Bea Yap Martinez

Latin American
Literature
PART IV
UNCERTAIN MODERNITIES

Shifting Hegemonies: The Cultural Politics of Empire

Fernando Degiovanni
I.

Introduction

The turn of the century was a period of deep political and cultural
transformations in Latin America.
o

Expansion policies of the U.S. (consolidated in the first Pan-American

conference in (1889-90)

Annexation of Texas

Acquisition of half of the Mexican territory as a result of the

Mexican-American War (1846-8)

Interventions of William Walker in Central America (1853-60)

French invasion of Mexico (1861-5)

Declaration of the Spanish-American war (1898) in which Spain lost

its last possessions overseas by ceding Puerto Rico to the U.S. and
renouncing all claim to Cuba

The rise of the U.S. to the status of world power had a profound impact on the
way the Spanish-speaking countries imagined their place and mission in the
new imperial order.
o

On the one hand: Growing interest of the U.S. in its neighboring

territories to the south compelled Latin American politicians and
intellectuals to formulate a new discourse of continental identity.

On the other hand: For Spain, the end of a long era of transatlantic
influence fostered a debate about the nations modernity and its role in
international affairs.

Furthermore: The consolidation of U.S. imperialism dramatically

transformed the manner in which Spain and its former colonies
redefined their relationship after nearly 100 years of strong political

and cultural disagreements over the consequence of the conquest and

colonization.

The need to curb the power of the U.S. led some institutions and writers on
both sides of the Atlantic to develop a unifying view of the Hispanic world by
reconciling their differences within alternative historical and cultural
references. There was a need to create a cultural identity.
o

Spain attempted to use their common legacy in the Spanish language

(referred to as Hispanism) to unify the cultural identity of their
territories. The Spanish language was seen as the most powerful
weapon of cultural cooptation that Spain could use to reaffirm its
central position in world affairs at a moment of political decadence but
this was very controversial and brought up even more issues.

This version of Hispanism was eventually assimilated by institutions

and individuals to the extent that it became a primary component of
the narrative of cultural identity in the first decades of the 20 th century.
Led to the emergence of Spanish-American literature.

II. French Latin Americanism and Spanish Americanism

Initially, the first U.S. expansionalist policies towards Mexico and Central
America did not immediately raise red flags since it was Europe that was still
seen as a threat.
o

Spain, for instance, attempted several military ventures to strengthen

their hold on their colonies. Spain was in fact more concerned by the
attention France was giving their colonies.

France created a pan-Latin policy in order to justify their intervention

in the territories that once belonged to Spain and Portugal. France
wanted to do this by incorporating those territories that shared a
common religious and linguistic background with them. This led to the
development of the idea of a Latin America rather than a Spanish
America. Frances intervention, however, was disastrous and shortlived.

Spain responded to Frances attempts by organizing a series of cultural

campaigns, particularly the opening of the Royal Spanish Academy in
their territories but that too was ultimately not successful.

III.

Pan-Americanism and Cultural Monumentalism

The U.S. launched their pan-American movement, wanting to wrest control of

Cuba and Puerto Rico.

To repudiate this, the Royal Spanish Academy launched the Anthology of

Spanish-American poets, which they referred to as a monument erected to
the glory of our common tongue. This, however, did not strengthen their
hold on their territories. Instead, it once more claimed a privileged position
for Spain as the guardian of its most perdurable legacy: the shared language
and the literary production that emerged from it.

Spain also tried to establish that, as a product of an extensive linguistic

empire, the literature of Spanish America belonged to Spains cultural
patrimony.

Menendez Pelayo, who published the Anthology, wanted to transform the

Spanish-American canon by focusing particularly on the place of colonial
literature in the continents literary history. In order to establish a link
between the old world to the new world, Pelayo included prerevolutionary texts into the Anthology which were previously considered
unimportant. Texts like Alfonso de Ercillas La Araucana and Pedro de Onas
El Arauco domado became central pieces of the Spanish-American patrimony.
This marked the beginning of a new way of looking disciplinarily and
historically at the Hispanic past. This was to be viewed upon as a new token
of the spirit of the Hispano-America brotherhood.

However, Pelayo could not be consistent. The idea of repositioning colonial

texts in order to promote neo-imperial ideas consequently required that he
play down the importance of the Spanish-American poems of the
revolutionary period as crucial texts in the continental canon since they were
full of animosity towards Spain.

IV.

The End of the Empire and the Rise of Spanish-Americanism Literature as a Field of
Study

The Spanish-American War allowed Hispanism to become an even stronger

cultural discourse in the disputes over continental identity.

The defeat of Spain and the intervention of Cuba and Puerto Rico by the U.S.
helped pave the way for the development of new strategies of symbolic
negotiation across the Atlantic.

Hispanism, however, still thrived despite having to find a less tutelary

approach to spreading its ideological tenets in Spanish America.
o

The establishment of the Center for Historical Studies created by the

Spanish government

Members of the Center also engaged in an active campaign to spread

their philosophical and methodological principles by actively traveling
and working in academic positions abroad.

Argentina played a decisive role in the epistemological and institutional

repositioning of Hispanism. Spanish agencies paid increasing attention to
Argentina as a critical platform for its project.
o

(-) Argentina was an especially challenging place for the development

of Hispanism since the country has a Francophile elite (often seen as
having a patronizing view of Spain.)

(-) Also challenging because they had a substantial majority of Italian

immigrants whose language was often regarded as the main source of
corruption for the local Spanish).

(+) It had been the strongest bastion of anti-Pan-Americanism in the

continent.

(+) It had a wealthy Spanish immigrant elite eager to establish

transatlantic links.

There were aggressive cultural campaigns in Argentina that led to the

countrys rapid assimilation to Hispanism. In fact, Argentina became the
preferred destination for Spanish intellectuals in lecture tours and academic
visits to Spanish America.
o

Menendez Pidals series of lecture tours was a fundamental step

towards the final institutionalization of Hispanism as a scientific
discourse outside of Spain.

The presence of the Center for Historical Studies director in Buenas

Aires was also a strategic move to sponsor the development of
Hispanophilic academic and social centers overseas.

The foundation of the Institute of Philology at the University of Buenos

Aures un 1923 legitimized the political and cultural role of the old
creole elite in a country deeply populated by non-Spanish immigrants.
The creation of the Institute was an alibi intended to make Spains
cultural program more acceptable to the local public without
fundamentally altering its ideological principles.

If the Institute was appointed and regulated from Madrid, it

would be seen as an imperialistic act that the common
sentiment will reject

Hispanism assured its hegemonic place in Spanish America

through the training of several generations of researchers and
teachers.

It also provided an academic context for the development of the

field of Spanish-American literature as a by-product of
Hispanism in the continent.

Henriquez Urena defended the unity of Spanish by:

By reacting against the intellectuals who promoted the

development of national autonomous tongues, and
consequently argued in favor of a continental cultural production
within the established confines of the language.

By supporting a limited literary autonomy for Spanish-American

literature. He focused on the literary problem as a linguistic
problem residing in the idea of continuing and perfecting (rather
than rupturing and questioning) the Spanish tradition.

By reacting against the idea that their literary history must be

written as trying to express and perfect that expression in the
Spanish language. This implies that prior to the arrival of Spain
in the continent no historical construction of a canon can be
done. It also excluded the production of subaltern groups.

V.

Challenging Institutionalized Philology

The institutionalization of Hispano-centric perspective on language and

literature was questioned by two individuals who would later become

central figures in the reassessment of the relationship between knowledge

and power in the continent.
o

Jose Carlos Mariategui (Peru)

He wanted the University to protect and conserve the culture

of Peru.

He also questioned the surviving colonialism implicit in their

intellectual projects and called for radical cultural reform.

He also favored works of authors who used the language of the

streets as a postcolonial approach to language and literature.

Jorge L. Borges

He challenged the claim that dialects corrupt Spanish and

Spanish-American literature as emphasized by the Academy
for many decades.

We do not suffer from dialects, although we o indeed suffer

from dialectological institutes. These organizations thrive on
condemning every successive slang they invent.

Both intellectuals showed the practices of political and academic

legitimization and they took the first step towards an analysis of the role of
scholarly discourses in the construction of cultural identities in the
continent. They set the basis for the critique of disciplinary epistemologies
that would develop in the second half of the century.

Narratives and Deep Histories: Freyre, Arguedas, Roa Bastos, Rulfo

Adriana Michele Campos Johnson
I. Introduction

Mario Vargas Llosa said that Peru is nothing but an artificial gathering of
men from different languages, customs and traditions whose only common
denominator was having been condemned by history to live together without
knowing or loving each other.

Despite the many projects for political and social unity, abiding fault lines still
cross Peru as well as many of the other postcolonial states of Latin America.
These fault lines take the shape of ethnic, linguistic, material, social, political
and other differences. Sometimes they can run so deep that they put into
question the viability of the project of the nation-state.
o

Can a nation be created out of men (and women) with nothing in

common but an unhappy accident of history?

Can the very political structure of the nation-state substitute for

missing common denominators?

Or can history itself, despite accidental beginnings, forge common

denominators as forces of synthesis take place over time?

Four writers grapple with the internal differences of their respective nations.
o

Jose Maria Arguedas and Augusto Roa Bastos grapple with the
Amerindian society and worldview (or what is left of it).

Juan Rulfo addresses isolated rural spaces.

Gilberto Freyre takes on the impact of African slaves and their

descendants.

These societies have not been on the surface and are not immediately visible
to intellectual sectors rooted in the main urban centers in Latin America. For
these intellectuals -- preoccupied above all with participating in modernizing,
cosmopolitan currents the culture of the Amerindian, of the descendants of
Africans, or the inhabitant of the hinterlands exist only as a relic of the past to
be eliminated on the way to the future.
o

Freyre, Arguedas, Roa Bastos, and Rulfo, on the other hand, linger
precisely in those spaces that are heterogeneous to modernity and
attempt, in their own ways, to rescue these spaces from the dustbins
of history.

Angel Rama provides the historic function of these four writers in his
Transculutracion Narrativa en America Latina (1982).

The term transculturation was borrowed from Fernando Ortiz, who

used it to describe a particular process of cultural synthesis. Ortiz
preferred the term acculturation which, he said, implied simply to
acquire a new culture. In contrast, transculturation drew contrast to
the loss or uprooting of a proceeding culture as well as the the
subsequent creation of new cultural phenomena.

Ortiz underscored the loss involved in the transit of one culture to

another. Rama instead used it to emphasize the agency and creativity
implied in the mixing of what he termed the interior-regional
(traditional rural cultures that had been sedimented in the centuries
since conquest) and the external-universal (cosmopolitan modernizing
cultures).

Ramas use of transculturation was meant as an antidote to viewing

non-modern cultures as merely passive or even inferior.

II.

Gilberto Freyre (Brazilian, 1900-87)

Acclaimed for
o

His eulogy or racial and cultural miscegenation in his best known work,
The Master and the Slaves (1933).

His emphasis on the positive contributions of African slaves to Brazilian

culture.

His view was radical at a time when what predominated were discourses on
racial and environmental determination which attribute Brazils backwardness
to an unhealthy tropical climate and to a weak and degenerate mestizo
population.
o

Paulo Prado represented Brazil as a country of fundamentally

melancholy people, exhausted by a long history of sexual excess
fueled by the land, climate and the presence of the African and the
Amerindian.

Freyre denounced the homogenizing process of modernization which

threatened to eradicate the local way of life in the northeast (where he was
born and raised).

He criticized the Brazilian anxiety to copy Europe (exemplified in the

fact that cafes in Recife were too embarrassed to serve local sweets
and instead served French pastries).

He advocated an eye attuned to the singularities of local history and

culture. This meant attending to the contributions of the Amerindian
and the African slave.

Freyres belief approximates Ramas theorization of transculturation. For

Freyre, the colonizers in Brazil had to adapt to the new environment and learn
from both its indigenous inhabitants and later from the imported slave
population. The result was that in Brazil the primitive cultures had not been
isolated into hard, dry, indigestible lumps incapable of being assimilated by
the European social system or stratified in the form of archaisms and
ethnographic curiosities but had instead made themselves felt in their
living, useful, active presence in Brazilian society. Their contribution meant
that our progress has not been purely in the direction of Europizeation.

The problem with Freyres vision, however, is that he never doubts his ability
to give voice to the voiceless. Such confidence is not unique to him but it
does locate him within a tradition in Latin America that understood the
intellectual as the voice of the voiceless, a position akin to the integrative
project of the national-popular state in the 20 th century which sought to
produce an ever more inclusive political community, one which would bring in
all those subjects that had been previously marginalized.

III.

Jose Maria Arguedas (1911-69)

He also made himself the spokesman of a world threatened by modernization

but, unlike Freyre, he did not see this world as a product of fusions and
reconciliations. What tormented him was living in between worlds that were
profoundly divided.

Although ethnically white, he was brought up largely in an indigenous

Quechua-speaking world. He was to remain forever torn between these two
worlds and spent his life attempting to bridge them.

Fiction was one solution. He did not simply depict an indigenous referent in
his novels but sought to transform his dual reality into artistic language.

According to Rama, Arguedas did not simply transmit the legacies of interiorregional cultures using the tools and expressions of modernity; he
transformed those tools in the process. Arguedas, he says, conquered one of
the best defended bastions of the culture of domination since in his hands
the novel A European bourgeois genre is mined with Quechua linguistic
and hermeneutical structures.

IV.

Augusto Roa Bastos (1917-2005)

If Arguedas understood his task as an attempt to forge a bridge between the

two deeply divided worlds that uneasily inhabited the space of Peru, we can
phrase the project of the Paraguayan writer Augusto Roa Bastos as the search
for cracks in an all too easy official story of a homogeneous national identity.

Paraguay has been characterized as one of the most racially and culturally
homogenous of the Americas, produced by the happy and peaceful marriage
of Guarani women with the Spanish conquistadors. Against this
transculturating narrative, Roa Bastos drew attention instead to the breaches
traversing its social body, suggesting ways in which it is still divided and
internally colonized.

One of the signatures of Roa Bastos attempt to rethink Paraguayan history is

the theorization of negativity, of what is not or of what is invisible.

Roa Bastos once declared that Paraguay had only ever had one rebellion, the
Comuneros rebellion, and that that was a false rebellion because it lacked all
popular content. Unsurprisingly, then, his novel Son of Man revolves around
what does not happen (a rebellion). While all attempts at outright insurrection
in the novel fail, the novel dwells on more oblique manifestations of conflict.

Roa Bastos also emphasizes the fact that writing is laden with a particular
history and that it cannot therefore be neutral terrain. This rather than the
attempt to make a living link of his writings is one of the abiding
quandaries of his work.
o

Example: When a narrator chooses to write in Spanish rather than a

local dialect, he consciously or unconsciously assumes the role and
ideological position of the dominant language and culture.

A more important example: The tension between orality and writing.

The attempts to translate into writing the oral tremor of the

collective which is the very stuff of Paraguay, to subvert literature

through the use of oral or popular cultural forms, rarely goes beyond
simple appropriation or substitution. The translation is a failure. The
oral tremor is inescapably lost.

He does not, however, eschew the process of transculturation completely. He

does hold out for the possibility that, despite its position as an apparatus of
ideological hegemony, literature can be mined from within, turned into a
place where popular voices can find greater and greater expression, a vehicle
for democratization and politicization, or a chronicle of liberation.
o

He is, however, critical of what he calls faulty transculturation in

which the use of popular sources is generally reabsorbed in
excessive fictionalization.

One example is magic realism, which he says is based upon a

prefabricated mythic reality formulated according to Eurocentric
models and which does not derive from Lain American popular culture.

He rejects such excessive fictionalization and holds out instead for the
realism of a painful mimetic pact with radically reduced claims to truth.
Rather than understanding Paraguay through a concept such as magic
realism Roa Bastos likens its reality to the delirium of a dying man.
The unreality in which Paraguayan life has coagulated is not simply a
product of its heterogeneity with respect to universalizing European
forms of knowledge and representation but a product of a history
which harbors at its heart a disaster which cannot be symbolized.

He does not suggest that this unreality can be translated into literature but
instead that it produces a pressure on writers in Paraguay.
o

If in Son of Man the fact that there are no open rebellions does not
mean the nonexistence of resistance, similarly the fact that the oral
tremor cannot be translated into literary form does not mean it lacks
existence. Its relationship is one of negativity.

The horizon of all writing in Paraguay is irredeemably circumscribed by

the necessity to rescue a colonized, eclipsed, absent, erased, even
unwritten text drawn from the oral and Guarani coordinates of its
cultural formation. This absent universe cannot be represented, it

cannot make its presence felt as content, but it can wield effects on
the form of representation, much like a black hole whose presence can
only be deduced from the distortion of the universe around.
V.

Juan Rulfo (1917-86)

Similar to Roa Bastos, Rulfo also believed that absence exerts pressure on
reality much like a scar or a missing book on a library shelf. These absences
take shape in his writing as ghosts that have come back to haunt the living.
Indeed, Rulfo comes closest to Roa Bastos in his attempt to think through the
paradoxical presence of the dead, of the seemingly defeated and
disappeared, and their relationship to the present. Such is the subject of this
brief, dense and extremely beautiful novel Pedro Paramo.

Haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony, Derrida says, and

certainly, as the narrator of the novel suggests, if these ghosts are the
product of conflicting imaginaries (or ways of death) they speak of the ways
the modern Mexican nation-state has overcoded older imaginations.

They exist as ghosts, in other worlds, because they have been ushered into a
Christian imaginary even if the possibilities for justice and redemption offered
by this imaginary have been denied to them.

At the same time, the novel is also populated by dead people who are
testaments to the ways in which the political system drawn up by the novel
has failed to hegemonize the meaning of death. Not only have the ghosts
been captured and then abandoned by this new sociopolitical system and its
attending ideologies; these are also the dead who were never fully absorbed
by it. In this sense, Rulfos novel, like those of Roa Bastos, theorizes the
existence of older and perhaps invisible ways of being in a land that seems
on the surface to have been completely colonized.
o

First, the soul is the seat of guilt and remorse the soul has been
captured by the Church, but not so the body, the novel seems to
suggest by contrast. In this sense, the spirits of the first half of the
novel would be the Catholic dead, whereas the dead in the second half
of the novel would be dead according to a different imaginary, others
ways of death, located literally underneath, submerged by the weight
of a colonial and postcolonial history.

Second, the dead bodies we listen to in the latter half of the novel
know they are dead in contrast to the souls we encounter in the
beginning, who act as if they were still alive and dissolve into thin air
every time Juan Preciado confronts them, asking if they are alive. The
bodies have no such illusion. These dead are not interested in justice
or transcendence. They are, perhaps, not marginalized by the political
system so much as indifferent to it.

Susana San Juan, another dead soul in the novel, is neither

elected nor damned, neither blessed nor hopeless. She is
indifferent, neutral, rather than resistant to the prospect of
salvation. This is the most radical objection that can be levied
against redemption.

If Susana is an ideal, as Rulfo suggested, then Pedro Paramo

goes furthest in all in undermining the project of transculturation
by speaking to us of worlds indifferent to any apparatus of
capture, of particularities indifferent even to the redemption of
writing.