Articles

Introduction to Comparative Cultural Studies and Latin America
By Sophia A. McCLENNEN and Earl E. FITZ

Gene H. BELL-VILLADA
The Canon is el Boom, et. al., or the Hispanic Difference
Abstract: In his article, Gene H. Bell-Villada's "The Canon is el Boom, et. al., or the Hispanic Difference," argues that the rich, globally acclaimed, foundational yet contestatory prose literature produced in Latin America allows teachers and scholars of Spanish to teach what is essentially the "canon" via work that is still fresh, yet historically provocative. Bell-Villada argues that in a time of reconsidering the importance of literature in literature programs, programs of Spanish language and culture should continue to teach this rich cultural legacy. The average U. S. student's condescension toward Spanish and Latin American culture can be transformed to respect after an encounter with writers like García Márquez, Borges, and similar writers of acclaim and when students encounter Nobel Prize winning authors in a course on Latin America their understanding of the region moves beyond the "Taco Bell" stereotype. Focusing courses on the "great works" of literature also allows students to rediscover the pleasure in the text making course material accessible and appealing. Further, Bell-Villada suggests that these texts allow us to include material on such topics as U.S. imperialism, race issues, political oppression, and world-system structures of power. For these reasons alone, literature is essential to a project dedicated to teaching students the ways that Hispanic culture is both different and intellectually valuable.

Gordon BROTHERSTON and Lúcia de SÁ
First Peoples of the Americas and Their Literature
Abstract: In their paper, "First Peoples of the Americas and Their Literature," Gordon Brotherston and Lúcia de Sá turn their attention to the indigenous literature of the Americas. They point out that concerted attempts to edit, translate, and publish the main examples or "classics" of Native American literature began little more than a century ago. Since that time, more than a dozen major cosmogonies have appeared, some of them in editions, which seriously attempt to trace back to pre-Cortesian antecedents. Outlining key classics and the ways that these texts have been disseminated, Brotherston and Sá elaborate on how this rich tradition has shaped later literary projects in the Americas. Brotherston and Sá indicate that these central indigenous texts play a major role in the literary development of Latin America and abroad, but, because such literature has often been devalued, scholars are often not aware of these influences and connections. Focusing on the example of the Popul vuh, they trace the multiple ways that this foundational text has shaped American literature. They illustrate how the Popul vuh, "the Bible of Latin America," has found ever-greater resonance in modern Latin American literature. In their conclusion, they argue that comparative work on the literature of the Americas must include focus on the legacy of native texts. The comparative approach alerts scholars to beliefs and paradigms shared by cosmogonies and classics from all over the American continent, establishing thereby a formal and philosophical premise that sets all subsequent American literature in due perspective.

Elizabeth COONROD MARTÍNEZ
The Latin American Innovative Novel of the 1920s: A Comparative Reassessment
Abstract: In her paper, "The Latin American Innovative Novel of the 1920s: A Comparative Reassessment," Elizabeth Coonrod Martínez examines four early twentieth-century  novels from four different Latin American countries. Coonrod Martínez pays particular attention to their innovation and rebellious breaking with tradition in the attempt to create new narrative. The paper includes comparisons of Arqueles Vela, Roberto Arlt, Martín Adán, and Pablo Palacio, and their novels of the 1920s, with works by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, Upton Sinclair, Ernest Hemingway, and Ezra Pound. In the paper, Coonrod Martínez also compares these early novels to celebrated novels of the Latin American "Boom" in order to point out that the latter authors were influenced by territory gained by earlier generations which, however, were not celebrated internationally as the Boom authors were. Coonrod Martínez suggests that re-evaluations of these early texts and comparison of them to U.S. and European innovators during the same era will help demonstrate gains made by Latin American artists in the early twentieth century.

Román DE LA CAMPA
Latin American Studies: Literary, Cultural, and Comparative Theory
Abstract: In "Latin American Studies: Literary, Cultural, and Comparative Theory," Román de la Campa explores the post-1989 era of Latin American literary studies, particularly the way in which theoretical production has responded to the collapse of left-wing state projects and the growing influence of market forces in academia. De la Campa suggests that in this context it becomes even more important to study the different ways in which national and regional imaginaries continue to shape Latin American literary studies in both Latin America and the United States. He asks whether we are witnessing the onset of new paradigms better able to comprehend or articulate the field in its ever-increasing complexity or a turn toward projects that are both more hermetic in their regional or national scope of application, as well as more immanent in their capacity to absorb difference in the abstract. De la Campa contends that the shifting grounds for Latin American postmodernism are particularly illustrative of how the post-1989 era converges on Latin American literary studies. As an example, he surveys the postcolonial turn, particularly as it pertains to two differing readings of testimonio, one largely articulated in the United States through the work of John Beverley and subaltern post-symbolic aesthetics, the other in Chile through the work of Nelly Richard's cultural critique of the dictatorship and post-dictatorship. According to de la Campa the current state of Latin American literary and cultural studies calls for a new comparativism willing to recognize a growing field of contradictory differences among nations, regions, and scholars.

Earl E. FITZ
Spanish American and Brazilian Literature in Inter-American Perspective: The Comparative Approach
Abstract: In his paper, "Spanish American and Brazilian Literature in Inter-American Perspective: The Comparative Approach," Earl E. Fitz argues that although Latin American literature has gained international acceptance and acclaim steadily since the 1960s, it is still underrepresented in the primary research journals of comparative literature. This situation is both troubling and puzzling: troubling because Latin American literature has much to contribute to discussions of world literature and puzzling because only the most narrow and nationalistic of reactionaries would deny that Latin American literature has produced some of our most beautiful and powerful works of literary art. By any criteria, Latin American literature is one of the world's most important area literatures, one that deserves a more central place in the scholarly deliberation of the discipline's leading journals. Fitz offers three suggestions for the future of comparative studies of Latin America. First, Latin Americanists should attempt to include the exceedingly rich cultural production of Brazil in critical studies, thereby comparing texts written in more than one language. Second, Latin Americanists should learn to think more in terms of "inter-American" literature, the study (inherently comparative in nature) of the literatures and cultures of North, Central, and South America. Third, Latin Americanists should provide studies of Spanish American literature and culture that stress the crucial differences that exist between the various cultures of Spanish America.

Roberto GONZÁLEZ ECHEVARRÍA
Latin American and Comparative Literature
Abstract: In his paper, "Latin American and Comparative Literature," Roberto González Echevarría asks whether comparative literature, a literary discipline dedicated to the proposition that linguistic boundaries must be transcended, can overcome the "cultural arrogance" of the "Eurocentrism" that he believes pervades it currently. González Echevarría argues that if it is to endure, comparative literature will have to undergo "a truly pitiless redefinition," one that effectively displaces "the hegemonic powers of nineteenth-century Europe" and that Latin American literature, by the nature of its historical development on the margins of these "hegemonic" texts and traditions, could -- and should -- play a central role in this rehabilitation. González Echevarría's paper includes a discussion of how Carpentier's The Lost Steps can serve as an example of how Latin American literature reads the canon and how reading those readings can lead to new insights into both canonical works and those presently excluded. González Echevarría argues that Carpentier's text, for example, ought to be considered required reading for both Latin Americanists and students of comparative literature  -- especially those seeking to make Spanish and Portuguese their primary languages -- and he makes a clear and convincing case for using the literatures of Brazil and Spanish America as the mechanisms by which comparative literature can be both redefined and revitalized.

Sophia A. McCLENNEN
Comparative Literature and Latin American Studies: From Disarticulation to Dialogue
Abstract: In her paper, "Comparative Literature and Latin American Studies: From Disarticulation to Dialogue," Sophia A. McClennen surveys the profound changes that characterize Latin American cultural studies today. McClennen reads these changes in light of recent transformations in the fields of comparative literature and cultural studies and suggests that scholars in these fields are now in a position to embark on productive dialogue and exchange. Before such interaction takes place, however, McClennen cautions, we should recall why there has historically been little intellectual exchange between comparatists and scholars of Latin American literature. Barriers to exchange between these areas have been: the traditional US-Eurocentric bias of comparative literature, the history of culturally
colonizing Latin America, comparative literature's repudiation of inter-Spanish American comparative work, and the different tendencies in critical approaches and methods used by comparative literature scholars versus their counterparts in Latin American Studies. If scholars remain mindful of this history, she argues, there are several key areas of study that would be strengthened and enriched by greater collaboration between comparatists and Latin Americanists and McClennen outlines five key areas of collaborative research.

Alberto MOREIRAS
The Villain at the Center: Infrapolitical Borges
Abstract: "The Villain at the Center: Infrapolitical Borges," Alberto Moreiras revisits the Argentinian ideology of "emancipation of the fatherland" on the basis of a re-reading of Jorge Luis Borges's short-story "The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero." Moreiras begins by referring to Paul de Man’s comment that Borges’s essays were like PMLA essays. Moreiras suggests that, concerning essays, the more deceptive the more honest and less devious they are; and, therefore, the less devious the more devious. He then considers this notion as he surveys recent work on "The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero" by Josefina Ludmer, Enrique Pezzoni, and Raúl Antelo. Moreiras proposes an alternative political reading of Borges as a writer of the infrapolitical, that is, a writer of poetic finitude against ideology where a reading of "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero" shows us the excess of the popular, a movement towards historical truth that coincides with the movement of the poetic drive towards its furthest limit, towards the truth of the social in its overwhelming immanence. Thus, Borges’s literature, in its apathetic practice, is an infrapolitical literature against the biopolitical rapture of politics.

Julio ORTEGA
Towards a Map of the Current Critical Debate about Latin American Cultural Studies
Abstract: In his paper, "Towards a Map of the Current Critical Debate about Latin American Cultural Studies," Julio Ortega surveys the shifting disciplinary, critical, and methodological paradigms used to study Latin American culture in both the United States and Latin America. Describing the post-theoretical period as a moment when grand analytical models are abandoned in favor of microanalyses, Ortega sees great potential in this new paradigm shift. In his paper, Ortega pays particular attention to the ways that the field of cultural studies has emerged and transformed in Latin American academic inquiry and he considers the disavowal of master critical models to open up spaces for dialogue and critical exchange. Nevertheless, the practice of cultural studies in Latin America and the U.S. has not always indicated emancipatory politics or liberating critical readings. In order for cultural study to be heterogeneous, fluid and dialogic, scholarly work must take care to negotiate the prevailing discourses of power. Ultimately, Ortega points to the emerging field of Trans-Atlantic Studies as an exemplary case of new critical practice and he describes the field as a dynamic and open-ended area of study that does not require a traditional canon or disciplinary configuration.

Christina Marie TOURINO
Anxieties of Impotence: Cuban Americas in New York City
Abstract: In her paper, "Anxieties of Impotence: Cuban Americas in New York City, " Christina Marie Tourino seeks a basis for comparison between Latin American literatures and Latino literatures of the United States. Such groups have rarely been compared in the past because they are considered part of the same literary "family." However, Tourino argues that owing to the flows of capital driven by global pressures, literatures between and among Latin Americans and Latinos hail from such culturally heterogeneous sites and are made over by so many relocations that they do call for comparative projects. Instead of comparing texts across national or ethnic lines, then, Tourino's project attends to texts that spring from related but different sorts of departures, dislocations, languages, and constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and class, then seeks what "family" resemblance still obtains. As a test case, Tourino looks at two texts that descend directly from Cuba and are produced in New York: Oscar Hijuelos's The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989) and Reinaldo Arenas's El asalto (1990). What Tourino discovers is that, despite radical differences in the class, politics, sexuality, language, and political disenfranchisement of the text's protagonists (and even their authors), both of these texts posit a fantasy of excessive masculinity as the source of an all-male family that reproduces itself without women -- a fantasy whose freneticism points to a masculine anxiety over its own emptiness that seems to be performed in related ways in much Latino and Latin American literature.

Mario J. VALDÉS
A Historical Account of Difference: A Comparative History of the Literary Cultures of Latin America
Abstract: In his article "A Historical Account of Difference: A Comparative History of the Literary Cultures of Latin America," Mario J. Valdés addresses the well-recognized limitations of literary history as historical research. Valdés outlines the theoretical thinking that has guided the editors of  The Oxford Comparative History of Latin American Literary Cultures to plan, organize, and complete the first history of literary culture of Latin America. The project is comparative, recognizing the radical diversity of the continent while at the same time it is an open-ended history that informs but does not attempt to provide a totalizing account of more than five hundred years of cultural development among the heterogeneous entities that make up Latin America. Valdés begins by considering the paradox of literary history, he then suggests ways that literary history can be shaped by the work of Michel Foucault, and he proposes a framework for a hermeneutics of literary history. Valdés also considers the challenges that face the literary historian whose work now includes cultural history. All of these considerations are then placed within the context of an effort to create a literary and cultural history of Latin America.

Bibliography

Bibliography of Scholarship in Comparative Latin American Culture and Literature
Sophia A. McCLENNEN, Comp.

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