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The Neoconservative Turn in Latin American Literary and Cultural Criticism

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 17; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13569320801950690

1469-9575

John Beverley,

Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Mario Roberto Morales, La articulación de las diferencias, o el síndrome de Maximón. Los discursos literarios y políticos del debate interétnico en Guatemala (Guatemala City: FLACSO, 1998; second edition: Guatemala: Consucultura, 2002). Mabel Moraña, “Borges y yo. Primera reflexión sobre ‘El etnógrafo’,” first published in Heterotropías. Narrativas de identidad y alteridad latinoamericana, Carlos Jaurégui and Juan Pablo Dabove eds. (Pittsburgh: IILI, 2003); I cite here the version in Mabel Moraña, Crítica impura (Madrid: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2004): 103–122. Beatriz Sarlo, Tiempo pasado. Cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2005). The collection edited by Emil Volek, Latin America Writes Back: Postmodernity in the Periphery (New York and London: Routledge, 2002) includes a number of papers that represent aspects of what I am calling the neoconservative turn, including Volek's own. 2 While the neoconservative/neoliberal distinction is important for understanding the special character and circumstances of the Latin American “turn,” which is explicitly anti-neoliberal and anti-postmodernist, one should not make too much of it either. Neoconservatism is an ideology especially directed at the state and the state ideological apparatuses, including education. But neoliberalism, despite its pretense of being anti-statist, also requires the state, and even, as in the case of Chile under Pinochet, a “strong” state, among other things to impose privatization and structural adjustment policies on sometimes reluctant populations and to protect private property. From a conservative or reactionary point of view, the ideal would be neoliberal hegemony over economic policy and neoconservative hegemony, with a strong emphasis on cultural nationalism, over cultural institutions, including the school system. In this sense, as in many others, the Pinochet dictatorship has served as a model for subsequent right-wing regimes like Thatcher's or G. W. Bush's. On the relationship between neoliberalism and neoconservatism, chapter 3, “The Neoliberal State,” of David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), is useful. 3 Though there was a strong anti-Stalinist, and frequently Trotskyist strain among the New York Intellectuals, there was also a shift towards a neoconservative position on the part of some figures associated with the US Communist Party, like the historian Eugene Genovese, who shared with the New York Intellectuals a visceral dislike of the New Left and ‘60s counter-culture. 4 David Stoll, Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (Boulder: Westview, 1999). 5 As a novelist and essayist in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Morales was closely identified with the Guatemalan revolutionary left; his first book of literary criticism, La ideología de la lucha armada, was a study of the political poetry of the armed struggle in Central America. He is also the author of an autobiographical novel, or what he calls a “testinovela,” Los que se fueron por la libre, based on his own experiences as a cadre in a small revolutionary group that was eventually expelled from the UNRG, the main coordinating organization of the armed struggle in Guatemala. 6 Angel Rama, Transculturación narrativa en America Latina (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1982). 7 Morales (42) provides the estimate that between 100 and 200 thousand indigenous people were killed in Guatemala between 1982 and 1984, and another million displaced from their homes. 8 Mabel Moraña, “El boom del subalterno,” Revista de Crítica Cultural 14 (1997): 48–53. The earlier essay charges subaltern studies with a critical neo-exoticism that represents the Latin American subject as pre-theoretical, marginal, and “calibanesque” in relation to metropolitan standards. 9 Moraña seems unaware in her appeal to totality here, which I take as a code word for Marxism, that the great central section of volume 1 of Capital, on the Struggle over the Working Day, is composed precisely out of many “small” testimonial histories of workers, strikes, legal appeals, etc. That is because Marx believed that the historical movement of capital, which is his theoretical object, is itself the product of subaltern identity, will, and agency, not something completely separate from those things. Labor “makes” capital, in other words. 10 See, for example, Erin Graff-Zivin ed., Reading Otherwise. The Ethics of Latin American Literary Criticism (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007). 11 One might take issue with the “sino” in Moraña's phrase, however, because there is nothing simple about inverting binary essentialisms, particularly if you are at the bottom end of the pair. 12 Beatriz Sarlo, “Los estudios culturales en la encrucijada valorativa,” Revista de Critica Cultural 15 (1997): 32-38. 13 This is not simply for Sarlo a question of formal elaboration versus unmediated experience, because Sarlo is also harsh about the hyper-formalized film Los rubios by Albertina Carri, which attempts to reconstruct the director's memory of her parents, who were disappeared when she was three years old during the Proceso. Sarlo sees Carri's film as a trafficking in “postmemory”–Marianne Hirsch's idea of the reconstruction by children of survivors of traumatic events like the Holocaust of the memory of that event in their own lives, even though they did not experience it directly themselves. Sarlo sees postmemory (and Carri's film) as a fundamentally narcissistic construct: e.g., “La inflación teórica de la posmemoria se reduce así en un almacén de banalidades personales legitimadas por los nuevos derechos de la subjetividad” [The theoretical inflation of post-memory is thus reduced to a storehouse of personal banalities legitimated by the new rights of subjectivity] (134). She seems unaware, however, that since Carri was herself directly affected by the Proceso as a child, as she depicts in the film, Los rubios is not strictly speaking a postmemory text, but a kind of testimonio. I owe this insight to Ana Forcinito. 14 See for example her op-ed column on Kirchner in La Nacion, 22 June, 2006. My understanding is that Sarlo did not support the recent campaign of Kirchner's wife to succeed him in the presidency. 15 Beatriz Sarlo, “Contra la mimesis; izquierda cultural. izquierda política,” Revista de Crítica Cultural 20 (2000): 22–23. 16 A similar sense of displacement of an older left intelligentsia seems to be involved in the decisions of many prominent left-wing Venezuelan intellectuals, like Elisabeth Burgos or Teodoro Petkoff, to identify publicly with the opposition to Chávez, or of many writers and artists formerly associated with the Sandinistas to leave the party and join the electoral front organized by Sergio Ramírez. Similar cases could be found in most Latin American countries today. 17 See e.g. Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from the South 1/3 (2000): 533–80. 18 Apropos the armed struggle, Sarlo notes pointedly in her op-ed column attacking Kirchner in La Nación mentioned in an earlier note: “Muchos sabemos por experiencia que se necesitaron años para romper con esas convicciones… No simplemente para dejarlas atrás porque fueron derrotadas, sino porque significaron una equivocación. [Many of us know from experience that years are necessary to break with those convictions…Not simply to leave them behind because they were defeated, but because they signify a mistake]” There is much that could be and needs to be said about the armed struggle, but it seems to me one thing to recognize the sometimes tragically absurd illusions, errors, and utopian fantasies that accompanied this or that form of armed struggle, and another to simply write it off as a vast historical mistake: “una equivocación.” I think it would be more accurate to say that the strategy of armed struggle was defeated in what turned out to be, especially with the weakening and eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, an unequal combat with a much stronger enemy, but that it might have been possible to win–indeed, there were at least two not inconsequential victories, Cuba and Nicaragua, several near misses, including Guatemala and El Salvador, and of course the ongoing civil war in Colombia. The new Latin American left, however pragmatically oriented it may be in its present incarnation–and I am certainly not opposed to pragmatism–needs to recover in a positive way the heritage of both the armed struggle and Allende's “democratic route to socialism,” if only because they represented an important phase of modern Latin American history, rather than simply renounce those experiences as youthful errors… 19 See, e.g., Arturo Ardao, Genesis de la idea y nombre de America Latina (Caracas: CELARG, 1993); and Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2005). 20 Ernesto Laclau, “Deriva populista y centroizquierda latinoamericana,” www.aporrea.org/ideologia/a26046.html 21 It is interesting to note in that regard that in spsite of their own stated distaste for identity politics and testimonio, there is a “biographical” or personal dimension in each of these three critics, including Sarlo. 22 See her recent Territory, Authority, Rights. From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 23 n early twentieth century Marxism, there was a nagging debate over whether a right wing epistemology–the usual culprits were Kantianism or positivism–could co-exist with left wing politics. The question of Borges might be seen as the reverse of this: how does a left wing or nominalist epistemology co-exist with a right wing or conservative politics? That is of course also a question about the nature of the literary Baroque in both Spain and Latin America.