Читать книгу A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture - Группа авторов - Страница 12

Sara Castro-Klaren

Codas are by definition short interventions. Codas constitute an attempt to reach a satisfactory, though perhaps always temporary, closing to the musical piece unfolding. A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture did, in the first edition as it does in this second edition, represent a kind of musical composition where pleats fold and unfold into inner and forward creases, tucks, and crevices that seem never ending. Conceived as such, a coda at this moment in history acquires the hue of a paradox, in that it both closes and opens the discussion on Latin American culture writ large.

Great change has occurred in Latin America in the last quarter century. Besides a turn to the left that never took place, people in Brazil and Spanish America along with many Indigenous communities living within the borders of various nation-states have experienced and continue to undergo the transformation brought about by the digital forces in play today. The forces of globalization, of which the digital age is only a part, have been exacerbated during the 2020 pandemic as people have been forced to communicate and interact more intensely via the internet, making use of every platform available for multiple purposes of exchange. Together, the pandemic and the digital transformation have repositioned subjects, fractured borders, reconfigured modes of production and realigned personal, social, and political relations. In this context, the paradoxical valance of a coda, as both summary ending but also opening onto uncharted waters, seems justified as a brief introduction to the new and enlightening chapters that comprise the volume in this second edition.

The last time I wrote in this space, we had just entered the new millennium. I suggested then that one of the best ways to understand the history of the unfolding of Latin America was to keep in sight its colonial genealogy and so, the concept of colonial semiosis, imagined as a deep, permanent, and pervasive exchange of signs across all human practices and experiences, seemed to be a good place to start. The unfettered exchange of signs and systems of signs that colonial situations entail – despite restrictions and hegemonic rules imposed by the colonizers – opens the way for the appearance of new forms, unsuspected places of enunciation, agencies, the formation of new subjects, new modes of communication and, of course, the emergence of new forms of oppression and dominance as well. Colonial semiosis is never separate from struggle, from loss, from resistance, and from appropriation. However, it is precisely in the space of contention, fraught with epistemological violence, where new subjects, voices, and practices arise. In a way, the multiple and divergent processes and experiences of colonial semiosis reside at the gate of modernity for both the colonizer, who takes “back” the experience and goods from the colonies, and the colonized who struggle to muster the forces necessary to resist and maybe even survive as well as lay the foundations of the variegated modernities that we have come to know and grapple with.

The theorization of these deep processes of colonization has led to the development of one of the most influential concepts we have seen arise in the last 30 years. Colonial semiosis has been absorbed and/or subsumed under the “coloniality of power,” a concept first developed by Anibal Quijano in Peru – not in France or England – and later expanded and further theorized by Walter Mignolo. Quijano stresses the conflict of knowledge and structures of power implicit in his term the “coloniality of power” as he developed it from the perspective of a subject living not at center of modernity but rather experiencing and assessing the epistemological hold of colonialism over the people ruled by empires. Writing in his Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (2000), Mignolo explains that in the “classification and reclassification of the planet’s population” – the sine qua non of the coloniality of power – “the concept of culture becomes crucial” (17). As Quijano points out, institutional structures become necessary to manage the classifications, distinctions, and hierarchies that organize the modern/colonial system. A powerful deployment of the knowledges sustains both the established order as well as the institutions that hold up its unassailable legitimacy. Most important within this matrix is the development of an epistemological perspective from which to constantly articulate the meaning and shape of the grid of power from which the production of knowledge is to emerge in order to maintain the coloniality of power in the hands of its managers (Mignolo 2000, 17). It is significant to stress here that the coloniality of power constitutes an analysis carried out outside the boundaries of any given discipline. Its analytic perspective was first put forth by Jose Carlos Mariátegui, a Gramscian intellectual concerned with understanding the clutch of coloniality in postcolonial Peru and, by extension, Latin America. He lived his short life far from the academic centers in the United States or Europe. Mariátegui labored every day immersed in the granular reality of the local and widely open to the possible meaning of world history and the forces that sustained the grip of the colonial domination in the clothing of modernity. However, neither Mariátegui nor Quijano could be said to work outside and beyond the broad and multiple umbrella of Western thinking, precisely because of the pervasive reach of the deep coloniality experienced in Latin America.

Rather, Quijano, Mariátegui, and many other trail-blazing Latin American intellectuals and artists should be thought to work from what Borges, in his “El escritor argentina y la tradicion” (1932, Obras completas 1972), posits as the web of thinking within which or against which, or beyond which, a Latin American intellectual operates. That is to say, the whole of Western tradition with special emphasis on its traditions of critical thinking, or thinking irreverently. Borges begins to make his point by asking: “Cual es la tradicion argentina?” (272). He replies by making a claim not for local traditions alone and not for the classical canon but rather for the whole world’s traditions taken, seen, and transformed from an irreverent perspective. The key is the irreverence as against any kind of orthodoxy. Taking the case of the Irish writers who write in English and in doing so transform the language and the traditions as an example of what he has in mind by “irreverence,” Borges states: “Creo que nuestra tradicion es toda la cultura occidental, y creo tambien que tenemos derecho a esta tradicion, mayor que el que pueden tener los habitants de una u otra nacion occidental . . . Creo que los argentinos, los sudamericanos en general, estamos en una situacion analoga [a la de los irlandeses en relacion a la tradicion inglesa]. Podemos manejar todos los temas europeos, manejarlos sin superticiones, con una irreverencia que puede tener, y ya tiene consecuencias afortunadas” (272–273). In closing the essay, Borges once again claims the whole universe as the patrimonio (heritage) for Latin American intellectuals who should thus not fear the future but rather march forth confidently and try out all topics and modalities irreverently. It is this irreverence practiced at the edge of empire that accounts for the originality and accuracy of the theses involved in the concept of the coloniality of power. To some extent, the first edition of the Companion bears witness to the impact and influence the “coloniality of power” had on many a discipline in the social sciences and humanities.

Given that nothing ever stays the same, or is subject for very long to the same set of influences and innovations, it goes without saying that the tenuously integrated and multifaceted field of “Latin American Studies,” as different from “Latin America” itself, would be, at the same time, open to theoretical developments stemming from various epistemological locations. In fact, “Latin American Studies” comprises many disciplines which more often than not do not dovetail as an inquiry developed under similar or compatible methodologies, perspectives, or set of assumptions. Fractures, contradictions, incoherencies, urgencies, and directions vary enormously from one discipline to the next. Even though one may be able to say that there was/is a linguistic turn or a cultural studies turn in history, or a visual studies turn in anthropology and gender studies appear everywhere, the scholarship in each of those fields of inquiry encompasses questions and answers set within the paradigm of its own. Nevertheless, the institutions that the coloniality of power necessitates to manage knowledge – fellowships, conferences, scholarly journals, university presses, course curricula at university-level instruction, and hiring of teachers and professors—have in the first quarter of this century produced a great deal of scholarship under the aegis of cultural studies, postcolonial studies, queer theory, various Marxist approaches, and postcritical studies.

The second edition of the Blackwell Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture will appear 15 years after it was first conceptualized and assembled. At the moment, the field of Latin American studies, with its attendant large number of disciplines focusing on the history and the present of the region, was not only vigorous and growing; it was thriving. From archaeology to zoology, the number of students enrolled in courses all over the United States seemed to grow every year. Almost any field, but especially those in the humanities and social sciences, had been affected by postmodern theory in the broadest sense of the term, albeit in different ways and with varied results. It goes without saying that the most profound embrace of postmodern theory, beyond departments of French, took place in English departments, where the study of literature began departing from a focus on individual authors and texts under the impact of Marxist cultural studies. The aperture onto culture and more specifically onto the topics of interest to cultural studies – gender identities, feminism, masculinity, binarism, surveillance, spectacle, intersectionality, plasticity, precarity – affected all the humanities, the social sciences, in ways that can only be considered transformative due to the fact that there occurred a radical shift in the set of assumptions, the perspective, and the methods of study that constructed, identified, and analyzed the new objects of study. The revival of Antonio Gramsci along with the legacy of French theorists such as Michael Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray, Michel de Certeau, and Althusser and their readings of Karl Marx cannot be overemphasized in this turn toward culture as text. Concomitant with the rise of postmodern theory and its growth in other influential academic centers such as British universities, the American academy at large, and Australian universities, the last 30 years also witnessed the rise of postcolonial theory.

Perhaps a list of key terms in postcolonial studies (see Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin 1989) could serve here as a quick reminder of some of the topics and perspectives that postcolonial studies put to the fore of the study of societies which, like Latin America, have undergone deep periods of colonization, together with the effects that colonization had on the colonizers’ own cultures. Postcolonial theory placed under an unforgiving critical lens the concept of the nation-state as a critical tool for understanding the transformations of political and cultural communities. We are reminded of how recent the birth of nations is in Europe and also of how the idea of “nation” has served to invent past rootedness and unified traditions in places where social, racial, and political heterogeneity has been the long-standing experience. Along with a fierce critique of “nation,” the nation-state and even subaltern agency, postcolonial studies questioned the neutrality and efficacy of concepts such as syncretism, authenticity, subaltern, transculturation, national language, agency, and modernity. It showed the unscientific and self-interested development of concepts and reporting of event-concepts such as cannibalism, savagery, and backwardness. Examination of the terms of the construction of the “other” and “otherness” yielded illuminating understandings on the processes by which some subjects figured examples of the normal and others were deemed to occupied the space of barbarism. Postcolonial studies critically advanced the notions of ambiguity, decolonial thinking, diaspora, alterity, and agency as analytical tools to deconstruct the philosophies of sovereignty, unified thinking subjects at the helm of the production of modernity. Postcolonial theory produced critical perspectives onto concepts taken for granted such as “national liberation” or wars of national liberation. It questioned the neutrality of all disciplines. History, cartography, archaeology, and even biology were subject to new historiographical understandings that showed how the terms of their emplotment linked them to an unacknowledged relation with the coloniality of power. Biography and autobiography, narrative modes crucial to the study of literature, lost their secure connection to the “the truth” and texts became ever more distant from authentic points of origin that could validate their long-standing privileged situation as both art and testimony.

From the perspective of colonial intellectuals, there occurred a radical critique of the key concepts under whose aegis “colonialism” had been justified and even advanced as either a civilizing mission or modernity. Much of this critique came from Indian diasporic intellectuals now settled in the United States academy, but a good deal had already come and continued to come from Latin American intellectuals who, although not read in the United States, had nevertheless left a mark on Latin American thinking and the critical perspective of Latin Americanism in the United States. Who could fail to recognize the critical thinking of Jose Carlos Mariátegui in the development of the concept of the coloniality of power by Anibal Quijano, later refined and deployed by Walter Mignolo, for instance? While post postcolonial studies maintained specific historical reference – historical events by which one people or nation colonized another – the concept of coloniality of power reached much deeper into the matrix of thinking, showing that the epistemological situation it described and analyzed was not circumscribed in time and space but was rather a worldwide phenomenon that can and indeed did occur anytime, anywhere. The phenomenon identified and understood by the analytics of the coloniality of power transpires both externally and internally and of course that includes developments in the field right now.

Although not necessarily linked to the work that the coloniality of power has performed in the reconceptualization of subjects and perspectives, I think it is important to mention here the appearance of a book like When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History (2018) by the historian Matthew Restall. The title repositions and signifies the events that are ordinarily understood to bear the force necessary for changing the course of history. Before Restall’s book, the narrative of world history had reserved that distinction for the moment when Columbus arrived in this hemisphere, but such narrative posited Columbus as subject, accidentally “discovering” America and excluded from the scene any Indigenous person. In Restall’s version, the focus is on the meeting between the two civilizations, on the duality implicit in the idea of encounter and the exchanges that followed. The book is a gripping and deeply informed rethinking of the meeting of these two civilizations as distilled in the “persons” of these two men at that moment in history.

The critical assessment of the telling of the story of the conquest of Mexico completely overturns what we have been told about the long duration of the events of 1521 in Tenochtitlan. Restall writes against the grain of almost all old and new accounts of the “conquest of Mexico.” He starts by completely dismantling the thus far unassailable testimonial and self-serving narratives of Bernal Diaz del Castillo, as well as the letters written by Cortes. One by one, the book takes apart the epistemological maneuvers necessary for intelligent people to believe in the Bernal Diaz account of both the prowess of the Spanish conquistadors and the pusillanimous nature of the Aztecs together with the rise of the spectacular “descriptions” of human sacrifice. Over and over, Restall puts to the question: why did subsequent historians believe the narrative put forth by Bernal Diaz and Cortes when it clearly violated elementary forms of understanding plausible human behavior? With reference to the riddle of Montezuma’s death, for instance, Restall asks why did the Spanish spend so much energy denying that they had murdered him in light of the fact that they had murdered and bragged about murdering other kings such as Atahuallpa and Cuauhtemoc? The historian asks:

Why then not admit to Montezuma’s murder? Why did Cortes and other survivors from the company deny it, and why did subsequent tellers of the traditional narrative elaborate upon that denial? Indeed, why go as far as Diaz did claiming that “Cortes and all the captains and soldiers wept as though they had lost a father”? That imaginatively implausible detail was repeated by Clavijero in the next century, and by Prescott in the next (believe it you can by McNutt’s sardonic aside). Those authors were not alone in indignantly defending the conquistadors and the denouncing the “monstrous imputation” that Cortes was guilty; why?

Because Montezuma’s murder by the Spaniards undermined the Surrender (story) . . . destroying the Spanish justification for their invasion. And while writers in later centuries were not as invested in the maintenance of Spanish conquest justification, they were still bound by the logic of the traditional narrative. Why would “Spaniards take the life of a king to whom they owed so many benefits” (as one put it)? (Restall, 2018: 227)

Many more inquiries concerning the binding of traditional or rather standing narratives embedded in colonial and modern studies need to be unraveled as they remain tied up by the force of the terms of emplotment and the ideology that undergirds them. We could ask, like Fernando Rosenberg does in his essay, if, for instance, the changes in subject formation we witness in Latin America today are indeed similar to what has been called the phenomenon of the posthuman in the United States, or are these assessments driven by the force of empirical theory?

No history of Latin American culture could have anticipated the deep and irreversible transformation brought about in the last half a century by the arrival of digital modes of production and communication. The introduction of digital formats and possibilities of communication into people’s everyday lives is only comparable to the invention of writing and the domestication of the book when inexpensive printing made the circulation of ideas and modes of feeling widespread and speedy. However, in light of what the pandemic of 2020 has revealed, this comparison is not exactly apt, for the rapidity and expansive reach of digital forms of production, communication, and participation in unprecedented massive sets of interlocutors put the digital age into a category of its own. The salon culture of the nineteenth century that allowed women to play an influential role in the male-dominated world of letters, the democratizing culture of the newspaper and even the scenography of the family in front of the television set pale by comparison with the disruption in consumption patterns, dynamics of subject formation, dislocation of previous communication communities, multiplicity of opening onto realms previously unreachable brought on by the smartphone and all other devices that offer access to the internet. The dynamics of digital culture has affected established fields of knowledge, perception, circulation, sensitivity, and production of the very same culture that it is transforming.

While scholars had previously turned their attention to visual studies with an emphasis on photography, film, and television, new work has begun to appear on the impact that digital forms and formats are having on Latin American culture in general and literature in very specific ways. Several of the new essays in this second edition of the Companion capture both the growth in visual forms of communication as well as the transformative and pervasive presence of digitization of the world. To the surprise of many a reader, it seems that the very vaunted effect of the production of a posthuman culture due to digitization of everyday life cannot be so easily detected in Latin America, as the evidence shows that what appears to be emerging is rather a mediatized sensibility. In the Introduction to their Technology, Literature, and Digital Culture in Latin America: Mediatized Sensibilities in a Globalized Era (2016), Matthew Bush and Tania Gentic write that: “It becomes clear that popular access to ever-growing, ever more intricate, networks in the Southern Hemisphere has not produced a new posthuman subjectivity. Rather we seek to demonstrate that the convergence of literary and technological media formats brings the body and the emotion of the spectator to the fore in new ways, even when using the same convergence of affect and ideology that occurs whenever an imaginary about technology circulates to produce subjects and communities” (1–2). It would seem that the power of digitization has been met with some irreverence and that the results of this encounter remain to be seen although it is ongoing, the impact is palpable in multiple ways, and scholars are paying close attention.

Concomitant with the production of new objects, new circuits of transmission, and consumption, there is of course the appearance of a new public. This public, among other things, is no longer wedded to or dependent on print culture as it once was. Take for example the graphic novel Zé Ninguém by the Brazilian artist Alberto Serrano. The book is made up of photographs of about 150 pieces of street art intervention that Serrano performed on walls, doorways, and underpasses in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The series of photographs are arranged into panels which together stand for a narrative that tells the story of the homeless Zé Ninguém in search of his lost love Ana. Edward King in his “Between Street and Book: Textual Assemblages and Urban Topologies in Graphic Fiction from Brazil” (2018) points out that “Zé Ninguém performs a parallel between the assemblages that connect books to other media and an urban context that is composed of assemblages connecting local actions and events with global flows of images as well as human and non-human forms of agency” (223). King points out that street comics are “read” in nonlinear, partial, and fragmentary ways (224). In contrast with the book, since there is no prescribed order, every reading of the “novel” is not only different but also evanescent. Due to the precarity of graffiti, some works disappear altogether as soon as they are created (224). King observes that “Increasingly, graffiti and street artists produce work to be photographed and posted on line. The demands of online platforms . . . actively shape the work rather than merely providing a neutral vehicle for it. Artists increasingly produce images that are easily ‘shareable’ and ‘tagable’” (227). The Zé Ninguém quest reaches its apogee when his image goes viral and raises his hope that maybe Ana will “see” him. Zé Ninguém announces to his internet followers that “Nossa selfie bombou!” (Our selfie has gone wild!) (227), affirming the global, public connectivity now available.

This new public is capable of decoding and consuming texts in multiple media, in an infinite variety of forms, formats, and materialities. Although this new public itself is variegated, divided by generations, degrees of approximations marked by access to the computer or cell phone, and endowed with different degrees of education and sophistication, there is no question that the smartphone has leveled down all previous differences of class and education in access to information, arts, forms of communication, and the capacity to perform and communicate on line. This fact creates new publics and transforms the existing publics in a constant flow of new appearances. The interpretive capacity of this new public no longer depends on academic training or instruction. The appreciation of new and old aesthetic forms has entered a free fall atmosphere in which multiple interpretations and preferences can hold on the same day in the internet. The history of taste and canon building has entered an unparallel transformative stage in which Indigenous video competes with novels that dwell on the deepest exploration of the abject while mimicking the formats of email communication.

This huge demotic new dimension of mass culture has proven a challenge and stimulus to the well-established forms and institutions of print culture, of which literature was and remains the crown jewel. Literature retains its special capacity to invent credibly the existence of new subjectivities, while at the same time remaining aware of its own discursive status. Literature has been aware of the possibility of its own dissolution throughout the twentieth century as each avant garde wave challenged the terms of representation forged by the previous generation, only to emerge with the power of unthinkable forms and discourses. Digitization is not a challenge only to literature. All the art forms, from music to painting, are subject to the same forces of unlimited reproduction, fragmentation, decomposition, and recomposition brought about by the power of a world without originals. Will the digital age transform literature beyond recognition or will it open new spaces for the unique and indispensable critical capacity of literature?

Perhaps at this juncture we need to say, with Borges in 1930, that we ignore if “la musica sabe desesperar de la musica, y si el marmol del marmol, pero la literatura es un arte que sabe profetizar aquel tiempo en que habra enmudecido, y encarnizarse con la propia virtud, y enamorarse de la propia disolucion y coretjar su fin” (Borges 1972, 205). Reading the several essays here dedicated to moments when literature’s awareness of itself surges into unprecedented new perceptual coordinates, new narrative forms, unimagined dialogues with and fictionalization of other forms of representation such as cinema, photography, and digitization might provide some sense of the directions that literature, and culture at large, might take in Latin America as it faces not just another imperial thrust from the West but rather the self-claim made by the Chinese with regard to their having become a world power on a par with the West. Will Latin America face yet another cycle of extractive capitalism, as the war for water seems to indicate? How will a new ecological awareness and strategy maneuver the economic, political, and cultural influence of China? What role will the West play in postcolonial spaces as it struggles with the East? This volume certainly opens onto uncharted waters even though it carries the weight of more than 500 years of cultural struggle and creation in “Latin America.”