, hence submerged into the cultural logic of late capitalism (Jameson). In Latin American Identity in Online Cultural Production, the authors demonstrate that even in the midst of the current neoliberal/globalized moment, identity continues to be a main topic of reflection for both scholars and artists living in this region.

The resilient reflection and re-elaboration of cultural identity that has marked the history and literature of Latin America—a process that in Carlos Monsiváis’s view is always located “a medio camino entre lo moderno y lo tradicional”—, acquires new layers of complexity when it takes place in the electronic/digital realm of cyberspace, as Taylor and Pitman’s publication attests. The authors assert that contemporary expressions of digital media practices in Latin America often display “contestatory positioning with respect to Western hegemonic discourses as they circulate online” (1).

The book makes use of cross-disciplinary epistemological approaches to develop the two main axes of the debate: theorizations of digital culture (or Internet studies) in the Anglophone academy, and contemporary debates on Latin American cultural identity and culture (or Latin Americanism, as identified in UK debates). In light of their findings and vis-à-vis the most current debates in Internet studies and in cultural studies of Latin America, Taylor and Pitman propose the concept of “postregional,” which transcends the notion of “postnational” that emerged in Hispanic studies (from within the Anglo academy) in the last decade; in their view, a “postregional” approach that goes beyond the discussion of national identities can allow scholars and readers/viewers to better understand how Latin American identity is currently reconfigured and contested online.

The first chapter traces the initial mapping out of Latin American territory since colonial times, taking these maps as a founding discourse of Latin American identity, and now encompassing with current mapping of identities online; it analyzes e-works produced by three Latin American and Latin@ digital media artists: Uruguayan net.artist Brian Mckern’s netart latino database (2000-2005), US-Salvadoran Eduardo Navas’s animation Plástico_2002_upDate (2002), and US-Colombian Praba Pilar’s Cyberlabia project (2005). The chapter provides evidence of net.art remapping initiatives that question prevalent assumptions about Latin American identity based on the symbolic and strategic space that this land occupies in today’s mapping of power.

The second chapter draws on Angel Rama’s concept of the “lettered city” and analyzes the problematized notion of urban space as it appears in new digital art forms; it explores Argentine digital artist and scholar Marina Zerbarini’s Tejido de memoria (2003), which brings to the viewer’s/spectator’s attention issues of gender domination and politics. Here, Taylor and Pitman also analyze the Colombian project Hiperbarrio, which gathers digital communities in working-class barrios of Medellín, the second largest city in the country.

The third chapter takes as its starting point the notion of Macondo—a central mythical locus in the Latin American literary landscape, founded by García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967)—and traces its persistence...