Remapping Culture

Author(s): Jean Franco

Source: Latin American Literary Review , Jul. - Dec., 1992, Vol. 20, No. 40 (Jul. - Dec.,
1992), pp. 38-40
Published by: Latin American Literary Review

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20119624

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 REMAPPING CULTURE

JEAN FRANCO

Until recently Latin American culture was identified predominantly with

literary culture. To study literature was to elevate "autonomous" works of verbal
art. In this essay, I shall discuss the emergence of a new field of cultural studies
and the changes in contemporary culture and thinking that help account for its
emergence.
What formerly underpinned literary criticism as a discipline was the
tradition of close readings practiced by Anglo-American New Criticism, Latin
American stylistics, and French "explication de texte." But while these methods
encouraged attentive reading, they ignored historical scholarship and the mate
rial conditions that accounted for the varying evaluation and canonization of
texts at specific historical periods. They also ignored the aesthetic ideologies that
underpinned literary innovations, and the different audiences, implied or real, to
which works are addressed. Even more crucial given the present postmodern
condition, traditional literary criticism was unable to deal with what Walter
Benjamin has called "the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction"?
the transformation of works of art that occurs when the aura of uniqueness and
originality is destroyed by transposition to other media, translation into other
languages, recycling, and pastiche.
Cultural criticism, on the other hand, not only engages with texts formerly
considered "nonliterary" but is, of necessity, interdisciplinary. For instance, in
her book Signs, Songs andMemory in the Andes, Regina Harrison, whose "field"
is literature, studies Quechua oral culture and particularly the problem of
translation, using a methodology drawn from philology, anthropology, linguis
tics, literary criticism, and history, and based on field work as well as archival
study. In referring to his book Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native
Caribbean 1492-1797, Peter Hulme describes it as a study of "colonial dis
course,"?that is, the production of a non-European world through "a discourse
that imbricated sets of questions and assumptions, methods of procedure and
analysis, and kinds of writing and imagery, normally separated out into the
discrete areas of military strategy, political order, social reform, imaginative
literature, personal memoir and so on." Like many contemporary studies,
Hulme's work spills over linguistic boundaries to focus on English and Hispanic

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Remapping Culture 39

texts of discovery and conquest.

Of course, this cross-disciplinary work is not confined to literary studies.
Political science, anthropology, and history now draw on the resources of
literary criticism. As early as the 1950s, Kenneth Burke had seen the potential
for describing political events in terms of dramatic structure and tropes. But at
that time, Burke was writing against the current for in the 1950's disciplines were
establishing boundaries. Science, with its clearly defined object of study and
goals, was the model for all academic research: indeed, with the advent of
structuralism even literature succumbed to the prevailing scientific model.
Underwritten by the science of linguistics, terms like narratology began to
proliferate.
But this disciplinary consolidation came to seem crippling to scholars in
both social sciences and the humanities. Thus, following Hayden White's
pioneering Metahistory, many historians became interested in the way history
had traditionally been narrated, and hence in textual criticism. Material once
thought suspect?folktales, popular poetry, literary texts, religious beliefs and
practices?enlarged the idea of the historical document and focused attention on
areas formerly outside the realm of historical inquiry. Much the same can be said
of anthropology. James Clifford's The Predicament of Culture drew attention,
among other things, to the powerful connection between surrealism and ethnog
raphy in France. Anthropology has become self-reflexive, examining the very
procedures and discourses on which it was founded.
Indeed, disciplines are using common methodologies more and more. In
Latin America, research teams now often include political scientists, anthro
pologists, and literary critics working on contemporary cultural and political
phenomena. For instance, the study of the cultural consequences of privatization
recently undertaken by Nestor Garcia Canclini seems to call for the expertise of
economists, political and social scientists, and art critics, not to mention scholars
with a comparative perspective. In the Southern Cone, the focus on cultural
studies began under the military governments and was pioneered by independent
research organizations such as CENECA in Chile, CEBRAP in Brazil, CEDES
in Argentina, and FLACSO. It was the FLACSO journal, Cabeza de Goliat, that
took up the debate on postmodernism, and the journal of the Federaci?n
Latinoamericana de Asociaciones de Facultades de Comunicaci?n Social, Di?
logos de la comunicaci?n, that has consistently explored new forms of reception
and subjectivity. These tendencies clearly indicate that topics such as media
politics, the globalization of culture, and modernization cannot be studied within
a purely national framework, and call for increasing transnational and interdis
ciplinary collaboration.
Whereas poststructuralism has resulted in new readings of the past, what
goes by the name of postmodern theory?for instance, the writings of Baudrillard
and Jameson?has signally failed to provide a satisfactory theory of the global.
In large part this is because, despite "global culture," our knowledge is not yet
global; in any case, the global is inflected differently in every locality, and new

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40 Latin American Literary Review

cultural configurations are constantly being formed. Not surprisingly, Latin

American critics have claimed that in any case Latin America was postmodern
avant la lettre, since its culture has always been formed from a complex
transaction between other cultures and regional specificities. The hybrid, copy,
pastiche that have always been features of Latin American writing are now
commonplaces of contemporary culture, which is engaged in a perpetual
recycling of a new global repertoire.
At the same time, new and more threatening aspects of contemporary
culture go unnoticed. Two examples that come to mind are the uneasy relation
ship between pluralism and censorship, and the role of culture in democratiza
tion. The two problems are indeed closely connected, since market forms of
pluralism?the expression of different opinions, tolerance of different life
styles?censor out the unpopular, marginal, and merely unpleasant.
Culture both here and in Latin America confronts the problem of media and
general publics intolerant of innovation and unconventional behavior. This is
why a performance artist such as the Mexican Jesusa Rodr?guez sees her greatest
antagonist in Televisa, which lists words that cannot be uttered, situations that
cannot be represented, and blacklists those who do not conform. Of course we
cannot equate this kind of self-censorship with the old-style repression of free
speech in dictatorships. But neither should it be ignored. Contemporary empha
sis on the accessible, popular, and global leaves little room for nuanced criticism,
and, as I have already argued, it tends to restore the power of the center by
reproducing stereotypes on an international scale. As nations lose some of their
autonomy, nationalism is on the rise; now that all races are represented in culture,
racial hatred comes to the fore. And all this happening at a time when literature
seems to have ceded its critical position or become marginalized.
Culture is still a powerful force that acts against facile globalization and the
reassertion of hierarchy, though we cannot expect it will always assume the
traditionally valorized forms of poetry and the novel. In the age of mechanical
reproduction people increasingly turn to public performance, to forms of
interaction outside the scope of the small screen. These cultural interactions,
which range from the mime on the street to the public at a rock concert, from
student storytellers on university campuses in Colombia to Mexico's satiric
cabarets of the Teatro de la Capilla, are perhaps no more than random samples.
Sadly, they are the minor spaces that remain open, even as the larger public
sphere of political discussion shrinks. More positively, they suggest the potential
of new political and cultural communities.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

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