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

154 reframing latin america
so-called U.S. school of cultural studies that we have associated with scholars
like Daniel Mato. Mignolo insists that his intellectual position resides
with Latin American scholars in Latin America and Latino scholars in the
United States, such as Enrigue Dussel, Anibel Quijano, Gloria Anzaldúa,
and Norma Alarcón, among many others.
Mignolo’s work is not commonly read by introductory audiences. He
typically assumes that his readers possess much knowledge about both
Latin America and theory. But we believe that this particular excerpt is accessible
and we have included a number of our own explanatory footnotes
in hopes of clarifying his complex terminology and concepts.
Gerald Martin, JOURNEYS THROUGH THE LABYRINTH 5
Myth: Father Europe and Mother America Weave Their Labyrinth
Those who journey often over time through Latin American cultural history
and its artistic expressions may come gradually to glimpse the outlines
of “grand historical narrative” which is effectively the Continent’s own
dominant self-interpretation and which, in its persistence and coherence
through the trajectory of such phenomena as the New Novel, can safely
be said to have the dimensions and the relative stability of a great cultural
myth [. . .].
The myth, Romantic in origin, Surrealist in focus, rebellious in orientation,
is in essence about the relation of the New World to the Old. It tells
of discovery and conquest, endlessly reproduced and repeated, and of desperate
struggles, usually fruitless, to resist, rebel and liberate, to overcome
solitude and attain some kind of collective unity and identity. And it shows
how the people’s dreams, utopias and occasional triumphs become internalized
through folk memory and through art which, sometimes at least, can
make itself the written record of that memory, and thus unite past, present
and future at the level of representation.
In reality the Latin American myth is merely one version of the great
master narrative of Western history: the road to freedom, progress and development
through self-realization. Jorge Luis Borges notes in one of his
fi ctions that “the generations of men, throughout recorded time, have always
told and retold two stories—that of a lost ship which searches the
Mediterranean seas for a dearly loved island, and that of a god who is crucifi
ed on Golgotha.” 6 The word “men” has rarely been used more ambiguously
than here. It includes, fallaciously, “non-Western men,” and (as is
usual) excludes, through invisibility, “Western women”: it is, in short, an
innocently imperialist and patriarchal discourse. Still, Borges’s reference to