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Nepantla: Views from South 3.3 (2002) 585-600



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Francine Masiello The Art of Transition: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. 352 pp. Review by Patrick Dove

Francine Masiello's The Art of Transition: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis offers a broad reflection on contemporary cultural production in Argentina and Chile, with particular attention to ways in which literature confronts problems associated with these two countries' recent transitions from dictatorships to free market–based democracies. Masiello's discussion presupposes that the transitions of the 1980s perpetuated—and in some respects deepened—the traumatic wounds suffered by Southern Cone societies in the 1970s under military dictatorship. Transition is experienced as crisis on at least two counts. On the one hand, these postdictatorship democracies have failed to pursue justice for the crimes committed under dictatorship, opting instead for the pragmatic mode of reconciliation evoked by Chilean president Patricio Aylwin's axiomatic phrase, “justicia en la medida de lo posible.” Memories of repression and terror thus exist in an antagonistic relation with de facto and de jure impunity for military criminals. On the other hand, the total identification of democracy with a neoliberal model during the transition is seen by many as the ultimate political legitimation of a project initiated a decade earlier at gunpoint. The enforcement of free-market structural adjustments during the transition has been viewed as a principle cause of increasing social fragmentation, as well as the confirmation that previous generations' dreams of social justice have been destroyed. For many, the transition is associated with a profound and sweeping loss of sense, a loss that casts its shadow on the very possibility of shared meaning.

Masiello's book should also be read in the context of recent academic debates about the status of “literature” today. In recent years there has been an increasing sentiment in Latin Americanist circles that literature [End Page 585] no longer occupies the privileged position it held for previous generations. The decline of literature as a cultural exemplar corresponds in large part with recent and dramatic transformations of the world system. I propose that two related hypotheses can help to clarify what is at stake in this transformation of literature's social role. First, beginning with the end of colonial rule in Latin America, literature has always constituted a privileged form of cultural production operating, whether knowingly or not, under the paradigm of the modern nation-state. A certain understanding of “literature” provides the cultural medium through which interpellation, or the formation of national subjects who identify their lot with the state, is carried out. And so, with the tendential eclipse of the nation-state as first principle of sociopolitical organization, “literature” finds itself stripped of its former necessity.1 Second and likewise, the aesthetic framework within which literature has traditionally been placed—as presentation of the beautiful to the faculty of judgment, and as picking up where the imagination can go no further—is felt to be inadequate for confronting the social and political realities facing Latin American societies in recent decades. Not only does the refined medium of literary language fail to correspond with the lived experience of the majority of Latin Americans but, what is even worse, literary aesthetics is suspected of participating in processes of exploitation and domination by converting structures of violence into aesthetic experiences available for the touristic enjoyment of consumers.2 The “crisis” to which Masiello refers is thus a rupture that implicates both sociopolitical and aesthetico-epistemological continuity during the transition.

As an intervention in both the sociopolitical and the academic context just described, The Art of Transition attempts to revitalize literary studies in Latin Americanist academic circles by arguing that the aesthetic can provide the ethical and political orientation for the formation of more inclusive, more reflective, and more just democratic societies in the Southern Cone. In this sense, Masiello's project should not be identified too hastily with other attempts to “save” literature through appeals to universal values (e.g., Sarlo 1994). Her argument is not...

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