Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

150 reframing latin america
Joyce and Franz Kafka, among many others, with their rambling, circular,
surreal, and often senseless narrative forms. But whereas some critics perceive
this reentrance as the beginning of the postmodern age and the death
of modernity, others like Martin see it as a temporary period of adjustment,
when the modern West is working out its kinks, righting its listing ship. In
contrast, a similar expression of disorientation in Latin American literature,
the so-called Boom of magical realism in the 1960s and 1970s, is seen as an
expression of Latin America’s deep-seated dualism and its ongoing effort to
exit its own labyrinth. In summary, Martin basically challenges his readers
to ask why so many of Latin America’s great writers, including Jorge Luis
Borges, Octavio Paz, and Gabriel García Márquez, obsess about labyrinths
and solitude unless Latin America truly suffers from an essence of duality
and must continue searching for the way out.
An alternative perspective to Martin is provided by Leslie Bary, a professor
of Spanish at the University of Louisiana who specializes in questions
of identity construction and representations of mestizaje in Latin American
literature. The selection from her work is drawn from a brief introduction
that Bary wrote for a book not unlike this one in its structure and organization.
There, Bary set the stage for eight selections of readings surveying
modern Latin America history. They begin with Simón Bolívar’s famous
speech before the Congress of Angostura in 1819 and end with Rigoberta
Menchú’s testimonial, I, Rigoberta Menchú, which explores Indian life in
the midst of Guatemala’s civil war in the 1970s and 1980s. Also included
are Domingo Sarmiento’s Facundo, Andrés Bello’s study of Spanish grammar
in Latin America, José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel, Jose Martí’s Our America,
and The Cosmic Race by José Vasconcelos. These are canonical literary
texts for studying modern Latin America. Gerald Martin refers to most of
them, and some are readings in this book.
Bary reads these texts from a semiotic perspective. She fi rst challenges
the notion of identity as an essence or constant, instead positing it as a
construct that is always subject to change. More specifi cally, Bary defi nes
identity as an “arena for struggle.” 3 She means that we make our identities
in the process of acting upon our preconceptions of them, not that our actions
emerge from innate and ontological identities.
Bary’s arena for struggle can be further clarifi ed using politics as an example.
Rather than being based on accurate or inaccurate understandings
of peoples’ true identities, politics and policymaking represent moments
at which identities are made and given meaning. If a national government
adopts a specifi c policy toward its Indians, for example, it is acting on ideas
about Indian identity whether or not a consensus about those ideas exists