Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Ilan Stavans's Latino USA: A Cartoon History (Of a Cosmopolitan Intellectual)

2006; CIESPAL; Volume: 35; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/29742098

2327-4247

Paul Allatson,

Asian American and Pacific Histories

Ideology in the Disney Comic.ii That 1971 study targeted the Disney comic as paradigmatic of U.S. cultural imperialism, a mass-cultural form capable of corrupting Third World youth with nefarious "American" capitalist and bourgeois individualist values.Stavans dismisses this argument as simplistic, tired, and tied to a bygone era of left-right Latin American antagonisms.Rather, Stavans insists, the worldwide popularity of the comic medium confirms that "Our global culture is not about exclusion and isolation, but about cosmopolitanism, which, etymologically derives from the Greek terms cosmos and polis, a planetary city" (xi).This appeal to an all-inclusive cosmopolitanism underwrites Stavans's desire for his cartoon history "to represent Hispanic civilization as a fiesta of types, archetypes, and stereotypes," and thus to avoid "an official, impartial tone, embracing instead the rhythms of carnival" (xv). Concomitant with Stavans's ambitions to generate a highly playful historical text,Latino USA is also committed to elucidating the author's own personal history.As Stavans puts it, "History, of course, is a kaleidoscope where nothing is absolute.The human past and present are far more malleable than the future.This, in short, is my own account, a pastiche of angles I have made my own" (xv).Indeed, Mexican-born and raised Stavans consistently