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Latinamericanism after 9/11
By JOHN BEVERLEY
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5114-6
Chapter One
Latinamericanism after 9/11
Let me begin by recalling the well-known passage in The Philosophy of History where Hegel, writing in 1822, anticipates the future of the United States:
Had the woods of Germany been in existence, the French Revolution would not have occurred. North America will be comparable with Europe only after the immeasurable space which that country presents to its inhabitants shall have been occupied, and the members of the political body shall have begun to be pressed back on each other. North America is still in the condition of having land to begin to cultivate. Only when, as in Europe, the direct increase of agriculture is checked, will the inhabitants, instead of pressing outwards to occupy the fields, press inwards on each other ... and so form a compact system of civil society, and require an organized state.... America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World's History shall reveal itself—perhaps in a contest between North and South America. It is a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe.
Following Hegel, should we believe that the future of Latin America will necessarily involve a conflict with the United States "in the ages that lie before us?" I think that the answer is yes. If September 11, 1973, marked the beginning of a long period of conservative restoration in the Americas, including the United States, it seems clear, as I suggested in my introduction, that Latin America has entered a new period in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, 9/11. If the tonic of the previous period was the integration of Latin America with the United States under the banner of neoliberalism—the idea of the so-called Washington consensus—the new period portends an increasing confrontation between Latin America and North American hegemony, in several areas: cultural, economic, and, perhaps, military too.
That prospect brings to mind Samuel Huntington's idea of the "clash of civilizations." Huntington suggests that new forms of conflict in the world after the Cold War would no longer be structured along the bipolar model of communism versus capitalism, but rather would crystallize along heterogeneous "fault lines" of ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious differences, which generate potentially antagonistic geopolitical blocs: the United States–United Kingdom–British Commonwealth; Europe (a Europe divided between east and west, "new" and "old"); East Asia ("Confucian") and the Indian subcontinent ("Hindu"); sub-Saharan Africa; and the Islamic world in all of its extension and internal complexity, stretching across Asia, Africa, and into Europe and the Americas. In Huntington's taxonomy, the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean are, like Turkey or Russia with respect to Europe, "torn countries." Will they define their future by a symbiotic and dependent relationship with the cultural and economic hegemony of the United States, or can they develop, individually or collectively, as a region or "civilization," their own projects in competition with or in the place of that hegemony?
But, one might ask, what is the point of talking about Latin America as a "civilization," or, for that matter, about Latin America, which is a doubly colonial double misnomer (first, for the name of the Italian navigator, and second, for the idea of "Latinity" promulgated by the French Foreign Office in the nineteenth century to try to displace U.S. and British hegemony)? Shouldn't we be concerned instead with marking the limits of intelligibility of concepts such as "civilization" or "nation?"
My question, however, is a different one. From a sense precisely of these limits, in which the authority of concepts of nation, identity, or civilization—perhaps even of "culture" itself—is brought into question, what would be the form of a new Latinamericanism, capable of confronting U.S. hegemony and expressing an alternative future for the peoples of the Americas? For Hegel, what delayed the coming to fruition of the United States as a nation was the continental frontier, because the expansion of the frontier did not allow the formation of a coherent civil society among its inhabitants. What has delayed, not the confrontation between Latin America and the United States (because this already has a history of more than three hundred years—the "immense space" that Hegel refers to was precisely one of its dimensions), but rather the successful affirmation of Latin America in that confrontation, has been the continuation in Latin America of elements from its colonial past, combined with a postcolonial model, the "liberal" nationalism of the new republics in the nineteenth century, which created stunted, dependent economies, and marginalized or repressed broad sectors of the continent's peoples and cultures.
One of the signs—perhaps minor in the scheme of things, but nevertheless symptomatic—of polarization between the United States and Latin America was the rejection or questioning by significant sectors of the Latin American intelligentsia of trends in academic "theory" such as postmodernism, cultural studies, postcolonial and subaltern studies, and U.S.-style multiculturalism. The fusion of "theory" and Latin American studies collectively constitutes what is usually meant by Latinamericanism, which is seen from the perspective of Latin America itself as a discourse formation involving at best an attempt to impose agendas from the U.S. academy and civil society onto Latin American contexts where they do not fit well, and at worst an outright colonization of Latin American intellectual agendas by forms of theory elaborated in the North American and Ibero-European academy and area studies.
This position can be defined as neo-Arielist, for its opposition to an intellectual "fashion" identified with the United States—Mabel Moraña spoke famously of "el boom del subalterno"—and its affirmation, in response, of the authority of a prior and ongoing tradition of Latin American literary, cultural, and theoretical work. (The reference is, of course, to José Enrique Rodó's Ariel, written at the end of the nineteenth century, when the United States begins to loom large in the affairs of Latin America, where Rodó famously counterposes the figure of Ariel in Shakespeare's Tempest, the poet or "spirit of the air," as representing Latin American civilization, to the "deformed" Caliban, as representing the vulgarity and utilitarianism of U.S. commercial society.) But neo-Arielism is also a form of Latinamericanism, a "Latin American Latinamericanism," to borrow a phrase from Alberto Moreiras. I will return to that question more extensively in chapter 4. Let me just sketch briefly the argument I develop there. The problem with neo-Arielism as a form of Latinamericanism, it seems to me, is not that it is nationalist or anti-Yankee, but rather that it is not so in a sufficiently effective way. It affirms the value of the "Latin American" against the United States, of Spanish or Portuguese against English, and of writing from rather than about Latin America (I allude here as elsewhere in these essays to Nelly Richard's distinction of critical theory written "desde" rather than "sobre Latinoamérica"). But it is not now (nor was it when Rodó wrote Ariel) an adequate response to U.S. cultural and economic hegemony. This is because its vision of the natural resources and human possibilities of Latin America is too limited, stunted by its own dependence on a colonial genealogy it has been unable to overcome. It shares this limitation with dependency theory, for which it serves, in some ways, as a cultural correlative. It is not able to represent and group together all the heterogeneous and multifaceted elements that actually make up the nation; it does not have the capacity to produce a genuinely "national-popular" appeal, to recall Gramsci's concept. But, beyond the nation, it also cannot articulate in a radically new way Latin America as a "civilization," in the sense that Huntington gives to this concept, under conditions of globalization. It produces and reproduces a perpetual division between the culture of the intelligentsia and elites—including liberal or leftist intellectuals—and the popular sectors. It represents, more than the conditions of impoverishment, inequality, and resistance of the popular sectors, the anxiety of intellectuals of bourgeois or middle-class background, generally ethnically European or mestizo, who are threatened with being pushed off the stage of history by, on the one hand, neoliberalism and globalization and, on the other, a heterogeneous and multiform proletarian/popular subject on whose behalf they had pretended to speak.
In this sense, the neo-Arielist position, which continues to be dominant among the cultural and intellectual elites of Latin America, and in the humanities side of the Latin American academy in particular, reproduces the constitutive anxiety of the initial Arielism of Rodó and the modernistas, who manifested a deep, visceral anti–North Americanism together with a disdain for (or fear of) the masses (including the new immigrant population) and mass democracy. It rests on an overestimation, colonial in origin, of the authority of written literature and the literary essay and an essentially Eurocentric sense of the cultural canon and aesthetic "value." While it often tends to celebrate "cultural criticism" over "cultural studies," which is seen as a U.S. phenomenon, it has shown itself curiously incapable of critiquing its own limitations. Instead, it has to defend and reterritorialize these limitations in order to present itself as an alternative to what it sees as "metropolitan" or "populist" academic fashions such as cultural studies. In this sense, although it accuses "studies" of orientalizing the Latin American subject, the neo-Arielist position cannot or does not want to see adequately the orientalization that has operated, and still operates, within the Latin American "lettered city," of which it remains an integral part. (The history of Latin American literature could be written in some ways as the history of the discursive orientalization by Latin American literary intellectuals of large sectors of the population of Latin America.)
The underlying problem has to do with the relation between democracy and cultural identity. What is it that we understand a democratic and egalitarian society to be? Those of us who work in the field of Latin American cultural studies are in one way or another conscious that we face a paradox in what we do. Beyond our differences, we share a desire for cultural democratization and social justice. That desire comes from our connection with an earlier project of the Left in both the United States and Latin America, which wanted to install new forms of politics, ones that were thought to be more capable of representing the popular sectors. Perhaps this aspiration has itself become problematic for some. But if we still accept the principles of cultural democratization and egalitarianism as a goal, today we find ourselves in a situation in which what we do can be complicit with precisely that which we want to resist: the deconstructive force of the market and neoliberal ideology. It was Néstor García Canclini who articulated this paradox the most lucidly, without finding, in my opinion, a way out of it, beyond the slogan—valid but limited—"el consumo sirve para pensar," consumer choice is a way of thinking.
I think that the task that faces the Latinamericanist project today has to begin with the recognition that globalization and neoliberal political economy have done, more effectively than ourselves, the work of cultural democratization and dehierarchization. This explains in part why neoliberalism—in spite of its origins in extreme counterrevolutionary violence—became an ideology in which some sectors of subaltern classes or groups could also see possibilities for themselves. To use a distinction made by Ranajit Guha, unlike British colonial rule in India, neoliberalism has been not only a dominant but also a hegemonic ideology in Latin America. But that hegemony is beginning to crumble.
If I am correct in this prognostication, the neo-Arielist project of finding refuge from the disaggregating forces of globalization and neoliberal "structural adjustment" in a Borgesian reterritorialization of the figure of the critical intellectual, the literary canon, and the notion of aesthetic as opposed to practical reason shows itself as a position that is too defensive and that risks (as I will argue in chapter 5) lending itself to a neoconservative turn, antineoliberal but also suspicious of new forms of agency emerging from the social movements and corresponding new forms of radical or "populist" politics. The crisis of the Latin American Left that coincided with, or led to, neoliberal hegemony in the 1970s and 1980s did not result from a scarcity of brilliant aesthetic, political, economic, historiographic, or pedagogical models of what Latin America has been or could be, but rather from just the opposite: the excessive presence of the intellectual class and its own values and ambitions in the formulation of models of identity, governability, and development.
What neoliberal theory celebrates is the possibility of a heterogeneity of social actors allowed by market society—a play of differences that is not subject, in principle, to the dialectic of the master and the slave, because according to the calculus of rational choice, individuals try to maximize their advantages and minimize their disadvantage in the marketplace, without obliging others to give up their interests, and without necessarily paying attention to the values of both traditional and modern intellectuals. By contrast, in some of its best known variants—for example, the ideal of the New Man championed by Che Guevara—the Left put forward a normative and voluntarist model of what the Latin American populardemocratic subject should be. If the goal of this insistence was to produce a properly socialist modernity, a more complete modernity than the bourgeois "peripheral" modernity inhibited and deformed by neocolonialism and dependent capitalism, then we would have to recognize that the project of the Left in Latin America, including the Cuban Revolution, substituted for socialism as such—that is, a state and society led by and for the popular classes—a development-oriented model of economic and cultural modernization carried out in the name of the "people," but put forward on the whole by technocrats and intellectuals.
If the conflict between capitalism and socialism in the Cold War was essentially a struggle to see which of the two systems could better produce modernity, then history has rendered its verdict on that score: capitalism. To limit the possibilities of socialism simply to the fight to achieve a more complete modernity is to condemn the Left, or what remains of it, to failure in advance. The possibility of fashioning a new Latinamericanism capable of both inspiring and nourishing itself from new forms of political and social practice "from below," so to speak, depends on the possibility of imagining a vision of the socialist project that is not tied to the teleology of modernity, but that, on the other hand, does not imply a simple renunciation of modernity either. That task would involve recovering for the discourse of the Left the space of cultural dehierarchization ceded to the market and to neoliberalism, and now claimed by postmodernist intellectuals in Latin America like Jorge Volpi.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Latinamericanism after 9/11 by JOHN BEVERLEY Copyright © 2011 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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