The Fantasy of Globalism: The Latin American Neo-Baroque by John V. Waldron (review)

John Waldron’s The Fantasy of Globalism: The Latin American Neo-Baroque advances the concepts of the neo-baroque and magical realism as a means to grapple with contemporary debates about globalization, coloniality, and the Global South in Latin America and the Caribbean. Through an analysis of numerous works by Latin American and Latina/o authors, including Alejo Carpentier, René Marqués, Ana Lydia Vega, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mayra Montero, this book illustrates how the neo-baroque and magical realism function as both modes of representation and literary techniques that allow artists to rearticulate the conventional narratives of colonialism and globalization and unsettle the totalizing gaze upon which they are based.

The book is comprised of six chapters. In chapter one Waldron introduces the reader to key theoretical questions of the gaze. Chapter two reflects upon Haiti’s foundational relation to modernity and globalization through a reading of Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo. Chapter three analyzes various modes of engagement with coloniality in recent Puerto Rican fiction. Chapter four offers an extensive discussion of, and a critical return to, magical realism. Chapter five reads García Márquez’s “La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y su abuela desalmada” as magical realist fiction that works to dislodge the Real of the postcolonial social text. Finally, chapter six returns to Haiti to illustrate an inverted South-to-North perspectival gaze in Tú, la oscuridad.

Of these, Waldron’s discussions on the neo-baroque and magical realism are the most critically relevant and, naturally, obtained with the highest stakes. This book’s key contribution is the elaboration of a psychoanalytic understanding of the notion of the gaze at work within Global North’s neo-colonial and globalizational discourse. Departing from the more Foucauldian, panoptic, understanding of power that we see at work in Laura Mulvey’s notion of scopophilia and Mary Louise Pratt’s “imperial gaze”––an instrumentalized gaze that places primacy on that which is visible––Waldron instead emphasizes the critical significance the “misrecognized, non-representable spot or stain” contained within it. Waldron here enlists the work of Jacques Lacan, Severo Sarduy, and Antonio Viego as the means to fashion a notion of the gaze that foregrounds the sinthomatic element––“the absence, the vacuum, the lack that exists at the very heart of the gaze”––that both conditions and subverts the West’s fantasy of symbolic totalization and mastery (17). Given this dramatic and more compelling understanding to the notion of the gaze, Waldron then enlists the neo-baroque and magical realism as aesthetic practices and narrative techniques that foreground the constitutive lack guiding contemporary neo-liberal discourse.

Waldron, for instance, argues that it is through Sarduy’s critical understanding of this gaze that forces a “reconsideration of the relationship between colonizer and colonized, between Global North and the Global South” from one entrenched long ago as Master and Slave into one of mere “contrapunteo [point/ counterpoint],” a dialectic with “no unifying ideal to strive for” and just like the symbolic order, “moves in an indeterminate direction . . . stretched out over the void” (19). This contrapunteo is indexed as the primary movement of what Waldron calls the baroque’s inherently “bifocal” nature: the attempt through which artists seek to represent opposed and competing visions of the same event at once (22). The baroque, or as he calls it American bifocalism, “emphasizes multiple perspectives that have the effect of blurring or even obliterating boundaries that other ways of thinking . . . would like to keep in place” (23). Magical realism, for its part, relies on this same dialectical movement at work within the gaze, as “one of those effects that narrate, or try to narrate . . . the meeting place of two or more systems and the failure of the symbolic order to fully register the event” (97). In short, through this complete Lacanian overhaul to the notion of the gaze...