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8 Cultural Studies and the Commodified Public Luis Rafael Sánchez’s La guaracha del Macho Camacho and Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance Testimonio attempts to keep alive the anticolonial ideal of the intellectual as representing the public while remaining engaged in counterpublic critique in the face of the postcolonial crisis of that model. A prominent strain of postcolonial Caribbean literary criticism mirrors this tactic by turning toward popular cultural, especially music, as a more authentic way of giving voice to the nation than the high culture of the modern colonial period. The first part of this chapter discusses that trend in the work of scholars such as Gordon Rohlehr, Juan Flores, Carolyn Cooper, Lisa Sánchez González, and Juan Otero Garabís, literary critics who have increasingly incorporated analysis of popular music into their work as a way of decentering high culture. Yet the idea that aligning with music might allow literary intellectuals to make their work more popular—described by Jean Franco as “the ideal of community persist[ing] among the intelligentsia in the form of nostalgia . . . evoked by music” (211)—is inextricable from the rise of postcoloniality in the region as an increasingly commodified, massified form of domination, as Sylvia Wynter explains in her two-part essay “We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture.” Caribbean criticism and creative writing of this period thus make the turn to popular music to reinvigorate the literary while maintaining a deep suspicion of the culture industry’s influence on the dissemination of culture. I follow discussion of the rise of Caribbean cultural studies with an examination of two novels from the 1970s—Luis Rafael Sánchez’s La guaracha del Macho Camacho and Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance—to show the competing desire for popularity but disdain for commercialism exhibited by critics and novelists alike as they occupy the contradictory space between anticolonialism and postcoloniality. 200 Postcoloniality and the Crisis of the Literary Caribbean Literary Studies and the Cultural Turn The 1970s marks a particularly important moment of shift and flux in the Caribbean, from the possibilities promised by the liberation struggles against modern colonialism to the realities of a U.S.-dominated postcoloniality . Looking at the 1970s also makes visible how this political and social transition has coincided with a cultural one: just as literature was finding its role in the public sphere in question, the decade witnessed the golden age of socially engaged salsa and the rise of reggae in both local Jamaican politics and the imagining of an international black diaspora.1 In a colonial public sphere that privileged high culture, anticolonial writers like José Martí, Aimé Césaire, Claude McKay, and George Lamming sought to inhabit the written word as a cultural weapon in the battles for decolonization. Postcoloniality brought uncertainty about that system of values; the result is an increased movement into cultural studies for Caribbean writers and critics, as popular culture becomes the site for intellectuals to channel the utopian aspirations once invested in literature. The notion that aligning themselves with popular music would allow literary intellectuals to democratize their practice and regain their public role becomes the inspiration for a number of postcolonial literary works that draw on popular music, from dub poetry to novels like Daniel Maximin’s L’isolé soleil, Colin Channer’s Waiting in Vain and Satisfy My Soul, Pedro Antonio Valdéz’s Bachata del ángel caído, Mayra Santos-Febres’s Sirena Selena vestida de pena, and Angie Cruz’s Let It Rain Coffee.2 This trend in literary production is paralleled in the academic rise of Caribbean cultural studies. The field of cultural studies follows the attempts made in testimonio to turn to popular culture as the last authentic repository of Caribbean identity in the face of cultural imperialism, at precisely the moment in which international culture industries have become dominant in the production and circulation of visual and aural forms. Within the context of these competing demands, cultural studies becomes a strategy for addressing the postcolonial crisis of literary authority. Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá’s El entierro de Cortijo, describing the famed Puerto Rican musician’s 1982 funeral, functions to mourn the end of a cultural epoch while brilliantly depicting this crisis: after a group of girls at the funeral call Rubén Blades, the salsero who most directly connects to the intellectual tradition of anticolonialism,3 “un pendejo” (136), the narrator wonders, “is...

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